Walking through the Forest with Artist Szu-Chieh Yun: A Conversation Between Sisters

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On Friday, May 16th, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston unveiled Into the Forest, a large-scale mural installation created by Taiwanese American Fine Artist and Arts Educator Szu-Chieh Yun (雲思婕), in collaboration with nearly 200 local youth. The mural — a vibrant landscape alive with curiosity, chaos, and the texture of rushing water and flowing trees — was the culmination of the Museum’s Community Arts Initiative, a program that invites young people to co-create with a professional artist…

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Rose Valland, the Woman Who Outsmarted the Nazis: Michelle Young (“The Art Spy”) in conversation with Kristi Hong

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We are so pleased to present the following conversation between two Taiwanese American authors we admire, Kristi Hong ("The Teacher's Match") and Michelle Young, on Young's newest book, The Art Spy. A riveting and stylish saga set in Paris during World War II, The Art Spy uncovers how an unlikely heroine infiltrated the Nazi leadership to save the world's most treasured masterpieces. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Ho Chie Tsai (TaiwaneseAmerican.org founder) with Michelle Young,…

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Lunchbox: Anne Hu Serves a Taste of Taiwanese America in 90s-Era Cleveland

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Nearly four years ago, filmmaker Anne Hu spoke with Grace Hwang Lynch for TaiwaneseAmerican.org as she was crowdfunding to make Lunchbox, a dramatic, three-part coming-of-age short drama about regret, healing, and honoring the people we love. In the film, when a Taiwanese American woman (Shirley), prepares lunches from her childhood, she struggles to forgive herself for pushing away her immigrant mother.  Hu had written Lunchbox in 2017, when a Facebook video appeared on her feed, capturing…

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Rediscovering My Heart Language: A Taiwanese American Mother’s Journey to Relearn Mandarin

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Like many Taiwanese Americans, Mandarin Chinese was the primary language spoken at home in my early childhood years, before formal public schooling rendered English as the dominant language to take over our household. Growing up, I have fond memories of being woken up by my mother’s soundtrack of soulful Mandarin pop ballads as she cooked rice porridge for us on early Sunday mornings. I remember being captivated by the background sounds of sword fights and long winded monologues of Chinese…

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Change in Atmosphere: Creative Non-Fiction by Evelyn Wu

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  It was someone else dressed in this striped red uniform, someone else who slung the same red backpack everyone was required to use on her shoulder, hiding the real reason she was trembling by the weight of the backpack. It wasn’t me who smiled a watery smile with a pounding heart, social anxiety kicking in stronger than before. It was my first day of sixth grade, back to school after abruptly leaving my 5th grade class back in America. When Covid hit, I refused the masks and social…

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“Abbott Elementary meets Crazy Rich Asians, but less crazy and a lot less rich”: Kristi Hong (“The Teacher’s Match”) in conversation with Michelle Young

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Kristi Hong, a pen name for a Taiwanese American author from San Diego, has published a new book, The Teacher’s Match, from Harlequin publishers. She sat down with Michelle Young, author of The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland (HarperOne), to talk about the book, writing romance as an Asian American, her upbringing in the Midwest, and the influences on her writing.   M: What inspired you to write fiction - specifically in the romance genre?…

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On Stubborn Roots: Creative Nonfiction by Charis Chu

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藕斷絲連 is a Chinese idiom. It roughly translates to The broken lotus is connected by its fibered thread. 阿婆, my grandmother, described it to me one night in the dining room of what used to be our apartment, tucked away in the hills of Taipei. I was probably tracing sheet after sheet of Chinese characters, painstakingly going over each brushstroke with an incorrect pencil grip, fostering the bump on my ring finger that still exists today. Homework took hours back then. I can see it—me,…

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Transforming Memory Into Storytelling: Cindy Chang in conversation with Jocelyn Chung

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It requires vulnerability and courage to transform memories into storytelling. Especially when those memories are mixed with pain and shame. For many of us, growing up Taiwanese American meant learning to save face. We hold our secrets deep inside of ourselves, carefully crafting the image we want others to perceive. We do this for survival, we do this to grasp normalcy, or maybe we do this because it’s all we know how to do. I had the honor of speaking with Cindy Chang about her new book,…

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A Republic of Taiwan: Breaking the Chains

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Editor's Note: A Republic of Taiwan: Breaking the Chains was submitted by high schooler Chloe Wu Shih to the 2024 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes and recommended by judge Charles Yu as noteworthy for publication. We are pleased to share this impressive, deeply researched piece representing the views of the writer; in particular, Shih notes that Taiwan's history traces back to the roots of the Republic of China though it is our editorial position that Taiwan has a 6,000-year…

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Rude: Creative Nonfiction by Colette Chang

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The mallard duck is everywhere. It is the ancestor of all duck species. Although their mating season is not until spring, mallard ducks form relationships much earlier, courting in the winter, and eventually laying eggs in the summer. When ducklings are first born, they are all the same yellow-bellied babies. They live harmoniously as adolescents in their separate spheres. For the first months of their lives, mallard ducklings waddle as a clutch behind their mother. As equals.  At ten months,…

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