With the support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, the Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles partners with UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies (CCS) to launch “Taiwan in Dialogue” lecture/dialogue series, which features eight online events from February to November 2021. Leading practitioners from a variety of Taiwan’s creative areas, including film, literature, theater, and art, will be invited to deliberate on the contemporary Taiwan culture. Following the four acclaimed events in February, April, and May, 2021, four more events will be held consecutively in September and October, 2021. Please see below for information on the speakers and events:
Tell the Good Taiwan Story--Prof. David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University
4:00 PM (Pacific Time), September 30, 2021
This lecture seeks to tell the stories of and from Taiwan, rethinking the terms of narrativity and polity, from territorial sovereignty to indigenous identity, and from historical precarity to environmental crisis. The works of writers such as Wu Mingyi, Chen Yaochang, Luo Yijun and Chen Xue highlight how storytelling constitutes the essence of our capacity to imagine a different world, and therefore, transform the status quo.
Writing Taiwan, Translating Taiwan: A Forum with Wu Ming-yi and Darryl Sterk
6:00 PM (Pacific Time), October 4, 2021
Wu Ming-Yi is a multidisciplinary Taiwanese artist, author, Professor of Sinophone literature at National Dong Hwa University and environmental activist. His ecological parable The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011) was published in English in 2013. His 2015 book The Stolen Bicycle has been described as a study of history in Taiwan during World War II through a missing bicycle, and in 2018, the book was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. Darryl Sterk translates Mandarin-language fiction from Taiwan into English. Writers he has worked with include Wu Ming-Yi (The Man With the Compound Eyes and The Stolen Bicycle), Sakinu (Hunter School), Horace Ho (The Tree Fort on Carnation Lane), and Lay Chih-Ying (Home Sickness). He hopes to branch out into natural science and natural history translation.
From Wild Fire to the Big Sea: In Conversation with Lung Ying-tai
7:00 PM (Pacific Time), October 15, 2021
Lung Ying-tai is one of Taiwan’s most popular and beloved writers, a literary critic and a public intellectual. Her 1985 book The Wild Fire created a major cultural stir for its honest and introspective look at the social and political problems facing contemporary Taiwanese society and is often credited for helping to usher in a more critical and democratic spirit in the 1980s. Her bestselling 2009 book of historical non-fiction Big River, Big Sea has been awarded numerous book prizes, including the Hong Kong Book Award. She served as Taiwan’s inaugural Minister of Culture from 2012-2014. She will discuss her body of work, from The Wild Fire (1985) to her most recent book Under Dawu Mountain (2020), along with broader reflections on the relationship between literature and social change in the Chinese-speaking world.
Dialogue with John Balcom
12:00 - 1:30 PM (Pacific Time), October 29, 2021
John Balcom is an award-winning translator of Chinese literature, philosophy, and children’s books who teaches in the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation and Language Education at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He was a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. His translation of Huang Fan’s Zero won the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award.
The four above-mentioned events will be held through Zoom while livestreaming on the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies’ YouTube channel and Facebook. All are welcome to register online: https://www.international.ucla.edu/ccs/events.
For further information about the “Taiwan in Dialogue” lecture/dialogue series, please follow CCS’s website www.international.ucla.edu/ccs/home, Facebook www.facebook.com/uclaccs, and YouTube www.youtube.com/user/UCLAccs/featured.