The written word provides a means for us to get to know foreign countries. Like troubadours summoning up visions of unfamiliar worlds, writers depict strange scenes in all their sensuous splendor, and retrieve untold stories from the sands of time. In recent years, Taiwan has emerged as a popular destination for literary tourists to visit in their imaginations.

Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan based her Green Island on the February 28 Incident of 1947. The novel was selected for Penguin Random House’s One World, One Book program.

Taiwan in the global spotlight

Shawna Yang Ryan is an American writer of Taiwanese heritage. Her widely acclaimed English-language novel Green Island (2016), based on the February 28 Incident of 1947, tells how survivors of the violently suppressed protests dealt with their trauma through the subsequent decades under martial law. By revisiting this cataclysmic period of history, Ryan illuminates Taiwan’s persistent quest for freedom and democracy since the Japanese colonial era. Green Island was selected for Penguin Random House’s One World, One Book program.

Ghost Town (2019), by German-based Taiwanese writer Kevin Chen, is set in Yongjing, Changhua County, where Chen grew up. Adopting multiple narrative voices, it probes the minutiae of family traumas, small-town secrets, and the shackles of the times. Chen’s narrative style exudes idiosyncrasy at ­every turn and is difficult to reproduce in translation. Canadian translator Darryl Sterk, who also translated Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes and The Stolen Bicycle, has preserved the authentically Taiwanese flavor of Chen’s text, forging a literary language full of pleasant surprises.

Taiwanese literary agent Gray Tan pitched Ghost Town to international rights managers by comparing it to Mark Frost and David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. The book immediately attracted global attention. World English rights were sold during the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by 11 other languages. Successfully bringing Taiwan to the wider world, Chen’s novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in January 2023, and was reviewed in Le Monde in September 2023.

Kevin Chen is a Taiwanese writer based in Germany. Rights to his Ghost Town have been sold in 12 languages. (courtesy of Kevin Chen)

National trauma

Shawna Yang Ryan, who has a Taiwanese mother and an American father, first set foot in Taiwan in her 20s. At the National 228 Memorial Museum in Taipei, she came across an exhibition dedicated to George H. Kerr, an American historian and diplomat known for his Formosa Betrayed (1965). The exhibition was precisely about the February 28 Incident.

Born in 1976, Ryan did not witness the tragic events that unfolded in postwar Taiwan. She tells us: “When I first learned about the February 28 Incident in 1999, I was so shocked.” At the time she thought that if she, a Taiwanese American, had no inkling of the incident, it was unlikely that other foreigners knew about it either. Feeling this was “an important story to share,” she resolved to commit it to paper.

Ryan’s protagonist in Green Island is a woman born the day the February 28 Incident breaks out. What takes place will long remain taboo in Taiwanese society, and inflicts deep-seated wounds on the protagonist’s family. Her father goes missing for ten years. When he returns, mentally damaged, the family too is no longer the same. Kept under constant surveillance, how do they cope? The protagonist eventually emigrates to America, but even there, her Taiwanese husband devotes himself to the political movement that challenges the Kuomintang’s one-party rule. History seems to be repeating itself. How will she herself act this time?

The title of Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island is richly allusive. It refers to Green Island off the East Coast of Taiwan, where political prisoners were once held. It can also mean Taiwan as a whole, which itself was a “prison” in the martial-law era. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Green Island has served as a bridge for communication between many first-generation Taiwanese Americans and their children. (courtesy of Shawna Yang Ryan)

Through writing, Shawna Yang Ryan pays tribute to the victims and survivors of the February 28 Incident. She hopes their experiences will be remembered and respected. (courtesy of Shawna Yang Ryan)

Small-town entanglements

Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town recounts the story of a big family in rural Yongjing in Changhua. It weaves together nine different voices, which take turns divulging the family’s secrets.

The novel starts with the family’s youngest child returning to Taiwan after serving a sentence in Germany for manslaughter. What awaits him is a tangle of family conflicts and gender-related persecutions, compounded by rural gossip, local corruption, and homosexual passion. The story charts the undercurrents of Taiwan’s economic transition from agriculture to capitalism, and its political trajectory from the White Terror to the lifting of martial law and beyond.

Chen knows how to engage and tease his readers. His narratives are riddled with mysteries that exude magic, absurdity, suspense, cruelty, and shame, constantly whetting our curiosity until all the strands of the plot finally come together. The New York Times compares Ghost Town to “a suitcase jammed full to the point of bursting,” praising the dexterity with which Chen handles the “messy” nature of life.

Through his writing, Kevin Chen has brought the charm of Changhua’s Yongjing Township to the wider world.

