The Gathering Library

A Taiwanese-American girl is nervous about visiting Taiwan— until her paternal grandmother, her Nainai, takes her on a mountain-climbing adventure and shows her its wonders. Traveling from California to Taiwan for the first time, even with her parents and her Nainai around her, is a lot for a little girl to take in. The plane ride lasts forever, she can’t read any of the signs, and she’s worried there will be unfamiliar bugs. But then Nainai becomes her tour guide, and Taiwan transforms. As they huff and puff up Nainai’s favorite mountain, stomachs full of bao and juicy sausage, Nainai spins yarns about riding to the movies in pedicabs, eating frozen pineapple, and playing pinball to win snacks. Even the bugs turn out to be more cool than scary. At the top of the mountain is a surprise: all sorts of people playing and exercising—and they all remember Nainai. The little girl is filled with pride when they can tell just who she is: “your granddaughter!”

The United States, Taiwan, and China are bound within a “silicon triangle.” Semiconductors link our geopolitics, our ongoing economic prosperity, and our technological competitiveness. This book draws on the deliberations of a multidisciplinary Hoover Institution–Asia Society working group of technologists, economists, military strategists, industry players, and regional policy experts to contemplate the dynamic global supply chain in semiconductors—one in which US industry faces growing vulnerabilities, China aggressively promotes home-grown semiconductor mastery, and Taiwan finds itself with a crucial monopoly on high-end logic chips sought by buyers globally. Silicon Triangle seeks to present a balanced view of how policies of the United States and its partners around semiconductors can increase the resilience of shared supply chains—and contribute to deterring conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

This is the space to provide an overview of the image.

This is the space to provide an overview of the image.

A groundbreaking study of Taiwan cinema, Hong provides helpful insight into how it is taught and studied by taking into account not only the auteurs of New Taiwan Cinema, but also the history of popular genre films before the 1980s. The book is essential for students and scholars of Taiwan, film and visual studies, and East Asian cultural history.

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture. Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.