C. J. Anderson-Wu’s «Endangered Youth – Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ukraine» extends her longstanding engagement with questions of authoritarianism, memory, and survival by situating youth at the center of political and historical upheaval. Known for her fiction that probes the legacies of Taiwan’s White Terror, Anderson-Wu here broadens her scope to consider how young lives are imperiled and reshaped in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Ukraine—three regions where the collision of violence, repression, and the yearning for freedom is starkly evident.
“Millions of Ants,” “I Am Not Broken,” and “June” depict the risks and grave prices paid by young people in Hong Kong during the street movements, born of their determination to defend the city’s democracy against the tightening grip of a totalitarian regime. The title story, “Endangered Youth,” underscores the parallels between Taiwan’s past and Hong Kong’s present: whenever young people rise to claim their rights, they are the first to be brutally suppressed.
In “Run, Run, Run Away, Come Again Another Day,” Anderson-Wu employs the perspective of a stray cat navigating a city ravaged by conflict. This device defamiliarizes the human catastrophe, allowing the reader to encounter scenes of abandonment, partisan conflict, and fragile survival with a disturbing clarity. The feline’s detached yet insistent witnessing renders the absurdity of human responses to crisis—quarrels of different political standings amid ruin, or the invulnerable abandonment of elders and disabled—with an almost unbearable poignancy. The city’s landscapes—its ruined theaters, hollowed churches, and scorched chestnut trees—become emblems of a cultural and moral collapse, while the recurring phrase “You don’t belong here” echoes the displacement and estrangement endemic to war.
In “A Letter from the Son of A Dissident to A Son of A Dissident,” Anderson-Wu demonstrates a precise attentiveness to the textures of place, memory, and trauma. Whether tracing how histories of violence infiltrate private life or how public upheaval leaves indelible marks on individual subjectivities, she consistently returns to the interplay between personal memory and collective history. Her prose is finely wrought, its restraint amplifying rather than diminishing its emotional force.
The stories gathered in «Endangered Youth» reflect these same preoccupations while extending them to a transnational frame. By focusing on youth, Anderson-Wu underscores how political violence is never an abstraction but a lived condition that shapes the most intimate dimensions of identity, belonging, and possibility. The figure of youth, in her work, is doubly endangered: vulnerable to immediate harm yet also burdened with carrying forward the memory of resistance and survival.
What distinguishes Anderson-Wu’s writing is its refusal to simplify. The narratives are not reducible to allegories of victimhood or resilience; instead, they remain attentive to ambiguity, contradiction, and the uneasy coexistence of despair and endurance. Her prose navigates between lyrical evocation and historical precision, producing fiction that is at once politically resonant and aesthetically accomplished.
Endangered Youth thus confirms Anderson-Wu’s position as a writer whose work speaks across national boundaries while remaining deeply rooted in specific histories. The collection contributes to ongoing conversations about literature’s role in witnessing, remembering, and resisting erasure. It is a text that demands careful reading, not only for its portrayal of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Ukraine, but also for what it reveals about the fragility and persistence of youth in times of profound political upheaval.
Dr. Wu Chieh-Hsiang holds a pivotal role as a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at National Changhua University of Education in Taiwan, where she brings deep expertise in cultural policy, art economics, art criticism, museology, art sociology, and the legal dimensions of art.
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