* 2025 Golden Tripod Award
* 2025 Taipei Book Fair Award
Adopting the perspective of embodied memory, the author looks back on an adolescence that spanned the final years of martial law and the first glimmers of democracy, discovering the shadows of history imprinted within her still-forming sense of self.
Born into an Indonesian-Chinese family, author Fang Hui-Chen grew up in 1980s and 1990s Taiwan, an era of momentous changes in Taiwanese society. Shaped by a childhood and adolescence situated between the memories of authoritarianism and the hopes for the new tide of democratic reform, she was, by rights, as Taiwanese as they come. Yet, as the daughter of immigrants, she was always labeled an outsider. With a perspective that places her outside the mainstream narratives of Taiwan's history, she looks back on the memories and feelings of displacement that marked her experience of a pivotal era.
The nineteen essays of Before Dawn unfold chronologically, using physically embodied details and sensations to describe the lived experiences that fail to align with historical narratives of the times.
On June 4, 1989, as tragedy is about to unfold on Tiananmen Square, the author is a middle school student far removed from the spotlight of history. Her body, heavy with fatigue, impels her to turn away from the events being watched so closely by the world, and find a quiet patch of grass to nap on…
Hoping for a promotion that will take them back to Indonesia, the author's father applies for Indonesian passports for the entire family. Forced to accept a decision over which she has no control, the author must practice her signature for the passport under her father's critical gaze...
Confined within the oppressive atmosphere of authoritarian rule at her middle school, the author isn't even aware of the burgeoning student movement taking shape beyond the campus walls – a movement that will soon transform the nation.
The title, Before Dawn, taken from the author's long-established habit of taking night-time walks, is also a metaphor for the attitude she adopted to public affairs – if mainstream historical narratives are the light of day, then the author has always occupied the periphery, watching from the darkness of night. At the same time, her wanderings before dawn is more than a literary device. Her walks are an opportunity to re-examine those difficult experiences that could never be adequately addressed or understood by her younger self: the immigrant experience, her sexual awakening, the missed opportunity to participate in a movement that would shape Taiwan's politics for decades to come, and the disillusionment of growing up in the fading shadows of an authoritarian regime. Through the microscopic lens of individual memory, the author recounts the ways in which the great currents of society impact the formation of personal, ethnic, and gender identity, seeping into every corner of a self still in the process of growing up.