*2024 Golden Tripod Award

Award-winning author Yang Limin returns to the literary stage after a multiyear absence spent building a career in Taiwan’s civil service. In Fog Alert, her second published work, Yang sharpens her acerbic pen on the everyday minutiae of life and explores the relationships among youthful ambition, reality, and literature.

An impassioned author working a low-level civil service job finds herself trapped in a bureaucratic machine’s soulless grind. Her dream of writing while earning a regular paycheck is shattered when she finds her life’s new stability and predictability have dulled her literary ardor and sensibilities. She only finds her stride when starting to write in pensive, world-weary terms, about the landscape of everyday life. Mirroring Kafka’s keen fixation on the absurdities and rich emptiness of life, Yang re-finds her penetrating literary insightfulness and recaptures her lost passion for writing when she begins picking apart and making sense of the farce and foolishness in her everyday existence.

Weaving her lived burdens into the narrative, the author writes of convoluted family secrets and city neighborhood legends that put the lie to an everyday life that, while deceptively normal and pleasurable, is emotionally and spiritually toxic. In gray-cast, dispassionate prose, inner truths and coveted hopes shine through her dreams of overseas travel and memories of her parents, hinting somewhat expectantly at true hope for redemption.

Yang’s latest work explores the struggles involved in balancing family, friends, reality and aspiration as well as the frustrations, apathy, and exhaustion wrapped up in everyday life and work. Writing may indeed be the author’s respite from the fog-bound pressures of life, or perhaps writing is the breath of fresh air just strong enough to part the fog and let a little sunlight through…just enough to reenergize, regroup and press on ahead again for a while.