Sag Harbor's Kim Liao Debuts Memoir at John Jermain Memorial Library

Growing up in Sag Harbor, writer Kim Liao always felt, as she put it, “ambivalent” about her hometown. The natural beauty that the East End of Long Island boasts inspired her, as it did many famous artists and writers. But the constraints of the small town sometimes felt claustrophobic. She “dreamed of living in big cities and traveling the world,” she said.

And so, that’s what she did. Though she has now settled down in New York City, after graduating from Pierson High School as valedictorian, she spent her college years in California at Stanford University, where she studied Modern Thought and Literature. She then extended her education to receive a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Emerson College in Boston. In 2010, she received a Fulbright Grant, which took her to Taiwan, where she stayed for 13 months, studying her family; specifically, the “exciting story of [her] grandparents and their role in the Taiwanese Independence Movement.”

This year of research would become the catalyst for her debut book, “Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence,” that she will be celebrating in her hometown of Sag Harbor on Saturday, September 7, at the John Jermain Memorial Library.

Liao has loved to write ever since she was a child. She wrote her first play in fourth grade, shortly followed by another play inspired by the “rockstar” role-model, R.L. Stine, and his “Goosebumps” series.

“I would write one chapter that ended on a cliffhanger, and give my notebook to my friends to read, and then they would ask what happened next, and I would dream it up and write the next chapter,” Liao explained.

As she got older, Liao added short stories and essays to her oeuvre.

“I wanted to be a writer, but never knew what that would really look like,” Liao said. “In college, I dreamed about writing a collection of linked short stories about one family, sort of like the Glass family in J.D. Salinger’s ‘Franny and Zooey’… I knew I wanted to write, but I was searching for the story that would make me a writer.”

That story, she soon found out, would be the story of her grandparents in Taiwan.

“It was important to me for understanding my identity, it had historical importance, and it was full of questions that I was consumed by,” Liao said. “I think we all need to be obsessed with a writing project in order to finish it, and this project both made me a writer and helped me understand myself as a person.”

Liao said, with rueful laughter, that she has been working on this story for “too long,” estimating the book took her about 15 years, give or take, to finish.

“That’s probably underestimating just a bit,” she continued.

The story began as her MFA thesis, for which she finished a first draft in 2013. After working both at an immigration law firm and as a teacher, which Liao cites as “her first love,” she stepped away from this story to work on other small things. In 2020, she attempted a “large scale revision, and I worked on it solidly whenever I could,” she said. In 2023, the story was sold to Rowman and Littlefield for publishing.

The book reveals years of secrets and unknowns about Liao’s family during the Taiwanese Independence Movement, and the White Terror Period, a time when Taiwan was under martial law, spanning about 30 years. The period began on February 28, 1947 with a anti-government uprising led by native Taiwanese. For Liao, uncovering this information was groundbreaking. She first found out about her grandfather’s achievements through a book titled “Formosa Betrayed” by George Kerr.

“Kerr was the U.S. vice consul in Taipei when the February 28 incident occurred, a riot that ushered in a violent military response from the KMT [Kuomintang] government that eventually became four decades of martial law,” Liao explained. “My Grandpa Thomas formed his Taiwanese Independence Movement in response to that harsh government response and corresponded a great deal with Kerr.”

“It was very surreal to learn about my family through a book, as opposed to from my relatives, but my dad hadn’t known any of this either,” she continued. “This clue set me off on a search through history to find out the truth about my family. I became obsessed with this story; it burned at me to find out what happened, because our family had always been so silent about the past. My Grandma Anna, in particular, said nothing about all of this. And part of this project was to find out why.”

“In tracing the story of my Grandpa Thomas’s life and work leading this independence movement, I came upon the stories of many Taiwanese imprisoned and tortured during the White Terror period — just for expressing dissatisfaction with the government or for supporting pro-independence or pro-democracy ideals,” Liao said. “My Uncle Suho was one of those men and was imprisoned for over a decade. While I was in Taiwan, I met other former freedom fighters, who explained their stories and how their fight for freedom helped usher in democracy in Taiwan in the late 1980s.”

For Liao, this research was extremely meaningful and impactful. She even met members of the Liao family in Taiwan — long lost relatives she didn’t know existed. But it could also be, at times, quite harrowing.

“The story is full of painful loss — and I began to understand why my Grandma Anna didn’t talk about it,” Liao said. “Once she brought her children to America, she never spoke of Thomas again. Her view was that in fighting for Taiwan’s independence, he sacrificed the safety of his family and chose not to be a husband and father. For her, his fight for freedom came at great cost.”

All in all, Liao would describe the experience as “bittersweet.”

“It was incredibly satisfying to learn the truth, even though some details would forever be unknowable. But it was also painful, and it took some reckoning to deal with the ramifications of all of this. This is part of why it took so long to write. I had to process it first and make my peace with the past as well,” she explained.

This experience has not turned her off from future exploration and writing. Liao states that she “will always be writing,” and at the moment, she is working on her second book, a “fun, summer-themed novel,” as well as a book detailing the “art of revision” in writing.

Her day job is as a writing lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but she says she definitely “spends nights, weekends and time off working on creative writing.”

That’s why the upcoming release of her book and local event is so close to her heart.

“I feel like I’ve come full circle to be able to do an event at the John Jermain Library celebrating the book,” she said. I’ve worked on writing the book at the library — I am so in love with the second floor Rotunda Room — and I used to work at BookHampton as a bookseller when I was in high school and college.

“Sag Harbor is such a vibrant literary community,” she continued. “It’s a real pleasure to return home to celebrate this book with friends and family.”

Kim Liao will be debuting her memoir, “Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence,” at John Jermain Memorial Library, 201 Main Street, Sag Harbor, on Saturday, September 7, from 2 to 3 p.m. The event is free, but registration is required. To register for the event and find more information, visit johnjermain.org.