INTERVIEW / Taiwanese poet Un Jiok-kiâu turns Taigi poetry into a bestseller

By Lee Chieh-yu, CNA staff reporter

For decades, Taiwanese (Taigi) poetry was widely seen as commercially unviable. Then Un Jio̍k-kiâu (温若喬) rewrote the script.

Her poetry collection, Ji̍t-hue Siám-Sih (日花閃爍), written entirely in Taigi, vaulted to the top of the bestseller lists across major online bookstores -- Eslite, Books.com.tw, Kingstone, TAZZE, Stepping Stone and MOMO -- within a day of its release on Jan. 6.

The book has since gone through five print runs in one month.

"This may be the first time a Taigi poetry work has achieved such strong sales," said Li Bi-chhin (呂美親), an associate professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University, during a dialogue with Un at the Taipei International Book Exhibition on Saturday.

Originating from Hokkien, Taigi has evolved into Taiwan's major local language, shaped by influences from indigenous languages and Japanese.

Li noted that Taigi poetry has historically struggled to find readers, in part because the language has long been regarded primarily as an oral language rather than a written one.

She said the book also departs from earlier Taigi literary works, which often focused on Taiwan's political past and collective historical memory.

Un's poetry, by contrast, draws on the everyday experiences and the emotional landscape of her own generation.

By choosing to write in Taigi, Un said she hoped to challenge long-standing stereotypes about the language.

"I wanted to show that Taigi can look completely different from what people usually imagine," she said. "Maybe then younger generations will be willing to engage with it."

Each poem in the collection is presented alongside its Tâi-lô Romanization and a Chinese translation.

Un also recorded herself reading each poem, allowing readers who do not speak Taigi to experience the work through her voice.

Born in Tamsui, New Taipei, in 1999, Un said she did not speak fluent Taigi until junior high school. It was around that time, she said, that she began to notice subtle but persistent attitudes that belittled the language.

In Taiwan, local languages are often burdened with perceptions of being old-fashioned or vulgar.

Students who participate in English recitation contests are praised, Un said, while those who compete in Taigi recitations are sometimes dismissed with comments such as, "No one speaks it anymore -- what's the point?"

For Un, the language also carries deeply personal meaning. Taigi was her grandmother's lifelong language. "If I can speak in her language," Un said, "maybe my way of seeing the world would be different."

Since 2025, Un has shared distinctive and lyrical Taigi vocabulary on the social media platform Threads, where she has attracted more than 60,000 followers.

She also founded an Instagram account, Ohtaigi, dedicated to sharing Taigi content, which has amassed more than 144,000 followers.

The viral popularity of her posts eventually caught the attention of a publisher, leading her to collect her poems and develop them into a book.

"The Taigi language is both the material and the tool when I write," Un said. She added that she chooses each word deliberately, often consulting the Tai-Nichi Daijiten (臺日大辭典), a Taiwanese-Japanese dictionary compiled in the 1930s that contains about 90,000 entries.

While browsing the dictionary, Un said she rediscovered archaic yet evocative words and incorporated them into her poetry.

One example is Ji̍t-hue (日花), which describes dappled sunlight filtering through clouds or leaves. Another is tîn-ai-hōo (塵埃雨), a term for raindrops scattered like dust.

Despite the book’s commercial success, Un said she feels a bit of pity that most online retailers still categorize Taigi literature as Chinese literature.

Still, she said with a smile, strong sales suggest people’s perceptions of Taiwanese could change.

"Sometimes, people need something abrupt like this to realize that we need a change," Un said.

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