Featured Stories

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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A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding a Possible Invasion of Taiwan

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  Overwhelmed by the frequent media headlines proclaiming the near certainty that China will invade Taiwan, Taiwanese American Johnny laments, “Taiwan is so cooked.” Johnny's reaction isn't surprising. When my colleague at TaiwanPlus and I were discussing what to talk about in an interview with Leona, he wondered whether Taiwanese Americans like Johnny "feel like they need to be geopolitical experts" simply because they are Taiwanese American, and the mainstream framing of that…

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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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2025 Taiwanese American Small Business Gift Guide

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Every holiday season, we return to this special tradition: gathering the makers, dreamers, and small business owners who infuse Taiwanese American creativity into their craft. What began years ago as a simple community roundup has grown into one of our most beloved annual traditions—a celebration of food, art, care, storytelling, and the people whose work reflects the textures of our diaspora. This year's Taiwanese American Gift Guide celebrates craftsmanship rooted in heritage and imagination.…

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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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Claiming Taiwanese American Identity: A Third-Generation Perspective

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Being a fresh-out-of-undergraduate 22-year old is not fun in the current U.S. job market. Luckily, I've decided to leave the country for a year, delaying the mundane process of the job search—or as I like to call it, “delaying adulthood”—to spend a year in Taiwan as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. It sounds like a laissez-faire dream, but I didn’t stumble upon this opportunity by happenstance. Bicultural Upbringing I come from a family that takes immense pride in their Taiwanese…

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Keng-lâm Su-iⁿ: Writing A New Chapter for Tâi-gí

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Meet the educator-activists turning the tide on Mandarin hegemony to nurture a new generation of Taiwanese speakers and storytellers. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2048"] From L to R: Hô Phè-chin, Lûi Bêng-hàn, Tīⁿ Têng-têng, Ong Úi-pek[/caption] Founded in 2024, Keng-lâm Su-iⁿ (The Mosei Academy of Taiwanese Language and Literacy) has quickly become a dynamic and influential forces in Tâi-gí (Taiwanese) language revival. Rooted in a pragmatic praxis, the collective’s…

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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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Winnie M Li’s “WHAT WE LEFT UNSAID” and California Book Tour!

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WHAT WE LEFT UNSAID By Winnie M Li Excerpt from p.102 - 103 In this passage, Bonnie and Alex, two Taiwanese-American sisters in their 40s, are sharing a hotel room on a cross-country road trip. They stop to reflect upon their mother.  ‘I guess Mom must have been like that with us.  Like, we were her whole purpose or living?’ ‘Yeah,’ Bonnie answers after a moment, releasing Alex from the hug. ‘And then we all moved away.’ They sit side by side, stewing equally in their…

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Where we come from, who we stand with: A Conversation with Professor Hsin-I Cheng (Part 1/2)

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Part 1: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Emotional Legacies of Immigration This interview has also been translated to Mandarin Chinese (Hanzi) and can be viewed here.  Editor's Introduction: As political crises unfold, they rarely do so in a vacuum—and neither do our responses to them. I have been thinking fervently of how the different reactions to statements like this within our own community illuminate a lack of common ground for understanding. While I do not expect or want everyone…

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