Over the past two decades, award-winning local movie directors such as Ang Lee (
The success in distinguishing Taiwan in film has not been repeated, however, in the literary realm. Taiwan's many writers and publishing houses have long found it difficult to entice overseas readers to immerse themselves in a book penned by a Taiwanese writer or illustrated book drawn by a Taiwanese artist.
Scholars of Taiwan studies say the country's literature is among the most diverse in Asia, because of its many influences -- Aboriginal, Dutch, Hakka and Japanese -- but its publishing houses have often struggled to make their mark internationally.
To stoke greater international interest in Taiwan through literature, the Government Information Office (GIO,
For the inaugural "Best of Taiwan" series, a committee of 12 leading figures from the local publishing industry short-listed 37 works from a total of 472 books submitted by local publishing houses. The GIO hopes that the series will generate international copyrights and promote Taiwan overseas.
Chosen publications cover four categories -- fiction, non-fiction, illustrated/children's books and comics. The books range from literary works penned by established authors like Huang Fan
"We are confident that the `Best of Taiwan' series will stoke some interest amongst in at least one or two foreign publishing houses," said Juno Wang (
Established 20 years ago, Unitas has long been a stepping-stone from which local authors like Ang Li (
Government not the answer?
But not all of the publishing houses whose works were chosen to represent Taiwan by the GIO are as upbeat about the series.
According to Claudia Chen (
"I think it will offer very little in the way of opportunities for us. As a new company with limited experience of publishing abroad I feel that the best way for us to sell and promote our products abroad is to participate in book fairs on the international scene personally," Chen said.
One company that has enjoyed some success with local works abroad is the Yuan-Liou Publishing Company (
"The books are not in shops because we felt that neither book would sell well. But we have seen success in schools and libraries," said Lee Chuan-li (
"It's been easy to capture these markets. Especially in areas with large Asian communities," he said.
The Chinese Zodiac and The Mouse Bride are two of six Yuan-Liou books currently published in the US by Pan Asian Publications, a company that specializes in the publishing and supplying of translated Asian materials to schools and libraries throughout the US and Canada.
According to a spokesperson for Pan Asian, apart from Yuan-Liou's successful titles, many other books from Taiwan that the company has distributed in US and Canadian markets have not met with the same success.
"Many of the books are certainly in libraries and fill a niche market, but ordinary people don't know them," a company spokesperson said.
"There are so many books published in the US that it takes a lot of marketing and penetration to get books to sell. Of course, if you want your publication to do well it has to be translated well, and this costs a lot of money."
Low-cost translation
Publishing, marketing and translation costs are one of the biggest hurdles when companies set out to promote individual books overseas. Because of this, publishers from Taiwan distributing in the US and Europe choose to bundle books into collections rather than sell them as standalone works.
Many of these collections are published by university presses rather than by private publishing houses. Even then, the number of publications remains miniscule, with the result that Taiwanese literature is often under-represented.
"The only books we publish in translation from Taiwan are novels that would be published in our Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series. The main criterion is that the book be a novel that is considered to be of high quality and representative of current Taiwan literary production," said Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University.
"We also think about whether the author is known in the US," Crewe said.
One of the earliest collections of Taiwanese literature translated and published outside of Taiwan was by Washington University in 1975. Titled A Collection of Chinese Contemporary Literary Works (
According to Ko Ching-ming (
"It wasn't until the mid- to late-1980s that the term Taiwan could be used to refer to the Republic of China without fear of angering the government. It is not surprising really that people in the US and Europe thought that Taiwan and China were one and the same for so long," Ko said.
"It is rather daft that nowadays, when Taiwanese literature is more developed and very different from that of China, people still cannot differentiate between the two."
The Washington University collection is still available. But while it is no longer the sole Taiwanese literature collection on the market, and Taiwan's quasi-independent status is recognized by much of the world, it remains published under the same title.
"It's too late to change it now," Ko said. "If we did, nobody would know what publication we were talking about or selling."
Problems at home
Academics may point to the turbulent and confused history of Taiwanese literature to explain its lukewarm reception abroad. But others feel that the roots of the problem lay not with overseas readers concepts and ideas of what Taiwan is, but, instead, with the changing face of local reading habits.
At the annual Kingstone (
From 2001 to 2003, British author JK Rowling took top honors for her Harry Potter books, with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix racking up sales of over 200,000 copies in Taiwan. This year, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code stole the show with sales of over 300,000 copies.
Sales of works by local authors pale in comparison. Ang Li's The Visible Ghosts (
"It makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to promote local literature overseas when even in Taiwan, sales of works by local authors are dwarfed by those of international writers," said Juno Wang, of Unitas, with a shrug of her shoulders.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS