Before this encore, a quick announcement: we are looking for (human) artists for a 2027 calendar project. If you're interested, get ahold of us. Thx!

The SS President Hoover was a ship ahead of its time, but just seven years after being commissioned, the ship ran aground just off Green Island, which in 1937 was a part of the Japanese Empire. This encore presentation is a riveting adventure involving a possibly intentional bombing, a journey along the unfamiliar East Coast of Formosa in the dark, a shipwreck, drunken sailors, and some heartwarming pre-WWII kindness between Japan and America.

This episode was first released in May, 2023.

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Shih Ch’ien (施乾) is a young, well-educated Taiwanese man with a coveted government job in the Japanese colonial administration. But he turns his back on this comfortable life to live among society’s outcasts. In 1923, aged just 24, he founded a shelter for beggars, Aiai Ryō (愛愛寮, the “House of Love”) in Taipei’s Wanhua district. There, he would spend the rest of his short life caring for the destitute and demonstrating his hands-on approach to helping the poor. Shih loved beggars but hated begging; he rejected feel-good charity, instead seeking to eradicate poverty through education, medical care, self-respect, and work-training. And he attempted this without institutional support. It was a constant struggle. Behind his success lay two extraordinary women, first his Taiwanese wife and later his Japanese wife.

Happy New Year from Formosa Files. We hope you enjoy this uplifting historical tale told with our usual seasoning of banter and that you forgive us our occasional inappropriate joke.

Wuxia (武俠) novels are martial-arts stories full of swordsmen and swordplay, secret techniques, and chivalrous outlaws. Think Robin Hood crossed with Taoist mysticism and Chinese history. John talks with Taipei-based writer Scott Crawford about the genre – and Jin Yong 金庸 (1924-2018), the most popular and influential wuxia writer. Generations of admiring readers across Asia have devoured his many books. But Taiwan’s government was not a fan. Enter, the Rainstorm Project – a long-running crackdown launched in 1960 that targeted wuxia, especially Jin Yong’s works. Within days, 120,000 novels were seized; and, over the years, hundreds of wuxia titles were banned. But why? Was this simply Cold War paranoia about possible communist cultural “contamination”? Or a kind of moral panic about the impact on children; after all, this fantasy fiction was inspiring Taiwanese students to run off to the mountains in search of kung fu masters.