Description: This slim volume will be an interview with Taiwan's most famous activist and author, Dr. Lung Yingtai. It's a conversation between Yingtai and Duke professor Eileen Cheng-yin Chow about politics, activism, and writing, in which they discuss: personal history as national history, the public role of a writer in a places like Taiwan and China, and the writerly life as a woman, activist, and mother. Yingtai's most famous book, Big River, Big Sea--which will be excerpted and translated in this collection of interviews--has been banned in mainland China but is widely read among Chinese speakers and its diaspora. She describes it as a novel in which everything is true.
Brief description: Lung Yingtai is a Taiwanese essayist and cultural critic. Her poignant and critical essays contributed to the democratization of Taiwan and as the only Taiwanese writer with a column in major mainland Chinese newspapers, she is an influential writer in Mainland China. Lung Yingtai has held two positions within Taiwan's government as Taipei's first Cultural Bureau Chief (1999-2003)[5] and as Taiwan's first Culture Minister (2012-2014).