Taiwan's most innovative science fiction writer presents three tales of intrigue, espionage, betrayal, political strife, time travel, and Chinese history and mysticism. After thousands of years of civil unrest and countless wars, the weary Huhui people of Sunlon City have once again succumbed to a ruthless and overpowering enemy. In Five Jade Disks, the first book in the trilogy, the imperialistic Shan have enslaved the inhabitants of Sunlon City and imposed a harsh martial order....

An epic spanning more than half a century of Taiwan's history, this breathtaking historical novel traces the fortunes of the Pengs, a family of Hakka Chinese settlers, across three generations from the 1890s, just before Taiwan was ceded to Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese war, through World War II. Li Qiao brilliantly re-creates the dramatic world of these pioneers—and the colonization of Taiwan itself—exploring their relationships with the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan and their str...

Unfolding in the tense years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Trees Without Wind takes place in a remote Shanxi village in which a rare affliction has left the residents physically stunted. Director Liu, an older revolutionary and local commune head, becomes embroiled in a power struggle with Zhang Weiguo, a young ideologue who believes he is the model of a true revolutionary. Complicating matters is a woman named Nuanyu, who, like Zhang Weiguo and Director Liu, is an outsi...

Heralded as a literary masterpiece and a best-seller in the Chinese-speaking world, The Great Flowing River is a personal account of the history of modern China and Taiwan unlike any other. In this eloquent autobiography, the noted scholar, writer, and teacher Chi Pang-yuan recounts her youth in mainland China and adulthood in Taiwan. Chi’s remarkable life, told in rich and striking detail, humanizes the eventful and turbulent times in which she lived.The Great Flowing...

Huang Fan burst onto Taiwan's literary scene in the 1980s, publishing pointed urban portraits and political satires that captured the reading public's attention. After decades of innovative work, he is now one of Asia's most celebrated authors, crucial to understanding the development of Taiwanese literature over the past fifty years.The first collection of Huang Fan's work to appear in English, this anthology includes Zero, a prize-winning dystopian novella echoing George...

Heralded as a literary masterpiece and a best-seller in the Chinese-speaking world, The Great Flowing River is a personal account of the history of modern China and Taiwan unlike any other. In this eloquent autobiography, the noted scholar, writer, and teacher Chi Pang-yuan recounts her youth in mainland China and adulthood in Taiwan. Chi’s remarkable life, told in rich and striking detail, humanizes the eventful and turbulent times in which she lived.The Great Flowing...

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War.Taken as a whole, these evocative and allus...

Guo Songfen's short stories are masterful psychological portraits that play with the echoes of history and the nature of identity. One of the few modernists to truly capture the fallout from such events as the February 28th Incident and the White Terror, Guo Songfen illuminates the quiet core of his characters through a spare and immediate style that is at once a symptom and an allegory of the trauma in which they live.In "Running Mother," a man is torn between his fear of abandonm...

'How can a whole nation forget about catastrophe?'LI YUAN, NEW YORK TIMESTRUTH IS NOT AN OPTION....Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one can care less. Except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that has possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and forc...

One of the best ways to understand history is through eye-witness accounts. Ting-Xing Ye’s riveting first book, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, is a memoir of growing up in Maoist China. It was an astonishing coming of age through the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1974).In the wave of revolutionary fervour, peasants neglected their crops, exacerbating the widespread hunger. While Ting-Xing was a young girl in Shanghai, her father’s rubber factory was exprop...

At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, 13-year-old Nanchu watched Red Guards destroy her home and torture her parents, whom they jailed. She was left to fend for herself and her younger brother. When she grew older, she herself became a Red Guard and was sent to the largest work camp in China. There she faced primitive conditions, sexual harassment, and the pressure to conform. Eventually, she was admitted to Madam Mao's university, where politics were more important than learning. He...

In the rich and varied life stories in Under the Black Umbrella, elderly Koreans recall incidents that illustrate the complexities of Korea during the colonial period. Hildi Kang here reinvigorates a period of Korean history long shrouded in the silence of those who endured under the "black umbrella" of Japanese colonial rule.Existing descriptions of the colonial period tend to focus on extremes: imperial repression and national resistance, Japanese subjug...