How do the forces that shape contemporary Taiwan become part of everyday life? The second volume of A Counter Literary History of Taiwan in the New Millennium, Taiwan and Life examines how the historical, social, political, and cultural forces explored in the companion volume are experienced, negotiated, and reimagined through family, desire, language, translation, technology, and the imagination of possible futures. Through literature and cultural production, the volume opens a window onto the lived realities of one of the world’s most vibrant democratic societies.

Moving beyond conventional literary history, this innovative “counter literary history” explores six interconnected dimensions of contemporary life: family, desire, animals, language, translation, and futurity. Using diverse media—novels, memoirs, blogs, documentary film, theater, public debates, and digital culture—the contributors reveal how everyday experiences illuminate broader transformations in Taiwan and across the global Chinese-speaking world.

Readers encounter adoptees, migrants, and multiracial families whose stories illuminate the legacies of the Cold War and transnational mobility; LGBTQ writers and activists who helped reshape public conversations surrounding same-sex marriage and queer kinship; and literary explorations of human–animal relationships that rethink ethics, care, and coexistence. The volume also examines multilingual encounters among Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, Indigenous, and global languages; investigates the cultural and political complexities of translation in an age of globalization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; and explores speculative fiction, queer futurity, digital afterlives, and posthuman worlds that imagine new relationships between humanity and technology.

Featuring works by Taiwanese authors, Indigenous writers, diaspora communities, and multilingual creators, the volume demonstrates how contemporary Taiwanese literature has become an important site for exploring global questions of communication, mobility, social change, cultural identity, and technological transformation. By examining works that cross linguistic, ethnic, national, and generic boundaries, the contributors challenge conventional assumptions about both “Taiwanness” and literature itself.

Bringing together perspectives from Taiwan studies, literary studies, cultural studies, queer studies, translation studies, diaspora studies, media studies, environmental humanities, and East Asian studies, A Counter Literary History of Taiwan in the New Millennium: Taiwan and Life reveals how contemporary Taiwan has become a uniquely fertile site for exploring some of the most pressing cultural questions of the twenty-first century: how families are reimagined, how languages circulate across borders, how translation shapes global visibility, how technology transforms human relationships, and how new futures are imagined. Few books provide such rich access to the everyday experiences, cultural innovations, and literary imaginations through which contemporary Taiwan engages an increasingly interconnected world.