Scenes from a Book Fair in Taiwan
A Polish bear carries a rocket, a cosplayer hunts monsters, and more; plus, book club on American Pastoral and an outing to see Cloudgate
Hello dear readers! Albert and Michelle here. The Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE), a six-day mega-event, just ended yesterday.
Our hearts and minds have been full to bursting. We’ve seen kids sprawled on the floor immersed in books. We’ve run into old friends and made new ones. We browsed Thai manga, heard Polish songs, and discovered an independent publisher dedicated to children’s books about local customs—including our latest obsession, Ghost Month. As writers, we often despair that nobody reads books anymore. But the dizzying number of book-related stalls and exhibits, interviews and talks, gathered in this space of twenty-three thousand square meters—that’s over four football fields—did much to renew our hope.
How to describe the insanity? A Buddhist missionary tried to convert us. A likely deranged man gave us some free reading materials describing the moon’s existence as a human conspiracy. A Taiwanese dude made the rounds dressed in full metal armor cosplay, complete with sword hanging at his side. (Why? Read on!) Meanwhile, Taiwan’s most prominent intellectuals, writers, and translators gave talks to standing-room-only audiences—at any given moment, roughly a hundred of these talks were happening. This was not without its FOMO-causing tendencies, but above all it felt like proof of a flourishing Taiwanese democracy, an idiosyncratic and uncensored world of wildly different religious customs, subcultures, and political beliefs all coexisting in sweaty proximity.
About that proximity: we saw an intimate stall dedicated to juancun literature, memories from soldiers who grew up in military villages in Taiwan. The most tragic of these stories involve kids as young as twelve abducted in China and forced to conscript at gunpoint, never to see their parents, much less their homeland, again. Refugees in the truest sense of the word. At this booth, poignant in part because it was so small, there was a national flag—a sight not seen anywhere else at the fair. The elderly woman staffing it wore a flag mask.
Just a few footsteps away was an exhibit by the National Human Rights Museum, in which the entrance to a prison on Green Island leads you into a thirty-five-minute immersion in virtual reality. One book issued by the museum features illustrations by a man who describes his torture by secret police during the White Terror, a violent suppression in the period of KMT’s martial law.
For those who know Taiwan, it’s somewhat extraordinary to see these two strands of historical memory—military villages, prisons full of dissidents—side by side in a single public space. As our friend Christina observed, the fragmented memory in Taiwan impedes possibilities for reconciliation. Next year we want to see the staffers of these respective booths hugging it out over a beer.
The TIBE began in 1987, the year the KMT government ended martial law in Taiwan. Before then, since 1949, the KMT government had strictly controlled all publications here. Anything remotely “leftist” was, of course, a non-starter; you could go to jail if you were caught with a book that the government deemed seditious. Albert’s father tells a story about a dear friend in high school who, in the middle of a semester, suddenly disappeared without a trace. For thirty years, he heard not a word; then, in the 1990s, after coming back to Taiwan from the U.S., he ran into the friend on the street—Taiwan’s a small place—and learned that he’d been sent to prison for a year for participating in a reading group.
The government cracked down on a broad range of materials. Important Chinese writers with leftist leanings—Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Lao She—were banned, as was the foreign literature they’d translated during the flowering of Chinese culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Not even Emily Brontë, Ivan Turgenev, and Émile Zola were spared. In one of the most absurd instances, the writer Bo Yang served eight years in prison for translating a Popeye the Sailor comic that the KMT decided was a critique of dictator Chiang Kai-shek.
In the 1980s the government’s censorship regime began to loosen, and independent newspapers, magazines, and publishers flooded into this liberalizing landscape—a boom captured by the Wild ’80s exhibit we wrote about in our last newsletter. Here is a picture of translated books that appeared (or reemerged from the underground) in the 1980s. The books on the shelf include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.
The TIBE emerged from this post–martial law boom. As the KMT government sought to demonstrate its connections to the rest of the world—even though it was diplomatically isolated—the first edition gathered booksellers from over sixty-seven countries, with more than two hundred Taiwanese booksellers setting up booths. And the fair has only grown since: it’s currently the largest book fair in Asia and the fourth largest in the world, behind the Frankfurt Book Fair, BookExpo America, and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. International booksellers were on display all over this week, with major showings from France, Germany, and Italy, among others.
In 1994, the Ministry of Culture debuted a Guest of Honor program, choosing a different country to showcase each year. The first country was China; since then, the TIBE has celebrated the book cultures of Bhutan, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and Thailand.
This year’s guest was Poland, and the central exhibit went all out. Classy but playful, it spanned centuries of Polish culture: first-edition Gutenberg Bibles in glass cases; Chopin’s handwritten manuscripts; gorgeous illustrations from children’s books; and a (possibly recruited) Taiwanese guy in cosplay from the fantasy series The Witcher, which has been adapted to video games and a Netflix series. He strolled around in a suit of leather armor, two swords strapped to his back, lantern in hand. (Lots of people wanted to take pictures with him; he cheerfully obliged.) He dutifully stopped to attend an event with the show’s creator, Andrzej Sapkowski, who had made the trip to Taiwan for the occasion. At a gathering hosted by Michelle’s literary sub-agent here, Grayhawk Agency, we asked Luke Li, Sapkowski’s interpreter, what the show was about. He paused, then said: “Think a Polish Mandalorian, but Mando hunts monsters.” (Apparently Sapkowski, who loves to cook and ice-fishing, found an authentic Taiwanese cleaver here after much searching.)
The Ministry of Culture also organized a Polish cuisine and music night along with a series of talks and events hosted by Witold Szabłowski, celebrated for his human rights journalism—he was the first person to interview Aung San Suu Kyi after she was released from house arrest in 2010—and his recent reporting in Ukraine.
At the children’s exhibit, we were struck by an illustration—spare, minimalist, typographic—of a bear carrying what appeared to be a rocket. “Is that a… rocket?” Albert asked the staffer, uncertainly. “Not a crayon?”
The lady, who was presumably Polish, nodded silently—whether her silence was shy or gruff, we couldn’t tell. There was no placard to offer context on this charismatic bear-with-a-purpose, whose life story we were suddenly desperate to know.
“The bear’s going… to kill Nazis?” guessed Albert.
Now the lady smiled, nodding eagerly.
Readers, we learned that we are ignorant and the bear is famous in Poland. He is, in fact, a real bear who enlisted in the Polish army, drank beer, and knew how to salute. He went to battle in Italy and eventually retired to the Edinburgh Zoo. He was born in Iran in 1942 and orphaned as a cub when his mother was shot by hunters. He was purchased by an eighteen-year-old Polish refugee, the niece of a general whose corps had been evacuated from the Soviet Union and was en route to Europe. Like the general’s niece, the soldiers in the corps fell in love with the cub and named him Wotjek, or Happy Warrior. They fed him condensed milk from an old vodka bottle (what could go wrong??) and gave him marmalade and honey. Because the British ship to Italy didn’t allow pets, he was officially enrolled as a member of the army and assigned a rank and number. He never carried a rocket, as it turns out, but he did heave a hundred-pound crate of ammunition.
At the gatherings we attended or passed, we were struck by how attentive the audiences were. Few or many, they showed a writerly curiosity. At a talk on the translation of Robert Badinter’s L’abolition, a book detailing Badinter’s long battle to end the death penalty in France, a high school student asked earnestly what he could do to end the death penalty in Taiwan. There were over two hundred people at a rousing event on the Ukrainian resistance, offering lessons for Taiwanese facing the prospect of invasion. (One passerby communicated his displeasure by waving a big middle finger at the speakers, which, impressively, he held in the air the whole time he walked by the crowd, never relaxing his pace.)
The fair also bridged the gap between the ivory tower and the public. Respected Taiwanese academics gave talks and signed books; Taiwan’s most famous economist, Chu Jing-yi, spoke on how Thomas Piketty’s work could be applied here, explaining to an enormous crowd the sources of inequality in Taiwan. (Piketty’s Capital and Ideology was just translated to Chinese.) At another standing-room-only event, one of the most famous Taiwanese authors, Wu Ming-yi, hosted a panel on environmental concerns in contemporary French literature. Yet another packed crowd listened to several of Taiwan’s preeminent historians discuss the intellectual world of their advisor, Professor Yu Ying-shih, who passed away in August 2021. The author of more than forty works, Yu was the most influential intellectual historian of China of the past half century, and the lecturers clearly and elegantly described the central themes of his work.
This kind of thoughtfulness pervaded the entire fair. The entry fee for the general public was 100 Taiwan dollars (roughly 3 USD). You could pay with your metro card, so there were no bottlenecks at the entrance. Visitors over sixty-five could enter for free—as Michelle’s parents did. The organizers invited NGOs to set up shop in a whole section dedicated to social justice work. There were myriad spaces for children to curl up and read, and several areas with sofas where people could rest and charge their phones. (Michelle left her phone at a charging station; half an hour later, worrying that she’d been overconfident about the safety of Taipei—a city where people leave their bikes unlocked and their laptops on coffee shop tables when they go to the bathroom—she rushed back to check on her phone, which was of course still there.) Many events were friendly to people with disabilities; many also had sign language interpreters, and there was even a booth where you could learn Taiwanese sign language.
