Jenna Tang presents Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

The most influential book of Taiwan’s #MeToo movement—a heartbreaking account of sexual violence and a remarkable reinvention of the trauma plot, turning the traditional Lolita narrative upside down as it explores women’s vulnerability, victimization, and the lengths they will go to survive.

Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi lives with her family in an upscale apartment complex in Taiwan, a tightknit community of strict yet doting parents and privileged children raised to be ambitious, dutiful, and virtuous. She and her neighbor Liu Yi-Ting bond over their love of learning and books, devouring classic works—Proust, Gabriel García Márquez, the very best Chinese writers. Yet, it is their lack of real-world education that makes them true kindred spirits.

Si-Chi’s innocence is irresistible to Lee Guo-hua, a revered cram literature teacher and serial predator who lives in her building. When he offers to tutor the academic-minded girls for free, their parents—unaware of Lee’s true nature—happily accept. While Yi-Ting’s studies with Lee are straightforward, Si-Chi learns about things no one teaches them in school—lessons about sex and love that will change the course of her life. Confused and uncertain, Si-Chi turns to her beloved books for guidance. But literature tells her nothing honest about rape or how to cope with the trauma of abuse. For her own salvation, the young girl begins to think of her personal hell as her “first love paradise,” where the power of love, no matter how twisted, gives her the strength to survive.

One of the biggest books to come out of Taiwan in the last decade, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise is a chilling tale of grooming and its lingering trauma, and the power structures that allow it to flourish. Insightful, unsettling, emotionally raw, it is a staggering work of literature that reverberates across cultures and forces us to confront painful truths about the vulnerability and strength of women and those who use and hurt them.

Translated from the Chinese by Jenna Tang

Lin Yi-Han (1991–2017) was a Taiwanese writer. Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise was her first and only novel. It sold over a million copies globally, won prizes, including the Open Book Best Fiction Award and the Liang Yu-Sen Literary Award, and became a feminist manifesto across Asia. Lin Yi-Han also wrote for INK magazine and BuzzFeed.

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer and a literary translator who translates between Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. She graduated from MFA in Fiction Creative Writing from The New School. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, AAWW, McSweeney’s, Catapult, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. She was a 2021 Mentee at ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship program with a focus on Taiwanese prose. To date, she has translated authors from Taiwan, México, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and more.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs 허수진is the author of Interrogation Room (White Pine Press, 2018); Paper Pavilion (White Pine, 2007), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize; and the chapbooks Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press, 2015) and Necro Citizens (hochroth Verlag, 2019). Interrogation Room received mention in The New York Times and won the Association of Asian American Studies Award in Creative Writing: Poetry. Her co-translation of Sámi poet Niillas Holmberg’s Juolgevuođđu, published as Underfoot (White Pine Press, 2022), received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Lief and Inger Sjöberg Prize and was longlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry. Currently, she is senior poetry editor of AGNI and Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary and General Studies at St. Olaf College.