After hosting a book-swap event, I unexpectedly rediscovered the habit of reading while trying to pick a good book to exchange. Not reading with any particular intensity, but a few half-finished books appeared on my desk, and the ones I’d borrowed and renewed again and again from the dorm bookshelf finally got taken down.
I read quite a few, and since March just ended, I thought I’d write a reading report to keep track — otherwise I forget them fast. This isn’t a proper book review or recommendation post; it’s just one person noting what they read and what they thought about.
殘骸書／陳列 (Wreckage: A Book / Chen Lie)
We tend to think that understanding history class means understanding the world’s history. So the February 28 Incident (二二八事件) becomes: Taiwanese elites suppressed. The White Terror (白色恐怖) silenced everyone. But how ordinary people experienced that era — how they are doing now — seems to have been of no concern to those in power.
Honestly, I picked it up because it won a major book fair award; it was also the first book I had ever intentionally opened because of the White Terror. Not a thunderous accusation, but not a light sketch either — it is the story of one person knowing the harm the state once brought, and of rethinking everything that happened while moving back and forth between a personal history in the past and the present.
The Dragon Prince: Stories and Legends from Vietnam / Thich Nhat Hanh
Meeting this book was a stroke of luck. Traveling in Hanoi, I went to a nearby bookshop while waiting for a tour guide who was running late. I asked the owner for a recommendation — something that would help me understand Vietnamese culture. He pointed to a thick academic volume.
“My backpack might not fit that. Do you have something thinner?”
He reached up and took down this one, carefully removed the plastic wrap, and said: It’s very good.
It’s a collection of fables Thich Nhat Hanh wrote for children — Vietnamese mythology, stories about life and friendship. Many of them unfold in fertile fields, rolling mountains, and grieving rivers. Many sentences are simply and precisely devastating. Here is one passage about life and death:
From the day the bird overheard the exchange between the two monks, her curiosity grew. Where have I come from and where will I go? How many thousands of years will the great tree stand?
The bird had heard the two monks speak about time. What is time? Why has time brought us here, and why will it take us away?
The nut that a bird eats has its own delicious nature. How can I find out the nature of time? The bird wanted to pick up a small piece of time and lie quietly with it in her nest to examine its nature. Even if it took months or years to examine, the bird was willing.
High over the ancient forest, the bird felt like a balloon drifting in nothingness. She felt her nature was as empty as a balloon’s, and that emptiness was the base of her existence and the cause of her suffering as well. If I could find time, thought the bird, I could certainly find myself.
誰是外來者：在德國、臺灣之間，獨立記者的跨國越南難民探尋 / 黃文鈴
Who Is the Outsider: A Journalist’s Search for Vietnamese Refugees Across Germany and Taiwan / Huang Wen-ling
I landed in Chiang Mai on my second day, mind still in Vietnam, and picked this up almost by accident while browsing a diaspora bookshop. It is about Vietnamese people in West Germany, East Germany, and Taiwan — each group having arrived for different reasons, in different directions, putting down roots (or not) where they landed. Perhaps because I was living far from home myself, having just come back from Vietnam — I could feel what the characters in the book felt.
“Home is not where you live; it’s where you are understood.” How do we actually see migrant workers in Taiwan — as labor, as island residents, or as family? Has our society truly included them as part of us? I think there is more we could do.
Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture / Philip Cornwel-Smith
At Passport Bookshop in Bangkok, the owner told me this was a book written for Thai people about Thailand — but, he said, it was equally right for a foreign traveler like me. Knowing only Thai milk tea and elephants, he said, doesn’t count as really understanding Thailand.
Short essays exploring different themes: Sanuk (สนุก) as both a catchphrase and a mirror of Thai society; the tension between kathoey (กะเทย, Thai transgender identity) and mainstream Western gay culture; the connection between the phleng phuea chiwit (เพลงเพื่อชีวิต, “songs for life”) genre and the pro-democracy demonstrations of the 1970s. I turned page after page and ended up staying in the bookshop all afternoon. Leaving, I couldn’t help wondering: could Taiwan have a book like this? (I later found the newly published Taiwan User’s Guide — looks like an interesting attempt.)
柏青哥 / 李珉貞 (Pachinko / Min Jin Lee)
I picked it up again because of the book-swap — someone had given it to me. The story of a Zainichi Korean (在日朝鮮人) family across four generations: displacement, adaptation, survival, taking root. Before reading, I had no idea that Japan had such a community — Koreans who, after the colonial period, (chose to) remain in Japan, unable to obtain identity documents, facing discrimination from local society, and caught in an ongoing dilemma of national identity.