In short, a real atmosphere of inclusion welcomed readers from all ages and all walks of life.
Earlier this week, we were delighted to give an introduction to Taiwan’s contemporary history for a group of publishers. We were invited by Gray Tan at the Grayhawk Agency, which alongside the Taiwan Creative Content Agency organized a fellowship to nurture deeper relationships between Taiwan and publishers worldwide. Our talk took place at a beautiful new independent bookstore in Dadaocheng, a historic neighborhood in Taipei. We think we went on too long; Michelle gives us a B or B+ at best; Albert, a notorious grade inflator, gives us an A-.
Still, we enjoyed writing the talk. We chose to tell the story of Taiwan through the prism of four people. While the Western media tends to present Taiwanese identity as formed in opposition to China, these people’s stories show much more layered, complex, and affirmative kinds of self-definition. The folk musician Lin Sheng Xiang, for instance, chose to go back home to rural Meinong in the south, where he successfully led protests against an anti-dam movement. Longtime readers know our deep love for his tofu and water snowflake videos, and his decision to sing in Hakka, a minority language in Taiwan.
The best part of the event for us was meeting book-loving professionals from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and France, among others. At our table at dinner, Indonesian and Vietnamese editors swapped some incredible stories about censorship in their countries: in one, a Vietnamese editor had to rewrite a whole book to remove all references to Stalin. In another, because Animal Farm is banned in Vietnam, one publisher tried to register it as a children’s book. The unwitting censor let it through, and it became a bestseller. The government then took action and punished the publisher, forcing them to retract the book and imposing a fine and a six-month injunction on publishing anything else. But now the Vietnamese edition Animal Farm is one of the hottest items on the black market, and sells for ten times its original price!
These stories reminded us how hard-won the freedom is to put on a book fair like this one. They reminded us to cherish the event as we were participating in it, to celebrate the intellectual diversity and the freedom to purchase books that aren’t guaranteed in other parts of the world. Our conversations also reminded us that forces opposing the freedom of speech and of publication are on the rise worldwide, from Florida to Vietnam. A book fair like the TIBE is a celebration of those freedoms, and the vibrant cultures they help create.
Book Club - Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
We loved talking to you about Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant—what a marvelous conversation! We learned so much about hope and memory, about historical amnesia and private grudges, about marriage and heartbreak. (Our Gen-Z participant asked how anyone who’s married can read this book, and whether all marriage is just suffering. We laughed.) And we discussed how the book takes on Englishness and whether its voice is post-Enclosure—thanks to the British historian on the call for the refresher on what that is!
Our next book is Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, a book that was much fêted in the late ’90s—Michelle loved it growing up—but is due for a reappraisal. We’ve been thinking through how weird the ’90s were, and this has to be the perfect book through which to think about that time. Please don’t hate us if you hate it! Even if you do, though, the conversation should be lively.
The date is Friday, February 25 at 3 p.m. PST, 6 p.m. EST / Saturday February 26 at 7 a.m in Taiwan. It’s a long book and we know there isn’t a ton of time, so don’t worry if you only get halfway through—we’ll play it by ear and decide whether to continue with it in March. All are welcome!
Lantern Festival Begins and Cloudgate Outing in April
For those in Taiwan, the Lantern Festival began yesterday! It’s a special day that celebrates the end of the Lunar New Year. (Yes, it’s a holiday to mark the end of another holiday.) One of Albert’s favorite childhood memories is lighting a lantern and carrying it around the neighborhood. The festival goes for two weeks and we’ll share pictures next time.
We’re working on a longish post about Cloudgate, a modern dance movement and one of the most significant cultural institutions in Taiwan. They’re reviving one of their classic pieces, Legacy. If you’d like to catch the April 28 showing in Taipei with us, please reply to this email within the next few days; we’re at last organizing an outing. Tickets are selling fast!
Finally, if you want to learn more about the book fair, check out our friend Wenpei Lin’s recent substack post. In the meantime, more fun photos:
Thank you for sharing all of this! Would've loved to attend that talk on Yu Ying-shih.
So interesting! I read The Mountains Sing based on your recommendation (I think!). Crazy story about black market Vietnamese Animal Farm. Also loved the details about lack of theft and leaving your laptop! Thank you for your great insights on Taiwan.