I imagined this happening in my late twenties, exactly ten years after high school graduation. A few of us would meet in Taiwan. I had just received my first promotion and at dinner, I’d humblebrag to all my friends. Justin–who would be earning the most–would pay for drinks, then pass out in the car. A few of us would be married, most of us single. Instead, I found myself back in Taiwan with almost a hundred alumni, reliving experiences that were once my last. Lunar New Year, homecooked meals with grandparents, weekly Karaoke—the routines I’d given up when I crossed the Pacific. Read More
This past weekend, over 200 participants came to see the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights’ (TAPCPR) "看見跨性別藝文展 100 Ways to See Transgender" exhibition at 二空間 SPACE TWO. Since their first Transgender Film Festival in 2020, TAPCPR has made it a tradition to do larger scale public engagement programming around transgender issues every year in the month of November. Last year was the second Transgender Film Festival, and this year is the 100 Ways to See Transgender exhibition Read More
A few years ago during the one-hundredth year anniversary of the May 4th Movement, when members of the pan-Blue camp, along with various Chinese nationalists, were outraged by the Tsai administration instead commemorating the date as “May the Fourth be with You”—Star Wars Day, I guess you could call it Read More
Near the end of the veteran journalist Scott Simon’s NPR program, Weekend Edition Saturday, on November 1, 2025, Simon asked Sir Anthony Hopkins to read the poem at the close of his memoir We Did OK, Kid (2025). The poem is T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), a poem of exhaustion and despair vaguely recalled by Hopkins’s frail, dementia-stricken father at Sandown Beach on, possibly, the Isle of Wight, now recited live, on the air, by the 88-year-old Hopkins. Bereft over the memoir’s “we”—his late father and the aging of the titular “kid”—Hopkins choked up again and again, begging out of the reading around the lines “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” “I can’t do any more of that,” Hopkins apologized to Simon, “it kills me.” Read More
Shortly afterward time by the bakery clock down the road showed half-eleven. Certainly rather late for a gathering such as that, you would have thought. The group of six men had chosen the corner of Lorong 26 & Guillemard, where a large, grassy square awaited some opportune time for development. Beside the deep, partly covered channel they had formed a loose circle, sitting on the grass like schoolboys, with their packs behind. Read More
A cultural event in Beitou has been criticized regarding Indigenous representation. Namely, the event, the “Beitou Witch Magic Festival”, draws on the history of female Indigenous mediums in Beitou Read More
When I went to the gallery at Ho Sng House (about a 10-15 minute walk from Guting station) to see Peng Hsiung Hsu’s Sexca-paint (一邊打砲,一邊畫畫) exhibition, the artist was there in person to offer a guided tour. I was handed a lollipop as part of the experience: “The lollipop is part of the exhibition.” Read More
At a time in which calls to remove authoritarian symbols have more often led to proposals for the removal of the Chiang Kai-shek statue in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, pan-Green legislators have recently called for the removal of the Sun Yat-sen portrait in the legislature Read More
The first hint that something big would be taking place in Bangka over the weekend was when a large stage was set up on the street of my apartment building and started blaring loud electronic music every day at 11 AM Read More
Cannabis decriminalization advocates held a demonstration and fair on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office Building today. Organizers claimed 2,000 were in attendance. While the demonstration was to mark 420, the rally took place instead today because of the weekend. This is the fifth time such a demonstration has been held in Taiwan, with last year’s demonstration called off due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic Read More
New Bloom/No Man is an Island editor Brian Hioe interviewed Lance and Stuart Chen-Hayes, who recently published 兩個爸爸. This follows up on an interview conducted following the publication of Double Dads One Teen in English in 2019. Lance is Taiwan’s first out gay dad and their nonbinary teen, Kalani, became the first Taiwanese citizen with two father’s names on both an international birth certificate and an international marriage license Read More
“The Wild Eighties: Dawn of Transdisciplinary Taiwan,” which runs from December 3rd to February 26th at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, is a highly successful look into the artistic creativity of Taiwan’s 1980s. This was the period in which martial law was lifted in Taiwan, resulting in an unprecedented explosion of creative freedoms. Read More













