The Taiwan Take

Weining Hung 洪維寧 founded LUCfest, a music showcase festival, in 2017 with KK Yeh 葉宛青 (White Wabbit Records). Taiwanese bands first played there before they went international, bands like Outlet Drift, The Fur, Go Go Machine Orchestra, Lücy, and Trout Fresh.  When Weining’s not managing the festival, she’s managing Asian talents like Phum Viphurit from Thailand. We talk about her love for mus...

She's a “21 Women Who Defined 2021” (VOGUE magazine Australia), a “Change Maker” (Australian Women in Music Award), and a “25 Trailblazers Reshaping Australia” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2022), Jaguar Jonze is a rockstar. The Taiwanese-Australian is also an advocate for mental health, trauma awareness, and MeToo against sexual harassment.  “If I can change one person's life and make it all worthwhile...

Harry Wu’s 吳易叡 is a historian of medicine. His book “Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization” was published in 2021 by MIT Press. “Scientific method is actually a cultural process. Studying science is actually studying a society.” From 2013 to 2021 Wu led the humanities programs at the medical schools of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and th...

Vivian Chen 陳依靖 was a delegate to APEC and a youth representative to UN forums. Now, she heads Girls in Tech in Taiwan, a non-profit that mentors girls and women in technology. She’s since founded Hepta Protocol and Da0, a collective for civic engagement in digital innovation using Web3. If we are not a part of international organizations, “it's really possible that our rights will be left behi...

Tuhi Martukaw 洪簡廷卉 was co-chair of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) from 2010 to 2015. She’s now a policy advocate, journalist, community organiser, and founder of the Taiwan Indigenous Youth Working Group (LIMA). She’s from the Pinuyumayan Nation, one of the 16 recognized indigenous nations in Taiwan. “We should be in the decision-maki...

Rachid Hami’s autobiographical film “For My Country” (2023, "Pour la France") tells story of his younger brother Jallal who passed away in 2012 at the age of 24 from a hazing incident at Saint-Cyr Military Academy. In real life, Rachid and Jallal grew up in Algeria and France, and they spent their final days together in Taiwan. “For My Country” - shot in Taiwan, Monaco, and France - premiered at t...

Vivi Lin 林薇 is a global period equity activist. She’s the 2021 recipient of the Diana Legacy Award from the UK - an award for youths aged 9-25 years in recognition of their social action or humanitarian work. Lin founded WithRed, an NGO to solve period poverty, boost education for women’s health, and eliminate stigma surrounding menstrual cycles. “Whenever we talk to people or negotiate with peo...

Yani Tseng 曾雅妮 is a former world No. 1 in women's golf when she was 24 years old. She was Number 1 in women's World Golf Rankings for 109 consecutive weeks; Time Magazine’s "100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2012; and the youngest golfer ever to win five major championships.  Today, Yani is 34 years old. She’s fighting off injuries and making a comeback.  “I look at who I was when I...

Gena Pan 潘郡瑤 is a co-founder of Double Pump, a media site and community for girls and women’s basketball. She posts game schedules, highlights, and player profiles, covering high school, college, semi-professional, and our national teams. She’s raising the visibility of women through sports. "We want to spread the idea that girls can be a better version of herself through playing sports."  This...

Annie Ivanova grew up in Bulgaria before moving to Australia. She’s an art curator, an advocate of cultural diplomacy, and the founder of the design firms Anibaba Co. and Studio Ivanova. This episode is a sponsored collaboration with the Taiwan Gold Card Office. Ivanova’s worked with art institutions like ZKM, Centre Pompidou, Ars Electronica, The Barbican, Centre Pompidou, Aaros Museum, Australia...

Happy lunar new year from all of us at Ghost Island Media! At time of this new years greetings recording, we didn't know yet of the mass shooting in Monterey Park in California that took the lives of 10 people on new years eve, Saturday, January 21, 2023. Our deepest condolences to families affected by the horrific tragedy. Our hearts are with our Asian American community. We have new shows waitin...

James Mao (毛加恩) is a former basketball player on Taiwan’s national team. Today, he's general manager of the New Taipei Kings. His roster includes Joseph Lin (brother of Jeremy Lin) and Quincy Davis, a L.A. native who’s now a Taiwanese citizen.  For the last 20 years, a fully professional basketball league simply didn’t exist in Taiwan. And as of 2022, there are now two professional leagues at p...

