Written by Yi-Jen Yu. This article reflects on a Taiwan-themed book exhibition at Princeton Chinese Language School, exploring how English translations, Taiwanese American children’s books, and bilingual learning resources can connect younger readers with Taiwan. Through stories of food, family, home, and language, the exhibition reveals reading as a bridge across generations, cultures, and distance.
Written by Chee-Hann Wu. This article further explores the diversity of Taiwan literature through nearly ninety books curated for the Brooklyn Book Festival. From translated fiction and graphic narratives to Taiwanese American writing, it examines how literature crosses linguistic and geographic boundaries, revealing Taiwan’s layered histories, diasporic experiences, and evolving identities through multiple perspectives and stories.
Written by Chee-Hann Wu and Yi-Jen Yu. This article reflects on the curation of “Slow-cooked: Stories from Taiwan across Time” for the 2026 Brooklyn Book Festival. Using slow cooking as a metaphor for Taiwan’s layered histories and diverse cultures, the exhibition brings together literature, food, and sensory experiences to invite readers to encounter Taiwan beyond the written word.
Written by Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley. This article explores how the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers helped catalyse Taiwan’s 2023 #MeToo movement by fostering empathy, challenging victim-blaming, and providing language for collective action. Drawing on XinLing Li’s recent book, it examines television’s capacity to shape public discourse while acknowledging its limitations in producing lasting social change.
Written by Sheng-mei Ma. Part II of the article perceives Detention as a haunting of Taiwan’s White Terror, where Fang’s guilt, forbidden love, and suppressed memory recur through ghosts, banned texts, and images of facelessness and decapitation. Its hybrid cultural references reveal Taiwanese identity as historically layered, while headlessness symbolises political violence, erasure, and unresolved collective trauma.
Written by Sheng-mei Ma. In Part I of the article, the author examines how the film Detention (2019), through a return to Taiwan’s White Terror, exposes unresolved tensions among Chineseness, Taiwaneseness, and Japanese colonial legacies. Through Fang’s mixed family, religious practices, and betrayal of the banned Study Group, the film links political repression with intimate conflicts of love, resentment, identity, and betrayal.
