The Trouble with Taiwan is a reflective, intimate read for a Taiwanese born in the final years of the country's martial law decree and growing up witnessing its democratic transformation. The book resonates with personal experiences, even childhood memories. Kids in my generation learned studiously about the history and geography of the huge landmass on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, as if it were part of our own, but in reality the dynasties and maps in the textbooks felt detached from the world we lived in. We were taught to speak standard Mandarin (guoyu) with a perfect accent, while the mother tongue of many of us, the Taiwanese dialect (Taiyu), was considered inferior and banished to private whispers.
Kerry Brown and Kalley Wu Tzu Hui capture the complexities of what it means and even how it feels to be Taiwanese. They direct us to...
