The Boy from Clearwater: Book 1

About

The true story of Tsai Kun-lin, born during the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan, who grew up to become a political prisoner on Green Island during the White Terror era. Told in graphic novel form, Book 1 follows Kun-lin from his childhood in a small fishing village through his arrest as a young man — caught up in the anti-communist purges that imprisoned tens of thousands of Taiwanese citizens for decades. Yu Pei-Yun and illustrator Zhou Jian-Xin render this painful history with clarity and compassion, making a complex political era accessible without simplifying it. The graphic format gives faces and landscapes to a history that textbooks tend to flatten into statistics. A book that insists on remembering what an island was pressured to forget.