Joelle Chevrier

Joelle 蔡雪青 was born and raised in south Florida where she wound up in a high school Chinese class by chance. Unexpectedly falling in love with the language, she then majored in Chinese and East Asian Studies at a quirky little liberal arts “early college” called Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, graduating with a BA at 19. When she arrived in Taiwan in 2014, Joelle intended to get a master’s in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and then head “home” for a career as a language teacher. Instead, she fell in love with Taiwan, discovering a passion for sustainable farming and food at farms across the island, later joining a Taiwanese queer women’s farming collective called Land Dyke where she farmed rice organically for four years. In her early years of farming, Joelle developed community connections for Where There Be Dragons in Yuanshan Township, Yilan that continue to grow and bring Dragons students to her backyard every year.

Now, as a settled member of a vibrant community of farmers and a host of eclectic characters in rural Yilan, Joelle and her wife Mei are “cultivating” the childhood of their energetic, trilingual young child. Working as a freelance translator and educator, Joelle is passionate about environmental, agricultural, and local identity issues and is highly engaged with queer communities and queer families around Taiwan, fighting for true equality for LGBTQ+ families in Asia’s first nation to pass same-sex marriage.

While her work has always been diverse and difficult to define, including working as a documentary assistant, interpreter, invasive snail picker, children’s cartoon translator, production assistant for her wife’s radio show, experiential educator and more, her most important job will always be cooking for and feeding her family and engaging with her community through food.