Jian-Wei Lin

Jian-Wei Lin, 56, is a foreign correspondent who spent twenty-two years in five postings before settling into a writer-at-large role in 2019. He was born in Taipei in 1969 to a mainlander father who came over with the KMT in 1949 and a Hokkien mother whose family had been in Taiwan for four generations, a household where three languages — Mandarin, Hokkien, and the English his father insisted on at dinner — were standard. He studied at NTU and then Columbia Journalism School on a Fulbright in 1992. He was Reuters' Hong Kong staffer through the handover, the FT's Jakarta bureau chief during Suharto's fall, ran the Beijing bureau for the Wall Street Journal from 2003 to 2009, was expelled in the 2009 China Daily flare-up, and went to Mexico City for four years afterward as a way of intentionally choosing a country he knew nothing about. He returned to Taipei in 2014 when his mother got sick and stayed there with his husband Marco, an Italian-Mexican translator he met in Mexico City in 2010 and married in Taipei in 2019, the first month it was legal. He still writes long features for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, has published two books — one on the Indonesian transition, one a memoir of the China expulsion — and is working on a third, slowly, about Taiwan. He is droll, formal in print, openly affectionate in person, refuses social media, and reads three poets in rotation: Tomas Tranströmer, Yang Mu, Octavio Paz. He drinks Taiwanese oolong every morning and Negronis on Friday nights with Marco.