Writer. Teacher. Daughter.

I’m a writer and program manager for The W.O.W. Project, an organization based in Manhattan’s Chinatown that seeks to preserve, protect, and innovate Chinatown’s creative culture through arts programming and youth education. In my writing and organizing work, I’m interested in exploring queerness, coming-of-age, and matrilineal histories. I’m passionate about creating artistic lineages and building intergenerational community. My work attempts to resurrect histories and animate our desires.

How does being Taiwanese/Taiwanese American and/or community ally play a role in your life?

Being part of the Taiwanese diaspora has played a tremendous role in my storytelling and sense of community. A lot of my inherited stories and thematic obsessions come from reflecting on the reverberations of migration, language, diaspora, and the intersections (and complications) of Taiwanese identity. Taiwanese history and diasporic Taiwanese/Taiwanese writers have been hugely influential to me (such as Wu Ming-Yi, Qiu Miaojin, and Shawna Yang Ryan), especially in exploring desire, fantasy and alternate realities, and histories that have been buried or erased.

If you could teach future generations 1 thing about being Taiwanese/Taiwanese American or Taiwan, what would it be?

I think that I have nothing to teach and everything to learn! I’m excited to see how future generations will continue to innovate and challenge and question and create for themselves what it means to be Taiwanese and Taiwanese American, and continue to create communities and lineages. I hope that they will be able to explore their losses and the things that they’ve gained from their community. I would also love to see how conversations about Indigeneity intersect with those conversations, and the importance of centering Indigenous voices.

What does the future of Taiwanese America look like to you?

I think the future of Taiwanese America is beautifully flexible and full of possibility – one of the things I love about Taiwanese identity is how multi-faceted it is, how it challenges singular narratives, how it contains multitudes. I hope that Taiwanese Americans create meaningful and lasting solidarity with the prison abolition movement and transformative justice in this country, and strive to be allies and collaborators within it. I hope that we help to bring an abolitionist future into fruition.

Favorite memory of Taiwan/Taiwanese America?

All my favorite memories are definitely storytelling moments – like when my mother told a humorous story of being robbed by a dog while waiting for this bus when she was a little girl. She tried to hide her piece of bread beneath her skirt, but the dog sniffed it out and tried to steal it from her – the way she told it was so funny and possibly exaggerated.

Favorite Taiwanese food?

油飯