Featured Stories

Shop Your Community: Mid-Autumn Festival Gift Guide

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  With Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 coming up next month, we had some fun putting together a gift guide from our community!⁠ 01 / "The Shadow in the Moon" by Christina Matula, illustrated by Pearl Law Two sisters and their grandmother celebrate a popular Chinese holiday with family. Their favorite part? Mooncakes, of course--along with Ah-ma's story of the ancient Chinese tale of Hou Yi, a brave young archer, and his wife, Chang'E. A long, long time ago, Hou Yi rescued the earth…

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Director’s Picks: Ten Taiwanese American Films to Watch

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  What is Taiwanese American cinema? Films directed by Taiwanese Americans? Films about the relationship between nation and diaspora? Films that explore the specific experiences of American-born Taiwanese? Films that distinguish themselves culturally or politically from the more recognizable “Asian American” or “Chinese American” film? There’s not enough of a critical mass of films to answer that question with any meaningful conviction. But perhaps this ambiguity is what has…

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A Girl Worth Rooting For: Meet Holly-Mei Jones

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Synopsis: Packed with humor and heart, this debut middle grade series follows a girl finding her place in a brand-new world of private school and frenemies when her family moves to Hong Kong. Taiwanese Canadian Holly-Mei Jones couldn’t be more excited about moving to Hong Kong for her mother’s job. Her new school is right on the beach and her family’s apartment is beyond beautiful. Everything is going to be perfect . . . right? Maybe not. It feels like everywhere she turns, there…

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Fantuan Discourse

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I would not consider myself an aggressive person, but I tend to find myself getting into petty arguments with my friends. One recent argument occurred right after a dinner in which I was introducing my new boyfriend to my friends Phillip and Lily.[1] It began innocently enough: we had dinner at a nice Turkish restaurant, then retreated to Phillip’s apartment for dessert and tea. During the conversation, it came to light that we are all of Taiwanese descent, which naturally led to a discussion…

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Wish-Granting and Magic-Making in “When You Wish Upon a Lantern”

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In Gloria Chao’s “When You Wish Upon a Lantern,” wishes don’t magically come true. They are received with kindness, guided, and often painstakingly maneuvered “into the light.”  Born and raised in Chicago’s Chinatown, Liya Huang and Kai Jiang are childhood best friends whose families harbor a mutual dislike not unlike the Montagues and Capulets - if the Montagues and Capulets were passive-aggressive and dueled with their children instead of weapons. Still, Liya and Kai share…

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Between My Grandfather, Taiwan, and Me

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I had just turned eleven years old when my gonggong passed away. I never got to know him very well; my memories of him are pieced together from summer trips to the East Coast, when we visited my mother’s side of the family. But between his deteriorating health and my distraction of getting to play Wii with my cousins, my gonggong and I did not spend much time together. After his death, his transformation into an unknown, distant figure in my life felt inevitable. [caption id="" align="aligncenter"…

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Why I Love “Everything Everywhere All At Once”

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  From the point of view of a Taiwanese American eighteen year old aspiring filmmaker I’ve been following “Everything Everywhere All At Once” since the first trailer released over a year ago. The trailer told me nothing about the plot of the movie, but as soon as I saw it, I knew it would be the most epic movie I had ever seen. There was a combination of factors that intrigued me: the sci-fi/Asian American immigrant mother-daughter hybrid story, the mysteriousness of the trailer,…

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“The Jennie Show” on TaiwanPlus: Animated First-Hand Telling of “Third Culture” Experiences in Taiwan

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Enjoying the best of both worlds or finding comfort in a “third culture”? A stranger in a strange land or a homecoming full of quirks and wonders? Learning about a foreign yet familiar culture or rediscovering one’s own identity? These are some of the questions Jennie explores in her return to Taiwan as experienced through her Taiwanese American lens – via Colorado, to be exact. “The Jennie Show”, a short-form animation recently released on the fast-growing global streaming platform…

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Book Review: Elaine Hsieh Chou’s “Disorientation”

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In 2015, poet Michael Derrick Hudson submitted his poem “The Bees” to various journals and magazines in hopes of being published. After the poem was passed over nearly forty times, Hudson decided to change his strategy. Only nine submissions later, “The Bees” was featured in that year’s edition of “The Best American Poetry” — but under the name Yi-Fen Chou. Hudson, a white man, had used a Chinese name as a pseudonym as a way to garner attention for his work.  In her debut…

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