#Notes of a Crocodile

[vadnuti]

notes of a crocodile, qiu miaojin

[mordax101]

Andrew and Neil’s relationship will always be impactful to me because it’s about independence existing with love rather than in defiance of it. “I’m not your answer and you sure as fuck aren’t mine,” isn’t a throwaway sentence; it’s not Andrew trying to deny the thing growing between him and Neil. It’s saying the pure and simple truth: love isn’t going to fix everything. Love isn’t going to heal Neil or Andrew; infatuation isn’t going to last an eternity; this interest isn’t going to be a life purpose.

Both Andrew and Neil see it. Instead of pretending they can be enough for each other, they both work to help the other stand alone. Andrew helps Neil stand his ground and stop running. Neil helps Andrew accept his brother and the importance of other people. They help each other find answers that aren’t just themselves. (Although I would argue Andrew had this intention while Neil more or less saw himself as insufficient -- 'nothing' -- and therefore not enough to depend upon; but that's a whole other thing for a whole other post)

I think Andrew has a much deeper understanding of trauma responses and recovery than he lets on (he had so many sessions with Bee). He sees the signs of Neil growing dependent on him. He knows Neil is prone to dependency after his mother; he knows he himself is prone to controlling people and situations. They are the perfect recipe for toxic reliance. Knowing this, he tries to push Neil away. When he figures out he can’t, he tries to change the trajectory their past and their trauma has them set on. Everyone emphasizes how much Andrew focuses on not becoming his past via his ‘yes or no’, but he also focuses heavily on letting his family stand alone. In more ways than one, Andrew actively aspires to be better.

There’s a quote from a book I read recently (Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin): “Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness worse.” So many stories romanticize love bringing people back from the dark. Andrew and Neil don’t drag each other out of dug graves. Instead, they hand each other a shovel and start digging themselves.

It's been on my mind; how Nora Sakavic masterfully concocted an outline of characters with a disaster waiting at the end of every road and told us a story about how people can take control of their lives and redirect themselves to something healthy and beautiful. I'm excited for TSC :)

[bloodhive]

"I'd wrenched our relationship to the breaking point and watched it split apart. I know I made you suffer. I'll never cut you off again. I spit out the words that were caught in my throat. She let out a laugh, and then, as if she'd finally been torn open, a cry of pain. To paint a picture of our embrace, I'd almost have to use her blood and guts."

�� Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile, trans. Bonnie Huie

[phaedraismyusername]

Happy International Lesbian Day! Here's some super brief book recs to celebrate

Books dealing with love, loss, longing and abandonment

This is How You Lose The Time War is a short but beautifully written epistolary novel between two agents on opposite sides of a time war as they slowly fall in love.

Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the most beautifully written debuts I've ever read about a woman whose wife comes home wrong after they thought she'd died at sea and how it feels to grieve the loss of someone who's still in your home.

Lucky Red is a western novel about a young girl working in a brothel who meets her first female gunslinger and falls head over heels for her, and the consequences that come with loving dangerous people.

Body horror galore

Camp Damascus is about a young woman living in a super conservative christian town built around the worlds most successful conversion camp and the horrors that are uncovered there when praying the gay away fails.

To Be Devoured is about a woman whose fascination with the local vultures turns into obsession and the urge to know what carrion tastes like overtakes her life and leads her down stranger and stranger paths.

Chlorine is about a girl whose entire life revolves around being a competitive swimmer, and how abuse, neglect, and obsession with being the best takes its toll on the young women caught up in these destructive cycles.

Flawed character studies

Big Swiss is about a woman who has a kitchen floor reset in her 40s, moves away and starts a new life as a transcriber for a sex therapist and becomes obsessed with one of his clients before inserting herself into this poor woman's life.

The Seep is a speculative sci-fi set in a future where there's been a quiet alien invasion that has given people the ability to make almost any changes to their own bodies and what that world feels like to someone who doesn't want to partake.

Milk Fed is about a woman in therapy who feels cut off from almost everything until she meets another woman who triggers in her a melding of sex, hunger, and religion and where that takes her. Huge trigger warnings for ED content. It gets tough, y'all.

