The book Taiwan’s COVID-19 Experience: Governance, Governmentality, and the Global Pandemic, edited by Ming-Cheng M. Lo, Yu-Yueh Tsai, and Michael Shiyung Liu, offers a comprehensive and thought-provoking analysis of Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As someone drawn into researching the social, political, and gendered effects of COVID-19, I approached the book with a sense of ambivalence. The pandemic remains a fraught subject—personally and collectively—marked by traumatic losses and enduring inequalities. At the same time, it also feels strange to revisit it in the so-called post-pandemic era. Documenting these moments is vital, not only to preserve a record of the past but to draw lessons that might save lives in the future. This sentiment is underscored by Taiwan’s own experience with the SARS epidemic in 2003, which exposed the weaknesses in its public health system and set the stage for the reforms that enabled Taiwan’s rapid response to COVID-19, as many authors in this book have also emphasized.
