Island X

Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism

Wendy Cheng illuminates a C old W ar trans Pa C ifi C drama

P layed out a C ross us C am P uses

Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s. Often depicted as compliant model minorities, many were in fact deeply political, shaped by Taiwan’s colonial history and influenced by the global social movements of their times. As activists, they fought to make Taiwanese people visible as subjects of injustice and deserving of self-determination.

Under the distorting shadows of Cold War geopolitics, the Kuomintang regime and collaborators across US campuses attempted to control Taiwanese in the diaspora through extralegal surveillance and violence, including harassment, blacklisting, imprisonment, and even murder. Drawing on interviews with student activists and extensive archival research, Wendy Cheng documents how Taiwanese Americans developed tight-knit social networks as infrastructures for identity formation, consciousness development, and anticolonial activism. Raising questions about historical memory and Cold War circuits of power, Island X is a testament to the lives and advocacy of a generation of Taiwanese American activists.

“A beautifully written book that foregrounds oral histories/biographies of Taiwanese students who engaged in activism and contextualizes their lives and experiences through infrastructures of activism and surveillance.” —Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, author of Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era

“The stories and political intrigue that fill the book’s pages are fascinating. I have been waiting for a long time for a book like Island X that covers Taiwanese American activism.” —Carolyn Chen, author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience

Wendy Cheng is associate professor of American studies at Scripps College. She is author of The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles.