Sex & Taipei City
“In these tales of love, lust and relationships gone awry, Yun-Han Chao portrays a city and culture of secret desires, hidden passions, and endless regret.” —Home Planet News
Sex in Taipei City is not what one expects: it is repressed, traded for cash, vengeful, sometimes awkward and almost always secretive.
In Sex & Taipei City, a diverse cast of characters finds relationships more trouble than they bargained for. Some are young and innocent: a teenager loses her virginity to a Ching Dynasty torture device in her family’s Strange Objects Museum. Some are far from innocent: a schoolgirl sells her body as an odd form of revenge and a grandfather alienates his family by watching Japanese porn at too loud a volume. For others, sexuality is a battle: a wife leaves her husband over a sexist joke, a foreign nanny steals an American baby, a mail order bride runs away, and a “spinster” beats up a pervert in the MRT station.
“From the fascinating quirks of food obsessions to the odd-but-seemingly-ordinary erotic moments of Taiwanese citizens, Yu-Han Chao’s Sex & Taipei City’s stories unfold a world of both the exotic and the familiar, captured in squirmy, disarming details . . . Funny, bold, and in moments, heartbreaking, these nineteen stories make up a stunning debut.” —William J. Cobb, author of The Bird Saviors
“Contemporary Taiwan’s contradictions come to life in Yu-Han Chao’s wonderful and gossipy collection Sex and Taipei City . . . These are the stories shared between rounds of karaoke that are so juicy and awful, you don’t realize it when your song comes on.” —Ed Lin, author of the Taipei Night Market novels