Written by Yi-Jen Yu.
Image credit: author.
From the early stages of planning the Taiwan Literature Booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival, we envisioned ways to extend its impact beyond the festival itself. While our primary audience was the general reading public in the New York area, we also hoped to engage local Taiwanese American communities and learners of Taiwanese Mandarin. This led to the idea of a follow-up exhibition at Princeton Chinese Language School (PCLS), where we bring the two-day festival showcase to the school for a one-day event.
Founded in 1970, Princeton Chinese Language School (PCLS) is a nonprofit, community-based weekend school in central New Jersey. As part of the broader landscape of heritage-language education in the United States, PCLS maintains a pedagogical tradition closely associated with Taiwan, emphasising Traditional Mandarin characters and the Bopomofo phonetic system alongside Hanyu Pinyin. Its language program accommodates both heritage learners from Mandarin-speaking households and students learning Mandarin as a second language. In 2021, PCLS further expanded its educational outreach by establishing a Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning (TCML), supported by Taiwan’s Overseas Community Affairs Council, extending Mandarin instruction to adult learners and promoting Taiwanese language and culture beyond the Taiwanese American diaspora.
Keeping the needs of Taiwanese Mandarin teachers and learners at PCLS at the heart of our approach, we began to rethink the exhibition by asking: what might this community hope to find in a book exhibition centred on Taiwan? What could English translations of Taiwanese publications, the primary focus of our original Brooklyn Book Festival selection, offer these readers?
Considering that PCLS primarily serves children and adolescents from prekindergarten through tenth grade, we placed greater emphasis on books initially selected for the Brooklyn Book Festival’s Children’s Day. We positioned children’s picture books at the center of the display, with the Taiwanese food culture and literature showcase and newly published English editions from the festival’s Literary Marketplace arranged along the sides of the main table.
A closer look at the children’s book selection for PCLS highlights its continuity with the previous Taiwanese Literature Booth’s curatorial approach, which foregrounds two categories: English translations of works by Taiwanese authors originally published in Taiwan, and English-language works themed on Taiwan by Taiwanese American authors. The former offers insight into the growing presence of Taiwanese children’s books in international publishing markets, while the latter expands the selection beyond the limited availability of English translations and brings the experiences of younger Taiwanese Americans into a broader, more inclusive understanding of Taiwanese identity.
This question grew out of our curatorial thinking for the Brooklyn Book Festival, where we had already begun to see translation as a way to connect Taiwan’s literary voices with readers who might otherwise be separated from them by language. At PCLS, however, that question took on a more intimate dimension, because many of these readers were not encountering an unfamiliar culture, but seeking new ways to approach a place or a culture they have always known.
English translations offer access to Taiwanese stories and perspectives through the voices of Taiwanese authors themselves. This is particularly valuable for young heritage learners who may feel a strong connection to Taiwan without yet being proficient enough to read books in Mandarin. In conversations with PCLS teachers, we were also struck by their enthusiasm for the selection and their surprise that most of the books on display were available through major retailers such as Amazon. Their reactions may point to a gap between availability and awareness. The longstanding perception of Taiwan as marginal to the international publishing landscape can make the very existence of English translations of Taiwanese books difficult to imagine, and therefore unlikely to be sought out. Even those who enjoy reading in English may not realise that books written and published in Taiwan are already within their reach. By introducing these works to teachers and families, the PCLS exhibition helped bridge this gap, making these overlooked books genuinely discoverable and accessible.
Equally important, the international circulation of Taiwanese children’s books in English affirms Taiwanese perspectives as legitimate forms of creative expression. These works invite readers to understand, depict, and imagine the world through Taiwanese experiences, whose value extends beyond cultural representation and whose presence in global publishing challenges the often unquestioned Euro-American norms in children’s literature.
Our selection in this category includes works by Taiwanese children’s and young adult authors acclaimed at home and abroad, such as Man-Chiu Lin’s The Ventriloquist’s Daughter, Li Tong’s Again I See the Gaillardias, and Hsu-Kung Liu’s Little Monk Writes Rain. Here, however, I would like to draw particular attention to Lian-En Lin’s Home.
Winner of the 2021 Bologna Ragazzi Award in the Fiction category, Home is a quietly evocative picture book that uses collage art to trace a journey from a “home” surrounded by farmland and mountains, along coastal roads and highways, into the city, and back again after a day’s work. Its spare prose and striking visual artistry leave ample room for interpretation, particularly as the identity of the first-person narrator remains unstated. The book invites repeated readings and conversations with children about the meaning of belonging, what constitutes a home, and where each of us locates it.
