Breaking Silences: Using Intimate Biography to Uncover the Lives of Thomas Wen Yi Liao and Mary Mon Toy

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:15 PM. Please visit here to register.

This program’s guests—a first-time author and a veteran novelist—spent decades researching family histories shadowed by war, global politics, and anti-Asian racism. Kim Liao discovered a many-layered story suppressed both in her family and by the Taiwanese government featuring her grandfather, a leader of the Taiwanese independence movement after World War II. Marnie Mueller, born in a Japanese American concentration camp in 1942 and later befriended by Mary Mon Toy, a talented “showgirl” incarcerated in a different camp, became her friend’s executor. After Mon Toy’s death in 2009, a hidden life story emerged that begged to be told alongside Mueller’s own long-concealed history. Learn about “intimate biography” from two authors who are inventing the form.