關於 ABOUT

Yenling TSAI 

I am a cultural anthropologist and a part-time organic rice farmer based in northeast Taiwan. Seeing  paddy fields as contact zones that weave multi-species relationships, I study how rural pasts and futures have been shaped by human and non-human agencies in cases such as species migration and water management.


Since 2017, I have been tracing the histories of golden apple snails, invasive companions first carried from Argentina to Taiwan in the early 1980s. Their arrival, and the flourishing that followed, transformed not only the ecologies of rice paddies but also the imaginations and labors of those who work them. From Taiwan, I follow their mid-1980s dispersals to Japan and the Philippines, asking how infrastructures of farming, rhythms of rural economies, textures of community life, and the reach of state pest-control regimes have shaped the diasporic pathways of these mollusks. My concern is with how golden apple snails came to dwell differently in each of these places, entangling themselves in development trajectories that diverge, yet remain knotted together across Asia.

Since 2024, my attention has also turned toward another field of tension: the fraught encounters between animal welfare activists and wildlife conservationists in contemporary Taiwan. Here, on the shifting frontlines where humans, stray dogs, and wild animals meet, I follow the daily negotiations of those who struggle to hold life together across irreconcilable demands. In these contested landscapes remade by human presence, I ask what forms of multispecies justice might be possible—and whether imagining such justice can itself be a way of inhabiting the Anthropocene otherwise.