In a digital age when many people use iPads, Kindles or other electronic devices to read, rummaging through shelves of books at small, local establishments may seem like an activity of bygone days. But that tradition is being celebrated at the Reading Festival of Independent Bookstores (獨立書店閱讀節), which comprises a series of reading activities at seven independent bookstores across the country and runs through June 1.
The festival organizer, Taiwan Small Life Culture Creativity Promotion Association (台灣小小生活文化創意推廣協會), has held, since its inception in 2009, a wide range of cultural activities, including guided tours of several independent bookstores in Taipei, such as Tonshan Bookstore (唐山書店) and SMC Publishing Inc (南天書局).
The festival encourages participants to visit distinctive local establishments that reflect their owners’ ideas and tastes. Hungya Bookstore (洪雅書房) in Chiayi, for example, is noted for its participation in social movements while boasting a rich collection of books and periodicals covering the humanities, history and Taiwan studies. Housed in a building put up during the 1940s, Huwei Salon (虎尾厝沙龍) in Yulin specializes in feminism and gender and environmental studies and is equipped with a gallery space and outdoor cafe.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Small Life Culture Creativity Promotion Association
The value of human interaction usually takes precedence over making money with small businesses, says Tsai Yi-hsin (蔡怡欣) from the association, and that is what attracts people like herself to indie bookstore.
“People who work at my favorite places know what I like. We talk about things, share ideas, and they make useful recommendations,” Tsai said. “I’ve never had that at chain bookstores.”
Each participating bookstore has invited a lecturer to hold a book reading session on various topics. At Small Small Bookstore (小小書房), which is tucked away in a maze of alleys near the Dingxi MRT Station (頂溪捷運站) in Yonghe (永和), poet and theater director Hung Hung (鴻鴻) will share his thoughts on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities on May 12. The following day, Chinese-language literature professor Wu Ming-yi (吳明益) will talk about Out of China or Yu Yonghe’s Tale of Formosa: A History of Seventeenth-century Taiwan (遇見三百年前的臺灣—裨海紀遊) at River Book (有河book), a tranquil establishment run by a poet couple that overlooks the Tamsui River (淡水河) in Tamsui and focuses on the arts and literature.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Small Life Culture Creativity Promotion Association
Reading aside, members of the general public are encouraged to contribute to the association’s ongoing effort to create a map of Taiwan’s independent bookstores. Those interested in sharing their favorite places can contact the organizers at smalllife2009@gmail.com. For more information on the festival, go to the event’s Web site at smalllife2009.pixnet.net/blog.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Small Life Culture Creativity Promotion Association
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep