Mapped
Crystal Boys
Pai Hsien-yung
Expelled from home for his sexuality, the young A-Qing joins the hidden community of gay youths who gather after dark in Taipei's New Park, a secret 'kingdom of the night' with its own laws and legends. Pai maps the real city of the early 1970s: New Park with its lotus pond, the bar the outcasts open together, the family homes and military-dependents' villages they are cast out of, and the neon nightlife of Ximending.
5 places →
The Stolen Bicycle
Wu Ming-Yi
A writer's hunt for his vanished father's lost bicycle becomes a walk back through twentieth-century Taiwan. The map centres on old central Taipei: Zhonghua Road and the vast Zhonghua Shopping Bazaar the family lived and tailored suits in, and the Wanhua-Bangka district of temples, antique stalls and bicycle shops. The search reaches back to the Japanese colonial years and, far to the south-west, to the forests of the Burma campaign of the Second World War.
5 places →