Crying in the Taipei 101 Food Court: Two Transpacific Adoptees Talk (Re-)Learning Mandarin in Taiwan

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We hadn’t meant to cry in the food court below Taipei — and during a Saturday lunch rush hour at that.  Author Stefany Valentine and I connected online in 2024 before she published her debut novel, First Love Language. As Asian American adoptees — her being Taiwanese American and me being Chinese American living in Taiwan — we bonded quickly over Taiwan and our longing for adoptee representation in young adult books.  Fast forward one year and suddenly we were meeting in person…

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In Grief, Returning to my Roots in Search of my Father’s Childhood

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My father’s final resting place was on a grassy knoll overlooking the Los Angeles skyline, 7,000 miles from his childhood home.  Since he immigrated to California in the 1970s, he’d only returned twice to Xingang, a rural township in southern Taiwan, flying over eleven hours across the Pacific Ocean each way. These trips were also separated almost a decade apart. Once, for his mother’s funeral service before I was born. The last time, he brought my mother; me, nine-years-old; and my little…

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Finding the Treasure: How National Treasure Helped Me Rediscover My Taiwanese American Story

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Watching Ben Gates defend his family’s name in National Treasure felt eerily familiar — like watching someone wrestle with the same questions of heritage and credibility that many Taiwanese Americans quietly face. I know... National Treasure probably isn’t the first film you’d expect to spark a reflection on identity. But beneath the puzzles and chase scenes, it’s a story about legacy, belief, and the search for meaning, themes that have quietly shaped my own journey. “This…

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It Is Not Up to Xi. And It Is Not Complicated.

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In 1996, ahead of Taiwan’s first direct presidential election, the People’s Republic of China launched missile tests and military exercises near Taiwan, attempting to signal its opposition to then-President Lee Teng-hui’s push for international recognition and Taiwan’s ongoing democratization. The show of force was meant to deter both Taiwan’s electorate and the international community from treating Taiwan as a sovereign political actor, which the PRC considered a violation of its “One…

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In the Shadow of a Flag: Creative Nonfiction by G.L. Blandford

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Prologue  I was born in Taichung, Taiwan, in 1974 under circumstances neither clear nor simple – though I would not understand that for decades. My mother, a radical street-smart woman from an upper class Taiwanese family, married a white Catholic U.S. Air Force airman from Kentucky shortly before my birth. My name carries his lineage, his pride, his promise of a better life in the U.S.  For much of my life, he believed I was his son, and I believed it too.  Four years later, my…

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Yagyu: Fiction by Grace A. Lin

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He has a memory of jumping down concrete bleachers, monolithic and grey, like a staircase built for giants. Each drop sends a jolt through his knees; each step is nearly waist-high. There are snacks, too. Salty and crunchy, or sweet and sticky, the manufactured flavor is engineered not just to please, but to wire itself so deeply into a child’s brain that years later, the cravings trigger a sense of nostalgia that feels like truth.  He’s certain that the memory takes place at a baseball…

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Creating an Archive Through Sound and Community: A Conversation with Angie QQ, Curator of SOUNDS OF TAIWAN

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When “Family Time” by Lim Giong starts playing over the speakers at Chao Bar & Record Store in Taipei, it feels a little like coming home.  This is my fourth year living in Taiwan — as a Chinese American adoptee from New York — but the sound of people chattering softly and spoons clinking in drinks takes me right back to when the island started becoming a place I wanted to stay.  Angie QQ, founder of East Never Loses and A Pure Person Press, created SOUNDS OF TAIWAN with Taiwanese…

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Understanding Our Parents Through the Stories They Never Told: A Glimpse Into 1970s Rural Taiwan

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As the year comes to an end, families in the U.S. are probably entering a season filled with gatherings, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and everything in between. I imagine it feels a bit like Lunar New Year in Taiwan. I often wonder: when you get together with your family, do you feel closer to them, or somehow even farther away?  My name is Jane. I’m a Taiwanese born and raised, and throughout my life I walked the classic Taiwanese path: school, cram school, more school, getting punished by…

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The Surreal, Dehumanized, and Fractured: A Conversation with Elaine Hsieh Chou

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Published earlier this year, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s second book, Where Are You Really From, is a stunning short story collection that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat. From a world in which men can purchase mail order brides to a deceptively playful story about a dollhouse, this book demonstrates Chou’s ability to explore themes of violence and desire, representation and family bonds, and the intersection of art, sexuality, and identity.  Today, I’m honored to speak with Chou about…

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Translation is a gift: Creative Nonfiction by brenda Lin

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緣 The first word I translated from Mandarin to English for my husband was 緣. We had met on a summer study abroad program in St. Petersburg during White Nights, when, at the end of each day, the sun dipped below the horizon, just grazing the night, before it glided back up into the sky, and we felt as though time belonged to us. Or, maybe what we felt was that we belonged outside the borders of time. We were bright-eyed twenty-year-olds, newly philosophical and contemplative, but also wild…

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