Fantastical wlw books

Bitterthorn is an amalgamation of fairytales retold as a slow burn sapphic love story between a sad young girl from a cursed land and the evil witch who takes her as a companion in the latest of the generational sacrifices made to appease her.

All the Bad Apples may be set in contemporary Ireland but it is a fairytale following a young girl as she travels across the country looking for a sister she refuses to believe is dead and the people she meets along the way.

Gideon the Ninth needs no introduction on this site but for the sake of formatting - lesbian necromancers in space who find themselves in an isolated murder mystery plot. It's not a romance but it is a love story and this series will change your life if you let it.

Translated novels

Boulder is a short character study following a free spirited woman when she accidentally settles down with the woman she loves and how love and resentment can take up the same space in your chest when life doesn't turn out the way you hoped it would.

Notes of a Crocodile is a cult classic coming of age story about queer teens in Taipei in the 1980s. It was written in the 90s so please keep that in mind if you choose to read it.

Paradise Rot is about an international student studying in Australia and her growing obsession with her housemate as they share a space that allows no privacy. I've never read anything that feels stickier.

[sssammich]

notes of a crocodile by qiu miaojin

image IDs under the cut

[First Image ID: She didn't understand. Didn't understand she could love me, maybe that she already did love me. Didn't understand that beneath the hide of a lamb was a demonic beast that had to suppress the urge to rip her to shreds. Didn't understand that love, every little bit of it, was about exchange. Didn't understand that she caused me suffering. Didn't understand that love was like that. She gave me a puzzle in a box. She put the pieces together patiently, one by one, and completed the picture of me.

Second Image ID: Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean's yearning.

/End ID]

[literary-illuminati]

2025 Book Review #15 – Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (trans. Bonnie Hu)

Many moons ago, I asked for and got a bunch of recommendations for non-English literature with good translations. The only thing I knew about Notes of a Crocodile when I picked it up was that a stranger on the internet thought it fell into that category – and they were entirely correct! This was not exactly an easy read – and I desperately wish I had the proper cultural context (of late ‘80s/early ‘90s Taiwan in general and queer and youth culture therein specifically) to get all the things that flew right over my head – but this was an interesting and often beautiful book all the way through.

The story is presented as a series of journals written by a woman who we only ever get the nickname Lazi for across her college education in Taipei during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It is, specifically, a chronicle of heartbreak, angst, and the many different ways a life-ruining mental health crisis can express itself over time. The spine of the book is her romance with Shui Ling, a woman a year above her in school who she followed to university. They are both deeply in love with each other, terrified of this, and totally incapable of expressing themselves to each other or making any sort of life together in a way that doesn’t leave one or both of them contemplating suicide. Every time they break up Lazi collapses into an entirely different kind of depressive spiral – and in the mean time, finds friends, connections, and other nearly-as-ill-advised romances.

Intercut between all this are allegorical passages about a frenzy of public fascination around the crocodiles living hidden throughout society as they go about their days in nearly-perfect humans suits, and the different opinions on just what should be done with them. Beyond getting that this is at least broadly a metaphor for the contemporary reaction to queer people I have to admit that what must have been the overwhelming majority of subtext and meaning of these passages flew right over my head.

Which stands out, because those passages are the only part of the book that really rubbed my face in how little grounding I had in its context. It is wrong to say Lazi’s character and struggles are universal – her whole character is deeply informed in trying to come to terms with what being a lesbian means in a culture and at a time where that’s a deeply precarious thing to be, and not one with any legible futures to imagine for yourself – but at the same time ‘depressed queer college student gets into hot mess of a first relationship, does not cope well’ is not exactly a novel or exotic narrative. Even beyond the specifics, Lazi’s melodramatic angst, self-centred self-loathing, tendency to wallow in her own misery, and terrifying lack of a vision about what kind of life she wants to lead are all things that are going to be at least a bit relatable to anyone who has ever been 18. Not to say the reading experience wouldn’t have been enriched by knowing more about the culture and immediate of post-marital law Taiwan – a context that’s obliquely mentioned often enough to loom over things a bit – but I never found lacking it prevented me from enjoying the book. And there’s not really any better way to get that knowledge than throwing myself into things like this and picking it up as I go.

