Ex-ICRT news anchor pens Taipei novel

Standridge worked at ICRT at two different periods, she said in a recent e-mail from her home in Seattle, from 1985 to 1990 and from 1995 to 1997.

“My broadcast name was Dana Morgan, and even longtime friends forget that is not my real name,” she added. “Standridge is my maiden name, Roberts is my married name, and my Chinese name is Gui Yilan. Yangmingshan was my home in Taipei. I lived in Bamboo Lake for six years or so and then for my last six years, I lived on Chingshan Road, also in the Yangmingshan area.”

And that’s where Standridge wrote her novel, she said. “Although all places in the novel are fictionalized, which I mention at the outset of the book, it is all about Taipei.”

“I met my husband in Taiwan, too,” she added. “He first went to Taipei on a Fulbright scholarship to study the qin, the ancient instrument the main character in my novel, Teacher Li, plays. Chris was a part of the Soochow University music faculty our last six years in Taiwan, and our son Eli attended the Taipei European School and still misses Taiwan.”

Charlie Dickinson, writing in an online review, noted: “This is not the usual expat novel about a foreigner’s attempts to fold herself into a foreign culture. Standbridge ambitiously creates an aged Taiwanese protagonist, Teacher Li, a retired instructor of traditional Chinese arts, whose soul is the battleground where timeless Asian verities clash with the chaos of the present. In many senses, her book is a traditional psychological novel. What elevates it is painstakingly accurate and faithful observation of Taiwanese daily life as lived by Teacher Li.”

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