For this special issue on “New Generation Women's Fiction from Taiwan,” we have specially invited Professor Lee Kuei Yun of the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at Taiwan's Tsing Hua University to be guest editor and take responsibility for the selections. Because of space limitations it has been possible only to select twelve short stories by eleven woman writers. These writers were all born in the 1970s or later and their works were published in the year 2000 or later. Thus, they represent a period of social change in twenty-first century Taiwan and the spirit of the new generation. The introduction that we asked Professor Lee to provide is entitled “Trauma, esire, Contemporary Women's Voices.” Aside from giving a brief account of the eleven writers and their works, Professor Lee sketches “a number of writerly qualities that become perceptible… [that] represent the internal trauma, female consciousness, physical lust, cat-uman metaphors, and everyday life, etc.” In her introdu
Born in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, raised in the scholarly traditions of ancient China by his grandfather but forced into the Japanese educational system, Hu Taiming, the protagonist of Orphan of Asia,
Chiang Ching-kuo, son and political heir of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was born in 1910, when Chinese women, nearly all illiterate, hobbled about on bound feet and men wore pigtails as symbols of subservience to the Manchu Dynasty. In his youth Ching-kuo was a Communist and a Trotskyite, and he lived twelve years in Russia. He died in 1988 as the leader of Taiwan, a Chinese society with a flourishing consumer economy and a budding but already wild, woolly, and open democracy. He was an actor in many of the events of the last century that shaped the history of China's struggles and achievements in the modern era: the surge of nationalism among Chinese youth, the grand appeal of Marxism-Leninism, the terrible battle against fascist Japan, and the long, destructive civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1949, he fled to Taiwan with his father and two million Nationalists. He led the brutal suppression of dissent on the island and was a major player in the cold, some
In Chinese American literature, countries such as China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore are experienced as well as imagined - experienced because some authors were born in Asia and have fi
More than 300 years ago, the island of Taiwan was a topic of hot controversy in London, thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born on the island. He made highly
Wang Chin-yun, a Buddhist nun born in Taiwan in 1937 and now known as the Venerable Master Cheng Yen, is one of the world's most inspiring yet largely unrecognized women. At the age of 29, she establ
劉耿一，1938年生於東京，1946年返台定居，其繪畫受父親劉啟祥啟蒙而啟開藝術之途，迄今長達50年之久，他藉由繪畫、造形木作與書寫，來觀照思索台灣社會現實和自然風貌。Liu was born in Tokyo in 1938 and came to live in Taiwan in 1946. He was introduced to painting by his father, Liu C
A Beginning I was born in Taiwan in 1941. At that time, Taiwan was a colony of Imperial Japan, and the Kominka Movement (皇民化運動), a program to see the Taiwanese assimilated into the empire, had alread
Traces of Rilke are unearthed in Lo Fu’s long poem sequence, Driftwood, along with his affection for surrealism and the early modernists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire and the more contemporary verse of Wallace Stevens. On New Year’s Day 2001, the poem appeared in the literary supplement to the Liberty Times in Taiwan and was serialized for three months straight. Lo Fu has won almost every literary award in Taiwan and has published more than three dozen volumes of poetry, essays, criticism and translations. Despite his prolific output, Lo Fu considers Driftwood to be the book that sums up his experience of exile, his artistic explorations and his metaphysics; Driftwood is a personal epic and the greatest achievement of his old age.Lo Fu is the pen name of Mo Luofu, who was born in Hengyang, Hunan Province, in 1928. He joined the military during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and moved to Taiwan in 1949. While stationed in southern Taiwan in 1954, he founded the Epoch Poetr
Born in Taiwan, Ang Lee is one of cinema's most versatile directors whose ability to traverse cultural, national, and sexual boundaries has gained him worldwide recognition. His astonishingly diverse
In this, the second volume of a projected multivolume series, jewelry designer Anna Hu presents a carefully curated selection of exceptional pieces created over the past five years. Born in Taiwan, Hu
Self Writeous presents a writer’s journey from his born motherland, Taiwan, to his reborn motherland, New York City, with many places in between. During this bicultural and bilingual transformation, C
Wen Ho Lee, a patriotic American scientist born in Taiwan, devoted most of his life to science and to helping improve U.S. defense capabilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then, in January
From the acclaimed author of Five Star Billionaire and The Harmony Silk Factory comes a whirlwind personal history of modern Asia.With his entry into Restless Book's The Face series, award-winning novelist Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation. From a taxi ride in present-day Bangkok, to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1980s Kuala Lumpur, to his grandfathers' treacherous boat journeys to mainland China in the 1920s, Aw weaves together stories of insiders and outsiders, images from rural villages to megacity nightclubs, and voices in a dizzying variety of languages, dialects, and slangs.Tash Aw was born in Taiwan, grew up in Kuala Lumpur, and currently lives in London. He is the author ofThe Harmony Silk Factory, which won the Whitbread Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and ofMap of the Invisible Wo
Born into poverty in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, Ruey Yu overcame near-starvation during World War II and rose to become a successful biochemist and co-founder of the multi-million dollar skin care comp
Born in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, raised in the scholarly traditions of ancient China by his grandfather but forced into the Japanese educational system, Hu Taiming, the protagonist of "Orphan of Asia
For fans of American Born Chinese and Roller Girl, this full color, contemporary heartwarming graphic novel proves food always has a way of bringing people together no matter the distance, by debut talent Lily LaMotte and Ann Xu.Twelve-year-old Cici has just moved to Seattle from Taiwan, and the only thing she wants more than to fit in is to celebrate A-má's 70th birthday together. Since she can’t go to A-má, Cici cooks up a plan to bring A-má to her and surprise her parents—by winning the grand prize in a kids’ cooking contest to pay for A-má's ticket!There's just one problem: Cici only knows how to cook Taiwanese food. And after her pickled cucumbers are mistaken for worms at lunch, she's determined to cook something American. Channeling her inner Julia Child, she cooks her way closer to the prize money—that is until she starts to lose herself in the competition. But Cici can't let A-má down, even if it means combining her newfound American identity with the flavors of home.Cici navi
