By Steven Crook and Katy Hui-Wen Hung “My father was born in 1926 in Tamsui. My mother was born in 1930 in Tokyo, where my grandfather (who was from Banqiao; my maternal grandmother was from Tainan) worked as a financial advisor until 1946. During the war, both of my parents ate hiromaru lunchboxes, with the…
Katy Hui-wen Hung and Steven Crook discuss their newly published book. Katy Hui-wen Hung: I grew up in Taipei, studied in the U.S. from 1984 to 1986, and have lived in the UK since the late 1980s. Some years ago in the UK, I got to know Marlena Spieler, the acclaimed cookbook writer. Marlena, an…
I spent nearly 20 years of my career in the news business. Sometimes people ask me: What was your most popular story? Which one attracted the most attention? My answer is a bit embarrassing, though it probably shouldn’t be. As a foreign correspondent, I got to cover a lot of big breaking news — presidential…
The government is making a strong effort to preserve Taiwan’s endangered languages so as to maintain a multicultural society. Taiwan has long been a place of linguistic diversity. Besides the Chinese languages of Mandarin, Hokkien (Taiwanese), and Hakka, the various indigenous tribes have each had their own version of an Austronesian language, and many senior…
Entrepreneurs in Taiwan are redefining the term ‘café’ in the era of social media. With the proliferation of cafés in Taiwan in recent years, proprietors have been looking for ways to make their shops stand out from the rest. Besides offering single-origin coffee, more and more cafés are dedicating space to displaying premium, handcrafted goods…
The most popular beverage in the world is made to perfection in Taiwan, from bubble teas at roadside vendors to the most expensive high-mountain choice grade oolong. The playbill for a Broadway production in the early 1900s pictures a waiter serving a gentleman and two impeccably attired ladies in some undefined but leafy and upscale…
Taiwan’s Indigenous Formosan Mountain Dog “Don’t be mad,” my wife said one afternoon in an unexpected phone call telling me that our 16-year-old daughter had found a puppy on the street near our home. “There are signs up in the neighborhood and somebody is looking for him. Can we keep him until we find the…
Two writers’ perspective on a Sun Moon Lake holiday marked by a peculiar mingling of love and death. By Joshua Samuel Brown The sound of gongs and chanting were already pronounced as we turned the corner and approached our hotel at the alley’s end. Though we’d come to Sun Moon Lake for its legendary peace…
Pick a day with nice weather and treat yourself to a walking tour of one of the city’s most diverse and appealing neighborhoods. Offering a diverse mix of sights, sounds, and flavors, the area near the Yuanshan (圓山) MRT Station, which is sometimes referred to as the “Confucius Temple Historic District,” has become one of…
Taiwan is known as an excellent place to study the Mandarin language and is also home to the world-class National Palace Museum with its breathtaking collection of Chinese treasures. But Taiwan is not a purely Han Chinese society. Prior to the 17th century, the island was dominated by indigenous people of Austronesian origin. Before the…