The prose is a bit difficult to talk about, because I’m totally unsure the degree to which, say, the dialogue seemed to jump wildly between registers of formality with little warning is a) an artifact of the translation, b) a deliberate part of the book’s formal experimentation c) exaggeration for the sake of communicating the character’s emotions or d) just how gay 18-year-olds in 1990 Taipei talked. Presumably some combination of all of them? But there was a decent number of little things like that, which combined to make it a bit of a mentally taxing book to parse and guess quite how things are supposed to be read.

Not that either the prose or the translation is bad, to be clear. Translating literary fiction honestly seems almost as horrible as translating poetry – so much of the value is in the specific aesthetic affect and playing with subtleties of meaning, effectively translating it into another language almost seems worse than writing it from scratch. So both author and translator deserve a lot of credit here – there were numerous passages that were beautifully written enough to make me stop and re-read them, or got across Lazi’s emotions vividly enough to be legitimately affecting. There were just also plenty that felt a bit clunky and very clearly written in a language that arranges and phrases things differently than English.

All in all, this is by far the most pretentiously lit-ficcy book I’ve read so far this year, and I couldn’t be happier about it. If it seems at all like your sort of thing, would absolutely recommend giving it a try.

[smokefalls]

The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit. That it could never develop into anything, and instead, it would split apart like pieces of a landslide.

Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (translated by Bonnie Huie)

[wrathwritten]

— Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (trans. Bonnie Huie)

[problematic-yuri-poll]

Problematic Femslash Ship Tournament - Round 1

Sakurin - Rin Tohsaka x Sakura Matou (Fate/Stay Night) VS. Narrator "Lazi" x Shui Ling (Notes of a Crocodile)

No official art for Lazi x Shui Ling, so submitter opted to provide a book cover.

Info and propaganda under cut! This will not be spoiler-free.

Problematic elements for Sakurin:

It's incest + Even just in canon Sakura's dark evil side not only shows attraction to Rin but is specifically pretty rapey toward her, including a bad end to the VN where she forces Rin to experience her (Sakura's) own sexual abuse until she breaks mentally.

Problematic elements for Lazi x Shui Ling:

Obsessive and self destructive relationship filled with insane mind games

--

Propaganda for Sakurin:

Sisters separated as children who experience mutual guilty crushes on each each other is already good, and making it so one wants to sexually abuse her sister the second all of her darkest impulses come out is so much fun.

Propaganda for Lazi x Shui Ling:

“It was the final standoff between two beasts. The bare teeth of one tore into the flesh of the other in an expression of love commingled with hatred. Incapable of licking each other’s wounds, the two of us could only stand face-to-face and lament.” “To paint a picture of our embrace, I’d almost have to use her blood and guts.” “I don’t know why I have to take jabs at you, either. I’m afraid of stabbing you into a pulp, until there’s no more blood left. I could stab you to death and not even know it.” Super important Taiwanese lesbian novel, insane couple

[chitrapearl]

One of my favorite excerpts from Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin. Just by this passage (and her facial features) I assumed she was Chitra and she most likely is (but could be Swati if born later in the day).

[aiwiloart]

collage I did back in June based on one of my favourite books, notes of a crocodile by qiu miaojin!!

[philiania]

Secretly though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn’t have a whole lot going on.

- Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 2B

Book summaries below:

Solitaire by Alice Oseman

The acclaimed debut novel from Alice Oseman, the author of the 2021 YA Book Prize winning Loveless. Solitaire features the characters that inspired the beloved webcomic and graphic novel series Heartstopper – now a major Netflix series.

My name is Tori Spring. I like to sleep and I like to blog. Last year – before all that stuff with Charlie and before I had to face the harsh realities of A-Levels and university applications and the fact that one day I really will have to start talking to people – I had friends. Things were very different, I guess, but that’s all over now.

Now there’s Solitaire. And Michael Holden.

I don’t know what Solitaire are trying to do, and I don’t care about Michael Holden. I really don’t.

Contemporary, coming of age, young adult

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

Literary fiction, experimental, coming of age, 1980s

[xeternalmuse]

one of my journal entries after reading "notes of a crocodile" <3

[quoteasiread]

Even if you were in the inferno, I'd follow you down just to see you. I'm capable of things you can't imagine.

Notes of a Crocodile, Qui Miaojin

[rosesteeth]

— from notes of a crocodile by qiu miaojin