Written by Chee-Hann Wu and Yi-Jen Yu.
Image credit: Yi-Jen Yu.
How do we imagine Taiwan’s literary landscape? How do we want others to experience Taiwan?
These were certainly the two most central questions as we began conceiving the exhibition for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature’s debut at the Brooklyn Book Festival. We still recalled that it was probably just a few days shy of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King’s winning of the 2026 International Booker Prize. Before even deciding on a theme, we knew that Taiwan Travelogue would be one of the central pieces in our book collection. “Food” quickly came to mind—we are Taiwanese, and none of us can resist food! Around the same time, a Taiwanese-style pān-toh (roadside banquet) also took place at Times Square in New York, and Taiwanese breakfast staple fantuan (rice roll) suddenly became a hit on social media in the English-speaking world. It became a spontaneous choice to build on the momentum and use “food” as a starting point.
We landed on slow cooking and took it as a metaphor for how Taiwan literature is made and shaped. Unlike a dish prepared in an instant, slow cooking depends on time. Ingredients meet in a pot, releasing and absorbing flavours while retaining their own textures. Taiwan literature has developed in much the same way: through encounters among Indigenous cultures, successive migrations, colonial histories, authoritarian rule, democratisation, and multiple languages, cultures, and communities whose experiences have overlapped and intertwined across generations. The metaphor does not suggest that these differences eventually dissolve into a single “Taiwanese flavour.” A slow-cooked meal is not a melting pot. Instead, they remain distinct even as they shape one another. Through time, they create a literary culture whose richness comes from layers, continuities, tensions, and change. This was how the theme, “Slow-cooked: Stories from Taiwan across Time,” came to life.
Two Days, Two Ways into Taiwan
Following the theme, we realized that we didn’t really have to look for what books to include; instead, they came to us. The Brooklyn Book Festival has two main in-person flagship weekend days: Children’s Day on Saturday and the main Festival Day & Literary Marketplace on Sunday. The main highlight of this miniature exhibition of Taiwan literature is English-translated works from Taiwan. We also include works by Taiwanese American authors and many books that lie beyond the existing categories while still contributing to Taiwan’s literary landscape.
For Children’s Day, we focused on stories of food, family, migration, nature, identity, and everyday life that invited families and young readers to encounter Taiwan through reading. We began with picture books on the tastes of Taiwan filled with bubble tea, dumplings, mooncakes, luroufan (braised pork rice), and night market must-haves, and moved on to stories of migration and diaspora, bilingual and language-learning readers, and classics. For curatorial purposes, we put them into the following categories: flavours of Taiwan, migration and diaspora, learning readers, curated classics, and young adult narratives. In particular, a small collection of picture books in Taiwanese, sent directly from Taiwan, also took the stage.
For many younger Taiwanese Americans, English-language books can also serve as an important bridge. Children who feel connected to Taiwan but may not yet read Chinese confidently can encounter Taiwan stories and creators in a language that feels familiar, while developing a deeper connection to family and cultural histories. Many food-centred children’s books in our selection follow younger Taiwanese Americans visiting family in Taiwan. Through shared meals, unfamiliar tastes, and moments of culture shock, food becomes a way of negotiating family, memory, and belonging. In this sense, translation does more than make Taiwanese literature linguistically accessible: it allows young readers to encounter Taiwan through Taiwanese and diasporic authors’ perspectives and imaginations, rather than only through stories written about Taiwan from elsewhere. This possibility would later become central to how we reimagined the exhibition for young Taiwanese Mandarin learners at Princeton Chinese Language School. We will discuss this further in the third article of this special issue.
For the Literary Marketplace, we expanded the collection to include contemporary fiction, poetry, and graphic narratives to explore subjects such as food culture, gender and identity, island ecologies and natural landscapes, freedom and democracy, and historical memory. Taiwan Travelogue and What’s A Snow Leopard to You, whose English translation was recently published, headlined our collection for the main festival day, followed by food literature, recipes, and titles that responded to the subjects above and our literary inquiry.
It was unexpectedly difficult to determine what to include to best represent the vibrancy and versatility of Taiwan and its literature. The notion of inclusion and exclusion felt wrong to us. As a result, our list kept growing at the first stage of book selection and became all over the place: books we personally loved, books that had to be there, books we were unsure of but felt right, and books that could be slightly too experiential or adventurous.
How we ended up with the current list of titles was somehow a breeze and anticlimactic. As both of us are theatre and performance studies scholars, we naturally view reading as an embodied practice. Books are not just about narratives; they also evoke our feelings and emotions and motivate action. In hindsight, as mentioned earlier, these books seemed to come to us. Along the way, they came together, guided the planning, and showcased both the accessibility and the intellectual depth of contemporary Taiwan literature.
