Books From Taiwan

Blurb: The Cheng-Po Code

By Openbook ∥ Translated by Jeff Miller

Mar 21, 2025

This creative effort, spanning the wide swathe of Taiwan’s modern art history with a story that resonates with plausibility and practiced literary flair, should not be underestimated. Beyond unraveling the “Cheng-Po” code, this story may indeed hold the key to understanding Taiwan itself. Interspersed with Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese elements, the narrative lays breadcrumbs while dangling answers just beyond reach. Once the code is cracked and the air has cleared, it is now us who should unlock our own closed doors.   Weaving a detective tale into historical fiction adds extra layers of difficulty to an inherently challenging literary genre. Its brilliant execution in The Cheng-Po Code gives staccato pacing and rich literary texture to the unfolding story. Resolving this novel’s final mystery sheds new light not only on Taiwan’s art history but also into a dark corner of Taiwanese history.  

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Blurb: Land of Serenity

By Chien Chen (Writer) ∥ Translated by Jeff Miller

Mar 21, 2025

This vibrant historical novel is set in early postwar Taiwan during a time when the island’s new Nationalist Chinese rulers are engaged in violently suppressing and cowing its recently “liberated” residents. While brilliantly capturing the anxious mood in Taiwan at that time, this work also weaves the nearby southern islands of the Okinawa Archipelago into its compelling narrative landscape.   The author treads lightly through historical minutiae to focus on breathing enticing life into the plot and literary imagery. Protagonist Lee Tsan-Yun, a man who analogizes his life to a map, fears being unable to extricate himself from its intractable lines. Unexpectedly, he too finds himself fading from the world and, as he makes his escape from his well-mapped life’s course, adopts a new perspective on the underlying meaning of the “map”. Land of Serenity amalgamizes personal and social anxieties, reminding readers of the true price paid by those who were sacrificed. Seeing future possibilities through the umbra of this age, the author describes a narrative landscape that, albeit sorrowful, is also radiantly bright.  

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Blurb: When the Sun Plummeted into Mt. Hainsaran

By Openbook ∥ Translated by Jeff Miller

Mar 21, 2025

The author uses the backdrop of a historical incident, the fiery, fatal crash of a B-24 Liberator during a flight between Okinawa and the Philippines in the mountains above a Taiwanese village, to take readers through the everyday lives of story characters into a period of time far removed from “normal”. Here, long-practiced habits and emotions hint at the deep, inner wounds pushed to the fore by the recently ended Pacific War. Here, the normal and abnormal grind against one another, creating a cauldron of feelings difficult to put into words yet brought to a head by the plane crash. Author Chu He-Chih’s circuitous narrative turns this creative story into a puzzle that, once finished, lets readers mingle with long-departed friends in that brief span of historical time. Relationships, folk ways, contemporary mores, and fate intertwine in the brief window after the war in Taiwan when neither Japan nor the Allies were in charge.

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Blurb: My Slight Problem with Infidelity

By Anniel Hao (Writer) ∥ Translated by Jeff Miller

Mar 21, 2025

This unconventional book is sure to add a dash of restless anxiety into more than a few marriages.   Responding to the female protagonist’s question, “Do you hug your wife this way too?” her lover, a married man, says, “We’re family. Family doesn’t do this stuff.” Family doesn’t do what stuff? I’m thinking I want to know precisely what you’re talking about! Reading this made me suddenly eager to contact the author and ask her myself.     A once common aphorism states that, “Love is indispensable in sex before marriage, as is sex in love after marriage.” While some say it as a joke, others know it to be true. Honestly, for both family and lovers, the relationship hangs on much more than the relevance of either sex or love. This terrifying ingredient in this work is its asking of one simple question: How far along is it in a marriage when couples start expecting something different of their spouse?  

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Blurb: The Memory Keepers in Ashes

By Chiang Ya-Ni (Writer) ∥ Translated by Jeff Miller

Mar 21, 2025

Chan Wai, perhaps contemporary Hong Kong’s most talented storyteller and scriptwriter, first came into the public eye working on TV and film production teams during the colony’s “glory days” of film and television. She was a member of the writing team behind the fondly remembered Hong Kong film Comrades: Almost a Love Story and other projects as well as a firsthand witness to the “golden years” of Hong Kong cinema.   If Han Banqing’s The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai and Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms can be said to capture the essence of Shanghai, then The Memory Keepers in Ashes surely encapsulates Hong Kong’s late-twentieth-century verve. The best years of Hong Kong are beautifully told through the lens of the lives of fortune led by Lin Shing, Song Wan, and their ten children. However, these halcyon days of spectacular growth and prosperity face an inevitable end, with a clock already winding down to zero.  