Kevin Chen never guessed that Ghost Town would bring him to so many places. The photos show him interacting with his readers in the USA, Japan, and France. (courtesy of Kevin Chen)

Writing Taiwan

Chen draws on a rich language that alternates between sarcasm, playfulness, exaggeration, and sorrow, presenting vivid accounts of the Ghost Festival, when masses of joss paper whirl about in the hot air, and of the small town’s ridiculous penchant for pomposity. Strippers, gay porn videos, an open-air cinema at a local temple, and Daoist priests performing rituals all arrive on the scene, in a world that pushes the limits of our imagination. The story overflows with a thick brew of descriptive flamboyance. Chen’s word pictures give Taiwanese readers a comforting feeling of déjà vu, and encourage foreign readers to delve deep into Taiwanese culture.

Reading Green Island, we are overwhelmed by the waves of stifling heat characteristic of tropical islands. Ryan, who lives in Hawaii, says that while it is hot and humid enough there, she cannot forget the smoldering heat that engulfed her when she first visited Taiwan. The experience prompted her to explore the connections between physicality and psychology. In Green Island, the sultry climate “adds to the oppressive air of the prison,” and Ryan explains that “including those sensory details helps underline that feeling in the reader.”

Giving her impressions of Taiwan, Ryan tells us that her mother came from Taichung, and that she used to be struck by how “history seemed to layer” in Taiwanese towns. That was something she never intuited in her native California: “It was like you could see multiple timeframes co-existing.”

From conception to completion, Green Island was a 14-year labor of love. For this project, Ryan learned Chinese, consulted scholarly literature, watched old films, and inter­viewed relatives of victims. She also accessed historical photographs to collect visual details absent from existing verbal records. Ryan’s meticulous research has endowed her novel with a fabulously rich texture, showing readers the highways and byways of Taiwanese history.

Literary tours in Yongjing invite Taiwanese readers to step into the magical world of Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town. (courtesy of Luko Changhua Travel Library)

Yongjing’s deserted swimming pool has become a tourist attraction. Kevin Chen’s admirers, including Japanese readers, visit Yongjing to look for places described in his novel.

Connecting with readers

We wonder how a novel about Taiwan’s February 28 Incident can garner so much attention in the US. Ryan, who teaches creative writing at a university, says: “Many countries have difficult histories, and I’ve heard from readers who see their own country’s history reflected in the story.” Many first-generation Taiwanese Americans have bought the book for their children, using it as a vehicle for discussing Taiwan’s past and present with the younger generation in English.

As she wrote, Ryan imagined herself addressing various types of readers, including those who didn’t know much about Taiwan. She hoped to instill in them a sense of familiarity that “might lead to concern and care about the position of contemporary Taiwan.” She also wished to “honor the people who had endured the events of the book.” This was “a gesture that allowed them to see their stories in print, to know that their experiences are remembered and respected.”

For his part, Kevin Chen remembers vividly the experience of meeting readers in Vietnam. Visiting Hanoi to promote Ghost Town, he was surprised to learn that it had become one of the publisher’s bestsellers of the year. A great many admirers, most of them young, turned up for his talk. Chen had never been greeted by such enthusiasm in other countries.

In Japan, Chen found readers to be more reserved. However, an elderly couple contacted him privately, mentioning their wish to see the sites that appear in Ghost Town. They eventually made it to Yongjing and visited such places as the abandoned swimming pool described in the book, as well as the temple square where films were screened. These inter­actions with readers bear witness to literature’s ability to facilitate connections between different countries and places.

Taiwan is working towards transitional justice by coming to terms with the tragic events in its past. Shawna Yang Ryan quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This photo shows the inside of the National 228 Memorial Museum in Taipei.

Light at the end of the tunnel

The protagonist in Green Island is referred to simply as “she.” For Ryan, leaving her unnamed felt “intuitively right,” as “she could be an ‘everywoman’ who had experienced major events of Taiwan history and fit the sociological profile of a certain demographic.” She is at once both “specific” and “universal.”

Ryan says that while her book is dark, it ultimately conveys hope. Over the last two decades, she has seen the sordid underbelly of Taiwanese history being discussed from multiple perspectives. More and more books have rattled the skeletons in the national cupboard, and previously unspoken memories have been preserved in words, with the government facing up to the unpleasant past. Ryan believes that Taiwan’s trajectory testifies to the famous words of Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Stories of the world

Never afraid to acknowledge his own queer identity, Chen tells us: “LGBT literature indeed constitutes a very special literary landscape in Taiwan.”

Chen became familiar with Pai Hsien-yung’s works and Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Last Words from Montmartre (1996) when he was young. In the 1990s, having moved to Taipei for university, he was exposed to a cornucopia of gender discourses in academia. In the same decade, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet won the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival, and in 1994 Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man bagged the first China Times Million Dollar Literary Prize. Both are famous for exploring male homosexuality. It was the lifting of martial law in 1987 that allowed such works to gain public currency in Taiwan. In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, but Chen says we still have a long way to go before we fully achieve gender equality. “As long as there’s still room for improvement, there will be opportunities for further literary intervention and creativity.”

Chen’s words on his Facebook page could not be more apposite: “The stories of this island—because they are free, and because they are exuberant—are stories that belong to the world.”

Taiwan is a free country that prizes freedom of speech. One of Taiwan's distinctive literary genres is LGBT writing.