As its warm-toned collages contain few overt markers of Taiwan, Home is filled with distinctly Taiwanese details and landscapes that reveal themselves upon closer inspection. The journey away from home and back, along roads and through spaces of transit, can evoke memories of Taiwan for those who left it, while inviting later generations to reflect on the shifting meanings of home in diasporic life.
Publishers such as Reycraft Books and Gecko Press, which are dedicated to bringing children’s books from around the world to English-language readers, have helped raise the visibility of Taiwanese picture books in the United States. This should not obscure, however, the fact that the richness and diversity of Taiwanese children’s publishing are not fully reflected in the limited range of English editions available through mainstream US publishers and bookstores. In this context, works originally written in English by Taiwanese American authors occupy an equally central place in our curation by both broadening our selection and expanding the scope of Taiwanese experiences.
One notable feature of these works is how frequently Taiwanese foods serve as touchstones of nostalgia and cultural identity. From the chewy pearls of bubble tea to the burst of warm broth from soup dumplings, from the airy crispness of fried dough sticks to the steam rising from braised pork rice, a symphony of flavours and textures forms a sensory cultural contact zone where Taiwanese Americans encounter and explore Taiwan.
In the exhibition itself, food-centred stories often follow younger Taiwanese Americans visiting family in Taiwan or, conversely, welcoming relatives from Taiwan to the United States, with culture shock and familial warmth arising along the way. In Grace Lin’s Dumpling Days, we see a girl travel to Taiwan for her grandmother’s birthday, only to discover how hard it can be to feel at home in a place where she “finally looks like everyone else” yet struggles with the language. Chris Huang’s Mama’s Home in Taiwan trilogy, comprising Mama’s Home in Taiwan, Ama’s Lu Rou Fan, and Good Morning! Taiwan, Agong, is even more deeply rooted in memories of food, depicting how familiar tastes sustain family ties across the Pacific. These stories portray Taiwanese American identity through moments of awkwardness, curiosity, humour, and sometimes a flurry of questions, as a fluid process of self-discovery－something continually navigated and redefined.
One picture book that explores this subtle tension with particular sensitivity is Amah Faraway, written by Margaret Chiu Greanias and illustrated by Tracy Subisak. With an exquisitely written chiastic structure, the story unfolds in two mirrored halves, with a pivotal encounter between Kylie and her grandmother at its center. The same sequence of experiences takes on entirely different meanings as Kylie’s perspective shifts. As Kylie opens her mind and begins to see things differently, what once felt strange becomes an adventure. Video calls no longer heighten the sense of absence but offer another way to stay connected. Even a crowded family gathering, once overwhelming and alienating, opens up the possibility of belonging to a larger family in Taiwan. The “faraway” amah (grandmother) comes to feel close. The ending hints at a newfound enthusiasm to overcome geographical distance and create more opportunities to be together.
Finally, we would like to consider the use of phonetic systems in light of Taiwanese Mandarin language learning. Several titles by Taiwanese American authors featured in this exhibition include multiple forms of language-learning aids, presenting Mandarin Chinese characters alongside Bopomofo, Pinyin, and English translations. Among them are Erica Lee Schlaikjer’s Wild Greens, Beautiful Girl, Maryann Chu’s A Little Book of Taiwanese Eats: A Bopomofo Foodie Book, and Lacey Benard and Lulu Cheng’s It’s Time for Hot Pot! . The latter two offer basic vocabulary-learning materials for pre-kindergarten children, while the first reflects the depth and diversity of voices from Taiwan’s multi-ethnic communities.
The significance of juxtaposing Bopomofo with Hanyu Pinyin lies in recognising that Taiwanese American children learn Mandarin in a different context than children in Taiwan. For those growing up and learning Mandarin in the United States, Pinyin is an efficient tool widely used in school Mandarin courses. Including Pinyin helps students read books about Taiwan with greater ease. Bopomofo, meanwhile, is an essential learning tool that opens access to a wider range of Taiwanese Mandarin resources. Learning Bopomofo may eventually enable children to explore books published in Taiwan independently, fostering connections that extend well beyond the classroom over the long term. The inclusion of both phonetic systems thus not only makes these books more accessible to Taiwanese American families but also offers lasting benefits to the community. Many teachers and parents who visited the exhibition expressed hopes for regular book exhibitions at PCLS, along with reading activities built around these titles. Their enthusiasm suggests that such initiatives could develop into lasting engagement with Taiwanese books, language, and culture within local Taiwanese American communities.
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‘.