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Blurb: How the Times Changed: Tsai Ing-wen and Taiwan’s 8-year Transformation

By Lee Tuo-Tzu (Writer) ∥ Translated by Joshua Dyer

Mar 20, 2025

Just eight years ago, Taiwan was a different place. In the past, the international community viewed Taiwan exclusively through the framework of cross-straights issues. But now, Taiwan has made a new name for itself as a critical player in pandemic defense and global supply chains, and a bastion of democracy, human rights, and social reform. A new era has dawned, and the shift couldn’t be more obvious.   How did Taiwan manage this change? What did the recent administration do over the past eight years to shift the state of affairs? What preparations had Tsai Ing-wen and her staff made beforehand, and what kinds of competing pressures did they have to face once in office? Assembled from in-depth interviews with the staff and officials of the Tsai administration, How the Times Changed is a political memorandum, establishing a record of how this soft-spoken yet firm-willed president and her core team led the nation safely through the treacherous waters of international politics. Under pressure from constant saber-rattling and hostile military exercises, they held to the middle-course, pushing forward one reform after another. During this time of great changes in the international order, they steered Taiwan in a new direction, and steadily urged the nation forward.

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Blurb: A Sketch of a Female Serial Killer: Taiwan’s Only Female Death Row Prisoner and the Murders that Shocked a Nation

By Chang Chuan-Fen (Writer and director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty) ∥ Translated by Joshua Dyer

Mar 20, 2025

The killer is revealed from the first page, but the author nevertheless keeps readers in constant suspense. The murders may be an established fact, but what was the motive? What kind of person is the killer? Is it even possible to have a glimpse into the inner workings of her mind? It’s a sumptuous read, packed with literary style that will have readers in mind of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.   The author maintains clarity by distancing herself from the established narrative of the murders. As a work of non-fiction, it possesses two outstanding qualities. First is the author’s tenacious pursuit of the facts through exhaustive interviews with a broad range of subjects, including many individuals who were deemed “unimportant” by the media and court proceedings at the time. Second, the book addresses contested details, seeking out contradictory views and evidence. The diligently conducted interviews did not always yield the best results, but the author does fantastic work weaving the smallest gleanings into the bigger picture. In this sense, she is thorough beyond reproach, raising the ceiling for non-fiction writing in Taiwan.

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Blurb: My Grease Monkey Father: the Life and Work of a Kaohsiung Truck Mechanic

By Lan Pei-Chia (Distinguished professor of sociology, National Taiwan University) / Translated by Joshua Dyer ∥ Translated by Joshua Dyer

Mar 20, 2025

A daughter’s tribute to her working-class father, a consummate tractor-trailer mechanic whose sincerest hope was that his children could study hard and escape the fate of a blue collar laborer. After earning a master’s degree in sociology from a university in northern Taiwan, the author turned her attention back to her father, analyzing his acquisition of technical skills and the influence of class structures on his parenting values.   One axis of the book views the development of the Taiwan tractor-trailer industry through the lens of the sociology of technology, exploring how the author’s father acquired the skills he needed to work as a fabrication and maintenance mechanic, his interactions with his coworkers and bosses, and how he defined his notion of a “good job”.   Another axis involves the inter-generational relationships and class divisions within the author’s family. How did the author’s father have such confidence in the value of his own labor and technical skill set, yet at the same time constantly praise the superior value of his daughter’s degrees? The result is an elaboration of an important site within the evolution of modern capitalist labor, which also touches on inequality in education, the culture of class structure, and other larger issues.

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Blurb: Why Are Teens so Difficult? Field-tested Strategies for Dealing with Challenging Teens from a Veteran Guidance Counselor

By Chung Sing-Yiing (Adjunct lecturer, Center for Teacher Education, National Tsing Hua University) ∥ Translated by Joshua Dyer

Mar 20, 2025

With his abundant experience in education and his well-honed powers of observation and personal reflection, the author paints a portrait of the mental state of Taiwan’s teens, and gives new teachers and parents an easy-to-understand strategy manual for dealing with adolescents. When you don’t understand the logic behind teens’ reactions, this book’s ample supply of case studies will help you quickly find examples and solutions that can be applied to your situation.

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