University of Heidelberg

Best Book in Taiwan by I-Wei Wu

Apr 08, 2011

According to one of the country's largest newspapers, the Cluster’s Graduate Student I-Wei Wu wrote one of the best books in the year 2010 in Taiwan. The book describes his family’s labour life in context of the Taiwan Economic Miracle.

The Chinese-language book whose title translates into English as “Working Hard: Days and Memories of My Family's Labour Experience”, covers the memories and details of I-Wei Wu family’s hard working life. On the basis of his family’s stories, the author conducted interviews as well as fieldwork, such as visiting the industrial export processing zone where his family members used to work. He also documented an important period in Taiwan from 1970 to 1990 when the island’s economy profoundly advanced, resulting in the so-called “Taiwan Economy Miracle”.

I-Wei Wu's work was selected one of the best books of 2010 by the reader’s section of China Times, one of the four biggest newspapers in Taiwan. It was named one of the best works in the category Chinese Writing for the representation of the “spirit of self-reflection” and the complex “mixture of optimism and frustration”. Chinese Writing – one of four categories together with Translation Work, Teenage Books and Children’s Books – is the major category and plays an important role in Chinese publishing in Taiwan and beyond.

I-Wei Wu is a Ph.D. Candidate of the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies at the Cluster and a member of the research project B1 “Satire”.