He received Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and English Literature from National Dong Hwa University.

Before becoming a full-time fiction writer, Kan worked as a reporter, as a middle school teacher, and as a playwright of a small theater.

As a result, the feelings of humans and animals become interchangeable but at the same time remain distinct; the complex interactions among Taiwan's various ethnic and social groups are revealed as well.

Killing Ghosts, a historical novel, deals with issues of Taiwanese identities resulting from fifty years of the Japanese occupation and from the iron-fist rule of the KMT after World War II.

Kan Yao-ming, against the backdrops of the Kominka Movement (the Japanization of Taiwanese Movement in 1937 during the second Sino-Japan War) and the 228 Incident (the cause of the KMT's enforcement of martial law on Taiwan from 1947 to 1987), depicts the insanity of that era as well as the unfailing vitality of people living on the island of Taiwan, be they post-World War II Mainland Chinese emigres, or the natives formerly colonized by the Japanese.