Wu Cheng-san (吳成三) has arrived at his Taipei bookstore every day for the past 20 years hoping to do good business. On a typical day earlier this month he was once again disappointed, but not surprised.
The tiny shop — Taiuan e Tiam (Shop of Taiwan) — stands in a quiet alley opposite the National Taiwan University campus and was established in March 1993 as the first Taiwan-themed bookstore.
Wu, 70, reminisced about the good old days when daily sales reached NT$40,000 (US$1,350) and wondered why fewer people read books about Taiwan these days.
“Ironically, I think people paid less attention to Taiwanese history and culture after we had our first Taiwanese president, Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came to power,” said Wu, a former computer scientist at Columbia University who moved back to Taiwan after martial law was lifted.
Wu said he founded the bookstore with the simple mission of allowing customers to find any Taiwan-related book they wanted in one place and was not greatly concerned about making a profit.
The store boasts possibly the most complete collection of Taiwan-related books anywhere — covering everything from politics, culture, Hakka and Aboriginal affairs, to Taiwan-themed English and Japanese-language books, Wu said.
However, he wonders why daily revenue at the bookstore, which also sells CDs and DVDs, souvenirs and T-shirts, has dropped to a few thousand NT dollars.
“Things have changed, as more young people work in China and the government no longer promotes Taiwanese culture and identity. Most television and newspaper reports are now focused on China,” he said.
With the emergence of the Internet and various publishing formats, people also tend to read and buy fewer books, he said, adding that more than 70 percent of his revenue comes from multimedia sales. What surprises him is that more people are interested in Aboriginal cultures, in particular Aboriginal music.
Wu said he has no plans of closing the bookstore, despite slow sales, figuring that by spending less money he would be able to make up for the losses.
Black Lin (林文欽) of Avanguard Publishing shares similar problems, but has exactly the same determination as Wu when it comes to running a business tied to Taiwanese culture.
His publishing company was established in 1982, when Lin was 30, during the Martial Law era, when books on sensitive topics were banned and confiscated by the Taiwan Garrison Command, Lin said. His company survived despite him once running up debts of more than NT$10 million.
The firm publishes 25 to 30 books each year on a variety of Taiwan-related topics, including politics, literature, languages, culture, folk traditions and biographies.
The company grew hand-in-hand with Taiwan’s opposition movement, Lin said, and sold most of its books on the sidelines of election campaigns and political rallies, when police tended to ignore book vendors.
However, competition in Taiwan’s publishing sector has been fierce as more than 1,000 companies vie for a share of a market valued between NT$25 billion and NT$30 billion a year, with almost 60 percent of sales coming from textbooks, Lin said.
The general decline in reading habits among Taiwanese, who on average spend less than NT$1,500 per year on books, has hit Lin’s company as well as competitors.
However, Lin says he has always been resilient and is determined to preserve and promote Taiwanese culture. He has resisted the temptation to publish books just because they would be popular.
“To me, doing so would be like asking a preacher to become a gigolo. I prefer to be a preacher,” Lin said.
The publisher said he was proud of having put a comprehensive collection of Taiwanese literature into print, as well as accounts, information and commentaries on the 228 Massacre.
He added that he is working on publishing books written by Western preachers, soldiers and scientists who documented their stays in Taiwan in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Although he has worked tirelessly to promote Taiwanese authors and publications, Lin said his two best-selling books were written by foreigners: Japanese manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi’s On Taiwan, published in 2000, and former US diplomat George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed, a book documenting the 228 Massacre, which was first published in 1965.
“I am going to keep doing this thing I love until I cannot do it anymore. It is my mission,” Lin said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching