Shawna Yang Ryan is a Taiwanese American novelist, short story writer and creative writing professor, who has published the novels Water Ghosts (2009) and Green Island (2016).
Ryan's debut novel was Water Ghosts, initially published in 2007 by a small press in Berkeley known as El Leon Literary Arts under the title Locke 1928.
[2] He also runs a casino called Lucky Fortune and has practically given up on the idea of seeing her, deciding to start an affair with a white prostitute who works in the town at Poppy See's Brothel.
The novel tells the story of a Taiwanese family known as the Tsais, who survive the February 28 incident of 1947 and are forced to live through the tumultuous decades that follow as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (or Nationalist Party), begins its martial law rule of the island.
[13] The 228 incident marks the start of a massacre overseen by Kuomintang soldiers from mainland China, where 10,000 to 30,000 Taiwanese citizens were murdered due to protesting the rule of the KMT.
[2] For over five decades prior to the KMT’s arrival, Taiwan thrived as an industrialized country bolstered by an efficient Japanese infrastructure — whereas China was poorer, and comprised mostly farmers — therefore, leading to a conflicting clash of cultures.
[7][20] The short story entitled "Marginalia" that Ryan published in the Fall 2013 issue of The Asian American Literary Review was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize.