4 ideas
Lazi, a university student in late-1980s Taipei, falls intensely in love with Shui Ling, an older woman who comes to return her feelings. Instead of feeling relief, Lazi withdraws, becomes cruel and absent, and ends the relationship. She then spends months in obsessive regret and depression over the love she destroyed.
When someone has absorbed society's contempt for what they are, being loved in return feels like being exposed rather than being accepted. The lover becomes a witness to the self they despise. Wrecking the relationship feels safer than letting that witness stay, so the person destroys the very love they sought.
In the satirical fable, a crocodile lives disguised in a human suit while newspapers, TV and merchandisers whip up a frenzy of fascination with 'crocodiles.' Public curiosity does not bring acceptance. It turns the hidden group into content and commodity, while each actual member must keep hiding. Sensational visibility and continued concealment feed each other.
The novel is built as numbered notebooks of diary entries, letters and abrupt shifts between Lazi's confessions and the crocodile fable. The broken structure is itself the argument: a self under depression and stigma cannot be told as one continuous story. It can only be recorded in pieces, as testimony written to survive.