Excerpt from Ghost Month by Ed Lin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Taiwanese also believe China would attack the island should we formally declare independence, mainly because Beijing vowed to. So we maintain a flimsy fiction to the international community that we are citizens of a wayward Chinese province. In the Olympics, we marched as "Chinese Taipei." How embarrassing. We were like the perennial kid in the playground whose mother made him wear a sweater in the summer—only in our case, if we didn't wear the sweater, she was going to invade and kill indiscriminately.

Excerpted from Ghost Month by Ed Lin. Copyright © 2014 by Ed Lin. Excerpted by permission of Soho Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.