Books from Taiwan

In Unraveling Threads: Essays on Inheritance, writer and literary translator Brenda Lin explores the intricate connections between family, cultural identity, language, and the objects that carry memories across generations. Through a collection of personal essays, Lin reflects on her relationship with her mother, whose passion for antique textiles and embroidered baby carriers becomes a window into women’s work, family traditions, and the preservation of cultural heritage. She considers the physical traces that connect parents and children, including the symbolism of an umbilical cord, and examines how language itself can preserve histories that might otherwise disappear. Her reflections extend to her father’s heart surgery, her own experience of motherhood, and her return to Taiwan after decades away. Weaving together personal memories, Taiwanese history, and the material culture of textiles, Lin investigates what we inherit beyond possessions: gestures, stories, responsibilities, and ways of understanding home. Intimate and richly observed, this memoir-in-essays considers how family bonds endure through distance and change, and how returning to one’s roots can become a process of rediscovering oneself.

Born into a prominent family in southern China, sisters Jun and Hong grow up inseparable in the 1930s, surrounded by the traditions and privileges of a world on the brink of transformation. But when the Chinese Civil War ends in 1949, fate divides them between two rival political systems. Jun settles in Taiwan, marries a Nationalist general, and builds a successful business, while Hong remains on the mainland, where her family’s political background makes her vulnerable to suspicion and persecution. Despite decades of separation and silence, both women forge remarkable lives under vastly different circumstances. Drawing on family memories and historical research, Zhuqing Li tells a deeply personal story of sisterhood, resilience, and the ways political upheaval reshapes families and identities.

Green Island follows several generations of a Taiwanese family whose lives are transformed by political repression and the legacy of the February 28 Incident of 1947. The story begins when Dr. Tsai, a young physician, is arrested by Chinese Nationalist authorities after the uprising in Taiwan. His eventual return to his family does not restore their former life; instead, fear, suspicion, and silence become part of their everyday existence. Years later, his youngest daughter grows up carrying the emotional consequences of her father’s experiences and eventually confronts difficult choices of her own. Moving between Taiwan and the United States, the novel examines how political violence enters private life and shapes family relationships across generations. It explores survival, complicity, memory, and the moral compromises people make to protect those they love.