Embodied Reading
As mentioned earlier, we believe that reading is an embodied and experiential practice. Our goal is not just to bring Taiwan’s stories to readers, but to invite them to encounter Taiwan. Therefore, in addition to books, we also prepared activities for them to play with. For example, a colouring corner was set up for Children’s Day, where young readers painted and colored their Taiwan and used Taiwan-themed stamps from Taiwan’s social media-famous KP Stamps, specialising in Taiwan-themed stamps to complement their art.
For the main festival day, a mystery book capsule machine was set up to draw the attention of visitors. It was like drawing fortune sticks in Taiwan’s temples, but recreated in the format of toy capsules (niǔ dàn). In each capsule, the drawer received a fortune slip, also reminiscent of the ones seen in temples in Taiwan, with an oracle poem, lucky colour, and guidance for the day. What was unique was that everything written on each slip was inspired by and based on a book in our collection. Through this activity, visitors had a chance to meet a book that they may not usually pick up. Once again, “you don’t choose the book; the book comes to you.”
Reading is embodied because it is not just textual, but also sensorial. With the support of local, New York-based Taiwanese American small businesses and friends—Mumu Bath, Yun Hai, and Mofa Cafe—we hope to welcome readers onto a taste and scent journey of Taiwan with fragrances, snacks, and herbs that are uniquely Taiwan.
What do the stories in these books smell like? Collaborating with Mumu Bath, a Brooklyn–based bath and body brand inspired by the founder, Sasha Chou’s Taiwanese heritage, we invite readers to encounter scents drawn from life in Taiwan—oolong tea, goji berries, jujube, osmanthus, jasmine, and hinoki cypress—and imagine the sensory worlds that surround the stories gathered. As food is at the centre of our curation, we are also delighted to hold a “taste test” of dried green mango from Yun Hai, a Taiwanese pantry sourcing premium ingredients directly from artisans, farms, and producers in Taiwan, also based in Brooklyn. Last but not least, herbs and herbal medicine are inseparable from Taiwan’s culinary landscape. Mofa Cafe, also New York-based, shares its recipe for Four Spirits Soup, a classic Taiwanese herbal tonic soup for everyday nourishment, to be displayed alongside other recipe books, as well as the actual herbs that enrich the flavours, so that readers can not only see what’s behind the rich taste but touch and smell the unique aroma
A Taste of Taiwan That Never Reached the Table
One thing I’d learned from Buddhism was, all phenomena are temporarily assembled with complex, multiple conditions to become an operating system for meaning to emerge. When we recognize a phenomenon and identify it with language, we’re defining borders for a set of relationships. When the relationship changes with the passage of time, the borders lose their effect in a certain way. Attachment then becomes the seed of suffering. What I understand about yuan, kismet, is that it is not a quantity that can be accumulated, but a particular kind of encounter—yuan arises because of the encounter and dies because of parting—Hsu Chen-Fu, What’s A Snow Leopard to You.
As Hsu writes, “all phenomena are temporarily assembled with complex, multiple conditions to become an operating system for meaning to emerge.” NMTL’s participation in the Brooklyn Book Festival embodies such a constellation of things that come together for meaning to emerge. Yet yuan, as a particular kind of encounter, is not a destination you can reach through accumulation or preparation. A day before the Festival weekend, the public was warned that Nor’easter brought strong winds, heavy rainfall, and severe coastal flooding to New York City. At around three p.m. on Friday, the 2026 Brooklyn Book Festival outdoor market for both September 26 and 27 was officially cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
It was unfortunate and frustrating that, despite all the preparations, we couldn’t share our book collections and bring the activities to readers in New York. Yet, thinking of the books about nature that we have prepared, from Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of the Ocean and Sakinu Ahronglong’s Hunter School to Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make A Forest, we have realised how fortunate we have been to co-inhabit the world with nature. During book selection, curation, and preparation, we were also fortunate to have these unique encounters through the books, the stories, and our collaborators. To us, this is yuan. This incident, perhaps, adds to the rich flavour of Taiwan. We look forward to future opportunities to bring this incidentally seasoned dish to readers very soon.
Chee-Hann Wu, Ph.D., is an independent scholar in performance studies who is drawn to performance of, by, and with nonhumans, including but not limited to objects, puppets, ecology, and technology. Her most recent work explores video games, VR, and artificial intelligence. In her free time, Chee-Hann writes about art, literature, and popular culture. cheehannwu.com.
Yi-Jen Yu is an independent researcher, writer, and cultural programs curator. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Dance from the University of California San Diego, and earned her B.A. in Chinese Literature and M.A. in Butoh and Theatre Studies from National Taiwan University. Her research explores the intersections of Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Indigenous Studies, focusing on the political and affective dimensions of artistic expression and cultural memory in Taiwan and East Asia.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Stories from Taiwan across Time‘.