Yu-Jie CHEN (陳玉潔) is a key legal expert on international law and diplomacy in the context of China-Taiwan relations.  As democratic support for Taiwan increases, so has Beijing’s message to the world about its “One China principle” and the myth of a global consensus regarding the sovereignty of Taiwan. The truth is, every country - including Taiwan - has its own “One China policy”. And that pol...

Steve Chen was born in Taiwan in 1978 and moved to the U.S. at age eight. After working at PayPal, he co-founded YouTube in 2005 and sold it to Google next year. Steve moved back to Taiwan in 2019 and lives here now with his wife and two sons.  Today’s conversation was a part of the 2022 Taiwanese American Scholarship Fund (TASF) ceremony, a scholarship fund for Taiwanese American students from lo...

Alice and Catherine are two anthropologists whose “jobs” is to write about other people-types… but they can’t stop obsessing over their own sociocultural categories - working-class or elite, Chinese American or Taiwanese American - and whether or not you can hear it in the way(s) they talk. Alice was an intern on The Taiwan Take and Metalhead Politics. This episode was ori...

PTT is one of the most open social media platforms in the Chinese language. Though it’s not more populous than Facebook, it’s arguably more impactful than Facebook here in Taiwan. It’s a reflection of Taiwan's spirited democracy, and it’s used heavily as a source for local journalists. We speak with two INDSR researchers on a year-long project, “A Pilot Study on PTT i...

Today’s guest is Dr. Puma Shen (沈伯洋), chairman of Doublethink Lab (台灣民主實驗室) and an assistant professor at National Taipei University. “Democracy is a failure” - that’s the narrative the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to plant over the past year and hopes to take root in international discourse and in the minds of its 1.4 billion citizens. This disinformation has heavy implicatio...

Taiwan’s next referendum will soon vote on activating the nation’s fourth nuclear plant, as well as constructing a natural gas plant on an algal reef that's critical for Taiwan’s biodiversity. These decisions come as governments around the world are scrambling to meet the demands of the Paris Agreement, and as environmental activists fight for a more sustainable planet.  Gre...

The state of cannabis in Taiwan with the country’s only lawyer who only takes on cannabis-related cases. In 2020, Zoe LEE (李菁琪) ran for a seat in the parliament on the platform of legalizing medical marijuana. She’s currently deputy secretary general of the Green Party in Taiwan. In March 2021, Ms. LEE won “Best Show Host” at the inaugural KKBOX Podcasts Awards for her podcast on cannabis, “In...

(This interview was recorded in November 2020.) In 2019, according to the Pentagon, China launched more ballistic missiles for testing and training than the rest of the world combined. It did it through its newly minted rocket force, the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force - acronym P-L-A-R-F. PLARF is a critical component of China's nuclear deterrence strategy to deter and counter third-party i...

Digital Minister and self-taught coding whiz Audrey Tang (唐鳳) shares her unconventional life story – from gender identity to hacktivism, why she chose the name “Audrey” and what conservative anarchism means to her.  Having come of age together with Taiwanese democracy and the Internet, Tang relates how she took her education online after dropping out of junior high. Since then, Tang has striven...

The first Taiwanese to receive a Michelin star, Chef Andre (江振誠) closed his 2-star restaurant in Singapore in 2018 to come home. He is the subject of the documentary “Andre and His Olive Tree” on his art, life, and what he calls “original intention”.  Chef Andre left Taiwan to learn culinary arts at age 13. A citizen of the world, he was inspired while in Japan, tra...

Documentary “Help Is On The Way” (助守在異鄉) won Best Feature at the 39th Indonesian Film Festival (FFI). It premiered in Taiwan on Public Television Service in 2020. Nearly 40% of the 700,000 migrant workers in Taiwan are from Indonesia. We speak to Nick Calpakdjian, producer of the feature-length documentary from Indonesia that explores the nuances of being domestic caregivers workers in Taiwan...

We talk to PhD candidate Lev Nachman about the world of Taiwan Studies in academia. He discusses his entry into the field and provides practical advice for students around the world who are interested in studying Taiwan. Lev Nachman is a PhD candidate in the political science department at UC-Irvine studying social movements and political parties in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He is also a Fulbright sch...

Gwhyneth Chen (陳毓襄) is a world-renowned classical pianist who's set to open the 2020/21 season for the NTSO (National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra) on August 29 and 30. Born in Taiwan and trained in the U.S., Ms. Chen is a Pride of Taiwan 台灣之光. Ms. Chen recounts performing for the late President Lee Teng-Hui and chats about the value of music, the importance of practice and staying humble, and...