Different generations of migrants face different struggles. One of the key debates: if you had to choose, would you rather live without dignity or die with it? The two characters in the book make opposite choices. If it were me, I would have no answer.
When we want the world to understand us, how well do we understand our own neighbors? Why should our stories be worth someone else’s time? I’ve been thinking about these questions lately. I’m trying to understand others first, and maybe find some answers from there.
馴羊記 / 徐振輔 (Taming the Sheep / Hsu Chen-fu)
Probably the novel I’ve loved most in recent years. (I’m emotional about this.) (Though The Eyeless still ranks first.)
Loving something doesn’t require reasons, but making that legible to others does. The Tibet and nature he writes about — I cannot understand from the inside — but the author lets me see them. The land’s economic, political, cultural transformations; the confusion and reflection of solitary searching — these I have thought about, experienced in my own way. Reading it was a constant dialogue with the author: a peak reading experience.
Here is a passage I love. I think it speaks, in part, to why I keep writing:
I took the notebook from my backpack and flipped through nearly a hundred pages of rough diary entries from this period. Regarding the golden years that had passed / were passing / would pass, I felt both moved and at ease. Buddhism gave me this understanding: any phenomenon is a temporary assembly of complex, varied conditions, forming a system capable of responding to meaning. When we name a phenomenon with language, we are defining the boundary of a particular set of relationships. As those relationships change with time, the boundary will eventually dissolve in some form — and so attachment becomes the seed of suffering. The word yuan (緣, karmic connection) as I understand it is not a quantity that can accumulate, but a specific kind of encounter — yuan arises through meeting; it ends through parting. I encountered similar ideas later, back in the academy, when I read post-structuralist geography.
Ordinary as I am, I never stop measuring the present against memory, tirelessly using a fine needle to thread together the parts that language can name, trying to keep certain things intact a little longer. But things like photographs and writing only remind us of how much we have changed and lost. Impermanence isn’t just the binary of meeting and missing, of being alive and dying — more often it is simply that a person passes a few years and becomes someone their old name can no longer call back.
And yet writing, through its tireless recording, gradually allows you to release the part of yourself you cling to most. Simply because you believe these things will last longer than you do — and so they become something like eternity. I suddenly felt something beyond words, and wrote on the last page of the diary: “By the measure of a human life, love is a promise infinitely close to eternal.”
山地話／珊蒂話 / 馬翊航 (Mountain Talk / Sandy Talk / Ma Yi-hang)
Another book I came to know through an award — I’d borrowed it about six months ago and kept renewing. I always feel something similar when reading writers who have lived in the east of Taiwan: their language isn’t only visual; scents and textures cling between the lines — built up day after day by feet pressed into soil, by ears trained on the forest. Sometimes the words can’t hold everything, and I, reading from behind the page, can only glimpse a corner of the plain.
I especially loved his descriptions of becoming an adult. It made me think: adulthood and growing up are different things. Adulthood is social — it requires ritual to prove, requires continual performance of responsibility. But growing up isn’t like that. No one tells you when you’ve grown up; it doesn’t need to be demonstrated to anyone. And yet in certain unexpected moments, society delivers the reminder like a blow — that you can no longer go back.
真相製造 / 劉致昕 (Manufacturing Truth / Liu Chih-hsin)
I’d quietly been following this series on disinformation from his time at Business Weekly to The Reporter. I thought I’d already read everything in the book, but perhaps because time had passed — reading the same words again, I found myself thinking more.
This is my final conclusion: we need more dialogue, and we need to keep reading. Dialogue lets us see the many possibilities that lie beneath polarized positions; it brings us face to face with voices beyond those in power. Reading makes us spend more time thinking, and helps us reclaim sovereignty over our own knowledge. High-quality conversation that comes from reading makes you realize the world is more complex than you thought — that we are not so far from each other — and that society is only possible because of all of us together.
台北家族、違章女生 / 李屏瑤 (Taipei Family, Irregular Girl / Lee Ping-yao)
I finally opened the first book from the exchange — if not for my friend, I probably never would have.
I love the writing: seemingly ordinary and yet deeply resonant. It made me think of conversations with classmates from different genders in my sociology department, where I realized that what I imagined about family, sexual harassment, and intimacy was completely different from other people’s understanding. Of course conversation isn’t the endpoint — ideally we first learn where the boundaries are, then begin to see the lives that lie beyond them, and eventually work together to dissolve those lines. But the reality is that these conversations are hard to have.
I keep thinking: the most frightening thing in the world is believing you understand someone’s daily life, while in fact you’ve never spent a moment actually listening.