A new photo exhibit in Anchorage is aiming to spotlight the varied experiences of people from Taiwan who live in Alaska.
The project, “Tropical Islands Up North,” is the work of photographer and Alaska Public Media alum Jeff Chen, whose parents are also Taiwanese immigrants. Chen says people from the Taiwanese diaspora have been in Alaska since the late 1960s and early ’70s, and he wanted to highlight the diverse experiences of those people, who made Alaska their home.
Listen:
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This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jeff Chen: One of the things that people know about Taiwan, in general, is like bubble tea comes from there. And maybe the other thing that people know is that Taiwan’s democracy is consistently being threatened by the Chinese government. I think those are the two things people know about Taiwan. Those are very much defining realities of Taiwan: bubble tea and war. But I think our cultures go way beyond that, and our stories go way beyond that. And I think “Tropical Islands Up North” is my attempt to kind of capture some of those stories. And so it’s very visual, it’s very colorful, and I tried to delve into people’s lives, you know, within the few hours that they let me spend with them.
Wesley Early: So you covered a wide swath of the state finding people to photograph for this project. Can you talk about your experiences in more rural parts of Alaska?
JC: So for this project, I was able to travel across Alaska. Sometimes I would just tack on an extra day or two onto a work trip that I was doing already. And so in March, I got a chance to go out to Bethel. And I photographed someone named Chris Liu there. And he’s actually been living there since I believe the late ’70s, early ’80s, and for, I think, about 15 years, he was the police chief there. And then for another 15 years, he was superintendent for the Department of Corrections there. And so he’s a pretty integrated part of the community there. And it was really cool. He picked me up from the airport, and we went right out to the river and started drilling a hole in the ice to fish for some pike. And that morning, his wife was already out there, Barbara, and so she had already been out there, and they would catch probably hundreds of pike already. And it was really cool to just be out there with him and his granddaughter and his wife.
WE: Yeah, it sounds like he’s sort of integrated his Taiwanese experiences to sort of the local Yupik community.
JC: Yeah, it’s interesting. I went to their house, and there was a spread of hooligan, there was dried pike, and there was some Taiwanese food called bacang, and it’s like sticky rice with meat wrapped up in bamboo leaves. And there was Russian Orthodox texts, there was Pentecostal church texts, there was Taiwanese texts, there was Yugtun texts. And it was just really interesting to see that kind of all that happening in one household.
WE: So you have a history of helping spotlight Indigenous voices in Alaska in some of your work. Did you see any overlap between that work and the people you highlighted in Tropical Islands Up North?
JC: I went down to Soldotna, and I spent some time at a restaurant called Golden International. And I did some photos there in the kitchen, following around the staff. And there’s someone named Sharon that has owned this place for the past decade, I believe. Before that it was her parents-in-law that ran the place since the 80s. And Sharon shared some of her history.
She’s from one of the Indigenous tribes in Taiwan, and they identify as Paiwan, and they’re in the southern part of Taiwan. And so the history of Taiwan, in 1949, when the Guomindang lost the Chinese Civil War with the Chinese Communists, about two million of them fled to Taiwan and assumed power once they arrived in Taiwan. And so that created a lot of conflict, because there was already an established society in Taiwan. And one of the conflicts was between Indigenous people and the newly formed Republic of China government in Taiwan. And so Sharon’s great grandfather, he was a Paiwan chief, and he kind of set out, he went abroad for education. And he was brought back to Taiwan and asked to lead in some of the negotiations with the Republic of China in order to establish Indigenous rights in the newly governed island. And I just thought that was interesting, because I saw some similar threads between that and, like, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, for example.
“Tropical Islands Up North,” opens at the Akela Space in Downtown Anchorage on Friday, Nov. 3 from 5 to 8 p.m. and will be up through November.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
