This groundbreaking study examines the poetry of Yang Mu, a pivotal Taiwanese writer who used Chinese literary forms to challenge Sinocentric narratives during Taiwan’s White Terror and democratization. Drawing on postcolonial theory and close reading, it explores his poetic use of ambivalence, mimicry, and minor narrative to resist cultural hegemony and reclaim historical memory.
Wu Ming-Yi is one of Taiwan’s most celebrated contemporary writers, whose work bridges literature, environmental thought, and history with a global perspective. The Wu Ming-Yi Companion, edited by Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu, is the first comprehensive volume in English dedicated to his oeuvre, offering new scholarship from leading researchers across Taiwan, Hong Kong, North…
Cross-border Intimacies is a powerful account of the experiences of migrant women and their families between China and Taiwan. Since the early 1990s, economic exchanges between the two countries have paved the way to migration and sociocultural interaction across a previously closed border.
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan…
While Taiwan continues to be in the news due to its geopolitical ambiguities, a lesser-known aspect of its short recorded history is the establishment of a Dutch colony in its southern part in the 17th century. A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa describes this Dutch settlement and its interactions with local indigenous people…
The ghosts of those wronged in war invariably call out for vengeance. When the conflict is a civil war, all the more so. Families may be split apart, feuds started, and children called upon to settle scores they weren’t alive to start. The civil war that swept through China from 1927 to 1949 is no…
Karissa Chen’s debut novel, Homeseeking, a sweeping family saga set across eight decades, is informed in part by her grandfather’s story. In her author’s note, she writes that she became interested in Chinese exiles in Taiwan a couple decades ago, just after her grandfather’s death. One of the images from her grandfather’s belongings was a…
In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But, as Michelle T King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, the inverse—that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine—might be more appropriate.
When Mark O’Neill first came to Taiwan in 1981 to study Mandarin, the island was under martial law that had been in place for several decades. Since then, Taiwan has undergone momentous changes to become a modern and prosperous democracy while remaining one of the world’s geopolitical hotspots, a great deal of which O’Neill witnessed…
The food of Taiwan has been the subject of a number of recent books, such as Frankie Gaw’s First Generation and Clarissa Wei’s Made in Taiwan. Chop Fry Watch Learn by Michelle King joins them, although it is a scholarly work, rather than providing recipes. While the first two do also include cultural, historical, and…
The civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists drove the largest refugee exodus in the modern history of China, across the sea to the southern island of Taiwan. Martial artists of many styles were among this diaspora. In the 1940’s areas of Taipei, Taiwan were terrorized by local gangsters. Supported by desperate martial artists…
On 12 March 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, capsized near Kenting, on Taiwan’s southern coast. A handful of survivors managed to come ashore, but almost all were promptly killed by a local indigenous tribe.
On October 27, 1930, members of six Taiwanese indigenous groups ambushed the Japanese attendees of an athletic competition at the Musha Elementary School, killing 134. The uprising came as a shock to Japanese colonial authorities, whose response was swift and brutal. Heavy artillery and battalions of troops assaulted the region, spraying a wide area with…
As the Japanese advance through China in 1938, a young widowed mother aims to flee her Changsha home in 1938 for the relative safety of the newly-established capital of Chongqing. But first Meilin and her four-year-old son Renshu must escape in one piece.
Kai and Ami are dancing butterflies from Taiwan! They have a performance coming up at the Winter Festival dance show in the southern part of the island. They are currently in northern Taiwan, so they need to hurry and start flying south. That’s far for a butterfly! Kai is worried about the long journey, and…