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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We Build Museums So We Can Someday Stop Building Cages: A Taiwanese American Reflection from the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park

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This essay was originally written for my personal newsletter, but I hope its reflections on heritage, human rights, and ethical imagination may resonate with the broader Taiwanese American community. 🫶 Hello from Taipei, where I’ve collected so many museum pamphlets and cute paraphernalia that I am tempted to start a junk journal (though now that I think about it, this Substack is an intellectual junk journal of sorts). I’m so grateful to have also spent time this week with people I’ve…

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Shared Meals, Fieldwork, Storytelling: Building Transnational Solidarity Through the Taiwan Food and Farm Delegation

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For many in diaspora, food is one of the most tangible threads connecting us to ancestry, memory, and land. Yet the pathways that sustain those connections—seed to harvest, recipe to ritual—are often complicated or even fractured by displacement, colonization, and distance.  It is along these fractured, but fertile, lines that Taiwanese American community organizers Li Schmidt and Kimberly Chou Tsun An have envisioned and built the Taiwan Food and Farm Delegation, a pilot project uniting…

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Ghost Month in Taiwan: When the Gates of the Underworld Open

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It is currently Ghost Month in Taiwan, also known as 中元節 (Zhōngyuán Jié / Ghost Festival), a traditional holiday observed on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, usually in August. It is believed that during this time, the gates of the underworld open, allowing spirits to roam the human world. The festival has roots in Taoism, Buddhism, and folk beliefs. In Taoism, it is tied to the birthday of the deity Dì Guān (地官大帝), who pardons sins. In Buddhism, it corresponds to Ullambana,…

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“To write is to share; to share is to be seen”: Jane Kuo, in conversation with Rebecca Yang

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As a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants growing up in suburban Los Angeles County, I didn't expect to find any literature that reflected my niche in life. That is, until I found Anna Zhang in Jane Kuo's books In the Beautiful Country and Land of Broken Promises. Anna is a middle schooler who immigrates to the United States (which she calls "The Beautiful Country") for the prospect of a better life. Instead, what she finds is a vastly different community---one with unfamiliar faces, discrimination,…

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Light as Insistent: Alvin Lu (“Daydreamers”) in conversation with Shawna Yang Ryan

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Alvin Lu’s second novel, Daydreamers, was released on July 15th. It’s a dreamy, unsettling book that radiates intelligence and beauty. Difficult to summarize, I will rely on this line from the publisher’s description, though even that cannot capture the many layers of this book: “Cycling between San Francisco, Los Angeles, China, and Taiwan, the novel unfolds across generations of Chinese immigrants and diaspora artists, linked by tenuous friendships, publishing feuds, and the obscure…

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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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