By Shelley Lee
“In the book Island X, Wendy Cheng offers a history of Taiwanese migrant students in the United States during the late twentieth century. More a set of unique case studies than a collective history, it is a fascinating and original work that makes major contributions to several fields. Especially salient for understanding migrations and transformations of the Taiwanese students, Cheng shows, are themes of geopolitics, community formation, and activism. Their story is not a linear one of coming to America and becoming American, but rather an ongoing saga about unsettled lives and identities perpetually destabilized by the unpredictable events that have been Taiwan’s history since the end of World War II. As a contribution to Asian American history, Island X advances the scholarship on the Taiwanese American experience. It also joins other recent works by historians such as Chris Suh and Genevieve Clutario that bridge the fields of Asian history, diplomatic history, and ethnic studies and reorient how we think about colonialism, post-colonialism, and US-Asia relations.”
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Wendy Cheng 