TAIWAN — Ciwang Teyra grew up in Hualien County, on the eastern edge of the island of Taiwan, where winding roads snake around the edge of mountains and the Pacific Ocean glistens down below.
She was raised in the Indigenous Truku tribe and can recall leaving Hualien County for the first time and encountering Han Chinese people who had never met an Indigenous person before. They would ask her ignorant questions like, "Did you ride a wild boar to get to school?" or refer to her by a derogatory term in Mandarin that roughly translates to "barbarian."
