Taiwan is having a moment these days: in the headlines, in the culinary landscape, in the history books, and in our global literary imagination. Gone are the days (we hope) of mistaking Taiwan for Thailand, or automatically responding, “Oh, do you mean China?” No, we mean Taiwan!
Taiwan is a beautiful island whose identity has been co-opted, contested, appropriated, re-appropriated, and re-defined since the days of the Dutch traders dubbing it Ilha Formosa in the 1600s. Now, it is a self-sufficient, democratic nation with free elections and the leading manufacturer of the world’s semiconductors—yet still, Taiwan remains dwarfed by threats from China, with questions about its nationhood and future, and contentions about ethnicity, history, and memory.
A number of recent books by Taiwanese women and Taiwanese American women highlight questions of identity, hybridity, legacy, boundary crossing, remembering, and how to celebrate and preserve a culture that has been marginalized for centuries and primarily defined by others.
This resonates for me personally, since my memoir Where Every Ghost Has a Name recounts an important lost chapter in Taiwanese history: the Taiwanese Independence Movement led by grandfather, Thomas (Wen-yi) Liao. More than just a historical account, however, the book also excavates my search for family, truth, and belonging, and the tension between what can be known and what has been forever lost and erased. I’m honored for my book to join the ranks of works on Taiwan with the company of authors below.
Below are some wonderful fictional and nonfictional reads, along with a few forthcoming books to keep an eye out for!
The Translator’s Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad
This compelling memoir-in-essays tackles feeling like an outsider, forced migration, belonging, and most prominently, the language barriers that build walls around us, separating Taiwanese Americans from family, culture, understanding, and fluent navigation through different spaces. There is a longing and wistfulness in Prasad’s writing, as well as a wry ironic appreciation of some of the absurdities during her misadventures and revelations traveling back through Taiwan as an adult. I was gripped by the tension—in her first moments in Taiwan, Prasad faces expulsion back to the U.S. due to an expired passport—as well as the compassionate humanity of moments when Prasad connects with her family, island of origin, and identity, especially through language. One of the most compelling instances of this is through obtaining the perfect chop of her Mandarin name from a former schoolmate of her father’s older sister, which serves as a talisman of identity for Prasad and also adorns the cover of her book.
Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan
This contemporary novel delves into a troubling and violent period in Taiwanese history that was dramatic, captivating, and suspenseful—not pedantic. It illuminates one man’s experience being imprisoned on Green Island, and its rippling effects over the next 50 years on his family members in both Taiwan and America, shining an important light on the White Terror period in Taiwan. Over four decades, more than 20,000 political prisoners were incarcerated on this tiny island off the east coast of Taiwan, so Ryan’s novel evokes the haunting legacy of these sentences, and shows their reverberations in Berkeley, California, several decades later.
Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho
This novel in dual perspectives was a pleasurable and even craveable read–I devoured it. Reminiscent in some ways of Hua Hsu’s Stay True, Ho explores the ambivalent identities of two Taiwanese American friends growing up in Los Angeles, delving into questions of identity, queerness, boundary crossing, family secrets, and what it means to be Taiwanese and Taiwanese American.
Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai
In this beautifully written, searing, lyrical novel, Tsai embarks on a retelling of Frankenstein from the perspective of biracial, queer female scientists in the American south. From the first page, questions of identity, queerness, and the corporeal state of bodies come to the fore, as do questions of family, legacy, and parentage. Tsai interrogates what it means to be biracial, Taiwanese, and how one might redefine gender, as well as questions of creation and what happens when ambition or the desire to escape one’s origins goes too far.
Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism by Wendy Cheng
How did the Taiwanese Kuomintang (KMT) government spy on pro-independence activists in America? Why through student spies who they paid to be informants, of course! This meticulously researched work of history relies heavily on oral history to cut through propaganda, hearsay, and supposition to get to the truth of how totalitarian governments exert control through manipulation of information and misinformation. In so doing, Cheng reveals an important portrait of a previously overlooked generation in Taiwanese and Taiwanese American history, and spins a captivating true-life tale of the difficulties many Taiwanese student migrants encountered on university campuses between the 1960s-1980s.
Made in Taiwan by Clarissa Wei
While Made in Taiwan is ostensibly a cookbook, it is so much more than that: really, it’s a culinary adventure through culture and history, focusing on Taiwan’s unique cultural and global role through an exploration of the origins of its cuisine. Wei is a beautiful writer and thoughtful journalist, and her essays pair perfectly with recipes that strive for authenticity as they depict the unique and often subtle flavors of Taiwanese cuisine.
Gods of Want: Stories by K-Ming Chang
Reading this collection, I could tell Chang was a poet. Her stories pulse with imagery, surreal magic, strange haunting lyrical moments, and flirt with the uncanny and unsettling emotions that all of us foster. For example, in her story, “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” we feel the greedy mouths of hungry ghosts who permeate the life of the main character, taking on a monstrous life beyond the corporeal, swallowing her up in a tornado. In all of her prose, characters become larger than life, haunting each other and casting long shadows of legacy and trauma, while narrative drama becomes symbolic imagery, prompting us to consider how the banal can become mystical and mythic.
The Third Son by Julie Wu
In this tender and lyrical historical novel, we open on a snapshot of life in Taiwan as a Japanese colony during World War II, and move through Taiwanese history through the eyes of a third son in a Taiwanese family, Saburo, who witnesses the retrocession of the country to China, as well as the disenchantment of Taiwanese people with the exploitative KMT Chinese Government, the 2/28 Incident and aftermath that precipitated martial law, and the White Terror period in Taiwan. Through this story, based in part on the coming of age stories of Wu’s parents, we see the obstacles faced by someone in this generation of Taiwanese immigrants coming to America for education and a brighter future, but constrained by the ghosts and shackles of family, history, and loyalty to cultural values. It’s a book that tackles a little known era of Taiwanese history, and does so with compelling drama and poignant, vivid writing.
Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Huie
This award-winning novel published in 1994 by Qui Miaojin, a prominent queer voice in Taiwanese literature, was translated into English in 2017, offering American audiences access to this truly unique voice of a generation. Qiu narrates the first-person novel through diary entries, short scenes and vignettes, with a compelling, addictive voice not unlike that of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The narrator, Lazi, has just enrolled in college and finds herself consumed with longing for her female friend—the kind of longing that can animate whole months or years when you are young, and these emotions are all consuming. This one line sums up that joyful anguish: “It was a clandestine form of dating–the kind where the person you’re going out with doesn’t know it’s a date.” Ultimately, this book is a gem, and captures a particular moment of actualizing queer identities in the Taiwanese community in the late 20th century. The real tragedy is that Qiu took her own life in 1995 (just after completing Last Words from Montmartre), so we’ll never know what else she might have written about our contemporary world now.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
This is a sweeping, generations spanning novel, from former Taiwan Fulbright Fellow Karissa Chen, that traces the lives of lovers separated by war and diaspora—recounting the flight of many from mainland China to Taiwan during the Chinese Communist Revolution and the causes of this migration eventually landing in the United States.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi, translated by Lin King
The novel Taiwan Travelogue won Taiwan’s Golden Tripod Award in 2021. Framed as a rediscovered historical text from a Japanese traveler, the book explores forbidden queer love and the impact of colonialism through culinary adventures in pre-WWII Japanese-occupied Taiwan.