Between 2017 and 2018, photographer Pei-Yi Lin and I kept returning to Yilan — Sanxing, Luodong, Nan'ao — sitting in kitchens and rice mills, listening, and coming home with notebooks full of other people's lives.

Two stories became garments. In the rice fields we met generations of women whose hands keep the farms running; for them I reworked the cheongsam, loosening its formality into something you could actually labor in. In Nan'ao we traveled with Jing-Ren Wang, a young Atayal river-tracing guide, and made a piece about carrying an old identity inside a new life.

We showed the work in Taipei in March 2018. More than any garment, what stayed with me is the habit it built: start from listening.