TaiwaneseAmerican.org
TaiwaneseAmerican.org is a volunteer-driven website and nonprofit (founded 2006) that publishes stories, interviews, and features about Taiwanese America. Official site: taiwaneseamerican.org. Not |taiwaneseamericanhistory.org (TAH Who’s Who).
Identity Snapshot
- Era: 2006–present
- Geography: United States (staff nationwide)
- Core roles: digital magazine; community archive of next-generation Taiwanese American stories
- Founder: |Ho Chie Tsai (蔡和杰) (staff: founding board)
- Editor-in-Chief (staff page): |Leona Chen (陳文羿)
History
Founded in 2006 as a web portal highlighting people, events, and organizations that make up Taiwanese America. About (2026-08-20 archive): it is both a volunteer-driven website and a nonprofit that intends to connect and promote those who identify with Taiwanese identity, heritage, or culture. The staff page states volunteers are based around the country. Founder |Ho Chie Tsai is listed under Executive Board / Founder; |Leona Chen as Editor-in-Chief on the masthead.
Role in the Community
In founder Ho Chie Tsai’s own account (mystories554), the site was created in 2006 “to bring together the growing 2nd generation Taiwanese American community by highlighting the events, organizations, and emerging celebrities and voices of our community.” Beyond publishing, the organization has spearheaded or supported community campaigns documented in the corpus:
- “Write in Taiwanese” 2010 Census campaign — encouraging Taiwanese Americans to write in their ethnic identity on the U.S. Census. Founder Ho Chie Tsai co-produced with a group of young people the video 2010年人口普查–寫下台美 (2009), circulated on YouTube and the site, which inspired many second-generation Taiwanese Americans to write in “台美人” on the 2010 Census (see 楊遠薰’s 2017-09-16 profile of Ho Chie Tsai).
- 100 Passionate People Project — profile series of community figures.
- Our Taiwanese American Story archive — community story archive aligned with the site’s stated value of “preserving and archiving an evolving history and legacy.”
- Platform support for artists, musicians, and actors in non-traditional career paths.
- Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes — announced 2021-02-11, the site’s first creative-writing award for Taiwanese American high-school and college students, co-founded with novelist Charles Yu (游朝凱); winners’ works are published on TaiwaneseAmerican.org, with judges including Shawna Yang Ryan (楊小娜) (see Taiwan Justice, 2026-02-11).
- Voice in the 2021 census-category dispute — Editor-in-Chief Leona Chen spoke for the organization in the September 2021 controversy over a Pew report grouping Taiwanese and Chinese Americans together, in the open letter co-signed by community groups (see Taiwan Justice, 2021-09-26).
The organization was profiled in the TAH.org Who’s Who corpus circa 2015 as a community institution in its own right — see TAH Who’s Who entry 12 and entry 4 (duplicate numbering across corpus editions). In his own Who’s Who profile entry 43, Ho Chie Tsai situates the site’s founding within a longer personal arc: parents who immigrated in 1972 and were active in the Midwestern Taiwanese American community of the 1970s–80s; youth summer camp programs he helped run in the late 1980s–1990s (Midwest and East Coast); co-founding one of the first Taiwanese American student organizations at his university and networking them into the first intercollegiate networks and conferences. By the mid-2010s the site’s Facebook page had passed 16,000 followers, doubling in three years. Author 楊遠薰 (Yang Yuan-hsun)‘s 2017 profile corroborates the site’s founding purpose (“為接觸更多更廣的台美人”) and its role as a community contact hub — Yang himself reached Ho Chie Tsai through the site, and describes it as a communication platform for the second generation reporting on young Taiwanese American artists and cultural creators (see Taiwan Justice, 2017-09-16).
Mission
Official About: To connect, inform and promote the people, events and organizations that represent the next generation of the Taiwanese American community. Vision: an allied community for Americans of Taiwanese heritage by intersecting diverse paths and passions. Values (About): common ground as one segment of America; strength from community; collective identity; highlighting unique experiences while preserving and archiving an evolving history and legacy.
Staff (from about/staff, listed; not all person pages)
| Role | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Founder / founding board | [[people/ho-chie-tsai| | Ho Chie Tsai]] |
| Editor-in-Chief | [[people/leona-chen| | Leona Chen]] |
| Food Editor | Tiffany Ran | Seattle; Babalio pop-up |
| Editorial Director (founding) | Anna Wu | Duke; Daiwan-lang documentary |
| Digital Strategy Director (founding) | Dot Lin | TANG; Dartmouth / Kellogg |
| Outreach Director (founding) | [[people/pamela-hung| | Pamela Hung]] |
| Social Media Director (founding) | Eric Kao | ITASA; TAF |
| Executive Director (founding) | Erica Ling | UCSD; Loyola Law; ITASA West |
| Logistics & Operations | Margaret Chen | ITASA, TANG, TAF |
| Finance Director | [[people/carol-lee| | Carol Lee]] |
| Legal Counsel | Nicholas Huang | Indianapolis attorney — not merged with [[people/nicholas-c-huang| |
| Administrative Assistant to the Board | Grace Liang | TAP Atlanta; Georgia Tech |
| Administrative Director | Kristina Lin | ITASA; NATWA II; GLO |
| Technical Advisor | Wil Chung | listed title only |
Works
Story-corpus on Echopedia: |Historical works · content/works/taiwaneseamerican-org/ — 2,413 harvested story pages as of the 0908 crawl (A/B/C units). Full firehose stays in the vault. Cross-corpus sibling: |TAH story corpus.
Coverage in the vault
- Story corpus: 2,413 harvested story pages under
content/works/taiwaneseamerican-org/as of the 0908 crawl (A/B/C confidence units), indexed at |Historical works index. - Person coverage: 5 of the 14 masthead staff listed above have Echopedia pages — |Ho Chie Tsai, |Leona Chen, |Pamela Hung, |Carol Lee and |Nicholas C. Huang (黄文郁) (Legal Counsel — merge still pending 漢名+bio confirmation).
- Site disambiguation is mirrored on the source hub |TaiwaneseAmerican.org source hub; the story-corpus twin on the TAH side is |TAH story corpus.
- Founder coverage inside the harvested corpus: |Ho Chie Tsai featured on Taiwan543.net — a story page documenting the site’s own founder being profiled by a sister Taiwanese-American outlet.
- Organizational cross-reference: TAHS |Taiwanese American Historical Society shares the community-archiving mission stated in the About values above.