In celebration of the growing canon of Taiwanese American memoirs (and manifestos!) in the literary world, we’re delighted to host a year-long reading series in 2026 to enjoy and discuss these texts together.
There are three ways to participate:
(1) Host your own reading group: At the conclusion of each month, we’ll post a community discussion guide for the selected text. We encourage forming your own reading groups (especially beyond the Taiwanese American community) and using these guides as a starting point for your own discussions!
(2) Join our virtual discussions (hosted by EIC Leona Chen): Please RSVP below for the calendar invite. We will meet for 60-90 minutes monthly on the third Sunday at 6PM PT/9PM ET (subject to scheduling updates), with one session dedicated to each book. You can join any number of book club discussions throughout the year. These discussions will be in English and are open to all.
(3) Contribute reflections: Feel especially moved by the selected texts? We’re always interested in commissioning thoughtful reflections and/or Q&As with authors. If you’d like to submit or pitch work, please refer to our Submission Guidelines here and email leona@taiwaneseamerican.org. Accepted submissions are compensated.
Our schedule will be as follows (scheduling subject to slight changes; will be communicated at least 2 weeks ahead of time!):
January 18, 6PM PT: Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty by Kaila Yu
Blending vulnerable stories from Yu’s life with incisive cultural critique and history, Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays exploring feminism, beauty, yellow fever, and the roles pop culture and colonialism played in shaping pervasive and destructive stereotypes about Asian women and their bodies. Yu reflects on the women in media who influenced her, the legacy of U.S. occupation in shaping Western perceptions of Asian women, her own experiences in the pinup and import modeling industry, auditioning for TV and film roles that perpetuated dehumanizing stereotypes, and touring the world with her band in revealing outfits. She recounts altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards, allowing men to treat her like a sex object, and the emotional toll and trauma of losing her sense of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted.
February 15, 6PM PT: Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo
Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening.
Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she is inspired by some such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eighth grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle’s exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school.
Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she left the Delta prematurely and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick’s education—even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a “good” life and what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.
Read our interview with Michelle Kuo here.
March 15, 6PM PT: Sun Shining on Morning Snow: A Memoir of Identity, Loss, and Living Boldly by Ingrid Hu Dahl
Sun Shining on Morning Snow is a fearless and deeply moving memoir that celebrates the power of authenticity, love, and resilience. Ingrid Hu Dahl, a mixed-race, queer woman, takes readers on an intimate journey through the challenges of self-discovery-navigating the weight of social, cultural, and familial expectations.
From her rebellious early days as a touring musician to her groundbreaking work at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, Ingrid’s story is one of courage, defiance, and empowerment. She fights to carve out space for herself and others, embracing her truth despite the pressures that seek to silence her. Through love, loss, and an unbreakable connection to the fierce women before her-especially her mother-she ultimately finds reconciliation and the strength to live boldly in her identity. In grief, she discovers not just sorrow but also a deeper understanding of love, memory, and the invisible threads that connect past and present. She recalls her mother’s words about going through fire to become pure gold, a metaphor that takes on new meaning as she recognizes the parallels in their struggles-two women, generations apart, yet bound by resilience in the face of cultural and personal battles. Despite their differences, their journeys echo each other, revealing the strength they both carried and the ways they were more alike than she ever realized. She comes to see the power in her own-in the name her mother gave her, Sun Shining on Morning Snow, a reflection of transformation, a crystalline purity shaped by both fragility and strength, ever-changing yet luminous in its own becoming.
April 19, 6PM PT: The Translator’s Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad
Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an accidental immigrant. The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents-including a father who worked as a translator-meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.
Read our interview with Grace Loh Prasad here.
May 17, 6PM PT: The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World by Tiffany Yu
Tiffany Yu takes readers on a revelatory examination of disability–how to unpack biases and build an inclusive and accessible world.
As the Asian American daughter of immigrants, living with PTSD, and sustaining a permanent arm injury at age nine, Tiffany Yu is well aware of the intersections of identity that affect us all. She navigated the male-dominated world of corporate finance as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs before founding Diversability, an award-winning community business run by disabled people building disability pride, power, and leadership, and creating the viral Anti-Ableism series on TikTok.
Organized from personal to professional, domestic to political, Me to We to Us, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto frames context for conversations, breaks down the language of ableism, identifies microaggressions, and offers actions that lead to authentic allyship.
– How do we remove ableist language from our daily vocabulary?
– How do we create inclusive events?
– What are the advantages of hiring disabled employees, and what market opportunities are we missing out on when we don’t consider disabled consumers?
With contributions from disability advocates, activists, authors, entrepreneurs, scholars, educators, and executives, Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have far too often been “othered” and rendered invisible.
June 21, 6PM PT: Stay True by Hua Hsu
In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.
But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.
Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
July 19, 6PM PT: Beyond Two Worlds: A Taiwanese-American Adoptee’s Memoir & Search for Identity by Marijane Huang
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Marijane was adopted by an American military family at four months old. She grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in the deep South where hers was the only Asian face among a majority of white.
Raised to believe she was Vietnamese and Japanese, she never doubted her ethnicity, until one day, she found her lost adoption papers. This discovery unloosed secrets that had been buried for decades, causing her to question her identity. With brave determination, Marijane set out on a quest to reconstruct her past and resurrect a birth heritage that had long been forsaken. Her journey took her halfway across the world to reunite with her birth family and a culture she realized she had longed for her entire life.
Beyond Two Worlds is a poignant telling of one woman’s search for identity and belonging despite insurmountable odds, and is an inspiring true story for those seeking to connect to their original families.
Read our review of Marijane’s book here.
August 16, 6PM PT: Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts by Jessica J. Lee
A chance discovery of letters written by her immigrant grandfather leads Jessica J. Lee to her ancestral homeland, Taiwan. There, she seeks his story while growing closer to the land he knew.
Lee hikes mountains home to Formosan flamecrests, birds found nowhere else on earth, and swims in a lake of drowned cedars. She bikes flatlands where spoonbills alight by fish farms, and learns about a tree whose fruit can float in the ocean for years, awaiting landfall. Throughout, Lee unearths surprising parallels between the natural and human stories that have shaped her family and their beloved island. Joyously attentive to the natural world, Lee also turns a critical gaze upon colonialist explorers who mapped the land and named plants, relying on and often effacing the labor and knowledge of local communities.
Two Trees Make a Forest is a genre–shattering book encompassing history, travel, nature, and memoir, an extraordinary narrative showing how geographical forces are interlaced with our family stories.
September 20, 6PM PT: Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence by Kim Liao
Where Every Ghost Has a Name offers readers a gripping tale of Taiwan’s road to democracy through the lens of one family’s sacrifices. This memoir recounts the story of Thomas Liao, a Taiwanese Independence leader after WWII that advanced the cause of democracy, whose fight for freedom tore his family apart and changed the history of Taiwan.
In this astonishing story, Kim Liao skillfully unravels a family mystery through a blend of meticulous historical inquiry and vividly imagined reconstructions of the past. This work is not just an important contribution to Taiwanese history, but also a profound account of the wide-reaching personal sacrifices that resistance against authoritarianism entails.
Kim effortlessly leads her reader on a tour of Taiwan in the early 2000s and a historical perspective of the 1940s to 1950s during the post-Japanese invasion period…. Her ability to share her experience honestly makes this memoir relatable for many mixed-race individuals…. As Kim Liao moves back and forth between her ancestors and present-day research, she does a beautiful job of sharing Taiwanese culture and helping her readers understand the whys of the culture. Through each step she navigates to find more understanding, she opens her readers to not just new culture but nuances of language and historical references juxtaposed with the information of why things were the way they were… This memoir is a great reminder of how our past always shapes the present and how remembering can serve as a form of healing for many.
Read our interview with Kim Liao here.
October 18, 6PM PT: The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin
Are these the only two stories? The one, where you defeat your monster, and the other, where you succumb to it?
Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father’s cancer grasped hold of their family.
As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin became frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she’d loved as a child—tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.
Featuring stunning illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, and divided into the four acts of a traditional Japanese narrative structure, The Night Parade is a genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, the grieving process, and other haunted topics with storytelling tradition, Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?
November 15, 6PM PT: A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Taiwanese Independence Leader by Peng Ming-Min
[As of December 2025, this book is currently difficult to obtain due to suspension of direct orders from its distributors. We will announce any changes to the schedule here and on our Instagram!]
A Taste of Freedom is the moving story of a reluctant hero and his journey from bookish youth to renowned scholar to political dissident.
Peng Ming-min was born into a doctor’s family in central Taiwan in 1923. He moved to Japan to study, at first French, then law and political science. He was badly injured in a U.S. air raid, losing an arm, and during his recuperation he witnessed the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Peng’s post-war return to Taiwan was bittersweet; the island’s new masters, the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) were “unbelievably corrupt and greedy. For eighteen months they looted our island…. They were carpetbaggers, occupying enemy territory, and we were being treated as a conquered people.” When nationwide protests erupted in 1947 in what is known as the 228 Massacre, Peng – despite his academic interest in politics – kept a safe distance and escaped punishment in the bloody crackdown and purges that followed. Peng pursued his studies in Canada and France, and quickly established himself as an authority in the new field of international air law. Returning to Taiwan, he became a full professor at the age of 34. The young academic star attracted the attention of President Chiang Kai-shek and other KMT leaders, who wanted to cultivate him as a model example of a local Taiwanese in the party elite.
Not only did Peng refuse to become window-dressing as a token Taiwanese, he decided to fight back against the regime. In 1964 Peng printed a manifesto calling for genuine democracy. After Peng was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison for sedition, his international profile helped secure an early release. In 1970, while under house arrest and the heavy surveillance of the secret police, he made a daring escape to Sweden, where he was granted political asylum. Not long after this he wrote A Taste of Freedom, which was originally published in 1972 and later translated into Mandarin.
After twenty-two years in exile Peng Ming-min was finally able to return to Taiwan, where he was a candidate in Taiwan’s first direct presidential election, in 1996.
Arguably the most readable account of Taiwan’s turbulent mid-twentieth century, A Taste of Freedom is the perfect introduction for anyone who wants to understand modern Taiwan.
December 20, 6PM PT: Like A Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself by Jane Marie Chen
On paper, Jane Chen was the embodiment of success. A Harvard and Stanford graduate, she was the CEO and co-founder of a company that developed a groundbreaking incubator helping to save hundreds of thousands of newborns in the world’s most vulnerable communities. Her work gave her purpose and earned her shoutouts from presidents and pop stars. Yet underneath it all, she was burning out—consumed by self-doubt and a relentless need to prove herself, shaped by wounds that had formed long before her career began. No matter how much she achieved, she never felt like she was enough.
Then, Embrace collapsed. Jane lost more than a dream—she lost the identity she had built her life around. Feeling utterly broken, she set off on a global quest for healing. Her search took her across oceans and into the uncharted terrain of her inner world. She sat in silence for days in the Indonesian jungle. She sought wisdom from world-renowned healers and therapists. She burned holes into her leg for a frog poisoning ceremony. She dove headfirst into every form of self-help, from the spiritual to the psychedelic, from the cultish to the comical, only to find herself face-to-face with the one thing she had spent a lifetime avoiding: the trauma of her upbringing as a first-generation Taiwanese American. Jane discovered a profound truth—that real healing doesn’t come from achievement, approval, or even the tools we think will save us.
A revelatory memoir brimming with candor, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Like a Wave We Break is more than a story of personal transformation—it’s an invitation to confront our deepest wounds and to embrace the messy, beautiful truth of who we are.
FAQ:
I’m the author of one of your selected books! How can I participate?
Eeek! We’d love for you to join the first or last 30 minutes of our discussions for Q&A if your schedule allows! If you’d like to share reflection questions for the community discussion guide, please email us at leona@taiwaneseamerican.org to discuss further.
Where can I obtain copies of the books?
Most of these books should be available at your local library or through our Bookshop, which fulfills orders from independent bookstores at no additional cost to you! They are also generally available wherever books are sold. Peng Ming-Min’s memoir may be more difficult to source; we will assess Camphor Press’s distribution and pivot if necessary!
Do I have to be Taiwanese American to join?
Nope! This is open to all! We’re so excited to have you!
Are there in-person/local options?
At this time, no – but we recommend forming your own reading groups in your local community! While we love in-person gatherings, we hope this virtual format promotes accessibility from wherever you are.
Will discussions be recorded?
Unfortunately, these book club discussions will not be recorded!
I haven’t quite finished the book. Can I still join the scheduled discussion?
Of course!
