In 2017 I reconnected with a childhood friend I hadn’t corresponded with regularly since the early 2000s, when we delighted in sending each other long-winded, subject-jumping letters and unspeakably nerdy drawings (we loved Lord of the Rings before it was cool, okay).
Something we shared as children besides our general lack of coolness (which I say with fondness) was our Taiwanese heritage, and in our young adult years we’ve commiserated on social and political issues that, as kids, we didn’t realize were pushing and pulling on our lives in ways out of our control. The way we processed the anxieties and challenges of growing up Taiwanese American was to, well, have conversations.
We’re still all about conversations, all about productive exchanges.
Chrysanthemum, a print anthology of literature and artwork, was partly a result of that conversation orientation. In affiliation with the nonprofit TaiwaneseAmerican.org, it shares young creatives’ perspectives on the currently not-so-widely-visible Taiwanese diasporic experience.
Cover art by Aster Hung, typography and arrangement by Andrea Chu.
On this project, we faced bandwidth challenges, but the thing about a labor of love is it demands to be finished, limitations be damned. We Kickstarted volume I (“liminality”) to unexpectedly enthusiastic support and have taken the finished product to the Taiwanese American Cultural Festival in San Francisco, among other places.
Currently in flight in its submissions stage, volume II is inspired by concepts of “geography” and the part it plays in lives and perspectives of members of the Taiwanese diaspora.
