This feature is part of festival month, a series dedicated to celebrating festivals, the people who make them happen and the people who cherish them.

On Friday night at 1 AM, the four of us were at an unmarked bar in Da'an, a southern district in Taipei. There was Neal—a part-time undertaker, mini-cake maker and bao vendor I befriended at Organik Festival—his girlfriend and her best friend, who introduced herself as Pin. "Like the one you put on your shirt," she told me, gesturing towards her collar. Pin was the soft-spoken and doe-eyed owner of the elegant, minimalist bar where we were the only patrons. She poured me my first cocktail of the evening, a home-brewed kombucha concoction. "So is everyone coming with me to Pawnshop?" I asked.

"What is Pawnshop?" she replied. I explained that it was a techno club just four minutes away, only to discover that she had never been to a club in her life—nor knew what electronic music was. "Is it like the beginning scene in the movie Victoria?" she asked, referencing the 2015 Berlin-based thriller about a party girl involved in a bank heist with dire consequences. "Yes, Pin, that's exactly right," I said, "Only hopefully no one is dying tonight." She handed me her iPad. Cutting off Chopin's "Nocturne No. 5 in F-Sharp Major," I played her a few examples of the wide world of electronic music—techno, but also drum & bass, jungle, dubstep and mutations of South African house.

Pawnshop is the perfect introduction to dance music. The club sits in an unmarked location that isn't searchable on Google Maps, a deliberate decision by the owners to maintain its underground status. Consequently, the crowd, who gather through word of mouth or social media connections, are well aware of club etiquette. It's also a manageable size. Upon entering, attendees step into the house room, or "downbar," situated next to a long counter serving fizzy lychee-gin cocktails. Above the dance floor hangs a traditional Chinese painting of a koi pond. Hao Chang, one of the ten co-owners, told me the Mandarin word for "fish" is a homophone for "abundance" or, as he described it, "when there's always more to achieve." After passing an area lined with red leather banquettes, attendees can lose themselves in a strobe-heavy techno floor to the far left corner.

Upon entry, patrons walk into the house room or "downbar," adjacent to a long counter serving fizzy lychee-gin cocktails.

Organik Festival, which launched in 2012, predates Pawnshop. Organik was born a decade ago out of a scarcity of techno representation in Taiwan. Yang believes it was the first festival to focus primarily on the genre—other similar events showcased psytrance, house and tech house. On the Monday after this year's Organik, I sat down with Yang, Hao Chang (Pawnshop's manager), Homing Hsieh (AKA Gemnital, a DJ) and Yoshi Nori Nagano in a red booth at Pawnshop. Everyone except Hsieh are among the club's ten co-owners.

Yang's motivation for organising parties and festivals was simple. "I was going out every weekend," he said matter-of-factly, blinking behind the frames of his thick black glasses. "I just like booking artists." He has a silver septum ring, a closely shorn bowl haircut and a tendency to speak only when necessary. One of his friends once said she wished she had a sound machine that could dispense his signature interjections: "Are you sure about that?" and "Oh really?"

Born and raised in Taipei, Yang played a pivotal role in shaping the city's nightlife through its various evolutions. In 2010, he and Huang started Smoke Machine, a label and event series aimed at establishing techno in the local scene. They found a home for their nights at Korner, a spacious hallway transformed into a club within the The Wall Live House venue, where Yang met Chang and Nagano. Chang was Korner's manager until it closed in 2018 due to financial mismanagement. This experience became a life lesson and later laid the foundation for Pawnshop, which opened its doors in December 2019. As Korner grew in popularity, so did the audience for Organik.

View from behind the booth of the techno-forward "Pawnshop" room.

"[Yang and Chang] realised that instead of having one owner, let's have ten to 15 owners who are our friends who can provide a little from the start," Nagano, a DJ who is also one of the club's stakeholders, explained. "If I go broke, it doesn't affect the club. The roots of Korner remain, but the identity is completely different." That identity is overtly techno-centric and queer, reflecting Yang and Chang's own sexualities. Chang told me, in Mandarin, that there weren't gay nights or parties in Taipei ten years ago.

That's why the Smoke Machine duo founded Spectrum Formosus in 2017, a three-day festival held in the tea fields of Wen Shan high mountain that presented itself as a celebration of LGBTQIA+ culture and Taiwan's diverse electronic music scene. The event ran for three editions until the pandemic hit, and will make a comeback this year in October. According to Chang, Organik—Spectrum's older sister with a more international reach—only evolved into an LGBTQIA+ attraction after 2018 when the queer crowd cultivated at Spectrum and Pawnshop migrated over. Taiwan also had its Pride moment a year later, when it became the first country in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage.

This year's edition of Organik settled in the foothills of Baisha Bay overlooking a windswept coastline about an hour north of Taipei.

In mid-April, Organik relocated for the third time, moving from its previous site on the black volcanic sand beaches of Hualien. This edition settled in the foothills of Baisha Bay, overlooking a windswept coastline about an hour north of Taipei. The nearby town featured a quiet strip of modest hotels and restaurants, including Dazzler's, a pub with fish and chips and prominent Union Jack signage, which unironically delighted my English colleagues.

A festival can represent a country's culture through music, decor, food, customs and atmosphere. In the 16th century, Portuguese sailors named the then-uncharted island of Taiwan, Ilha Formosa, meaning a "beautiful island" for its lush and fertile terrain. Organik conveyed this natural bounty not only through its oceanside location but through its stage design, which was created by Yang and featured dense flora. Swaying tropical palms surrounded the main stage. Bamboo tripods adorned with basket-woven lanterns were scattered throughout the adjacent field. "They look like pineapples!" one reveller exclaimed. The fruit is one of Taiwan's top exports and an auspicious symbol of prosperity. Tendrils of lobster claw, birds of paradise and laceleaf flowers hung over the indoor Red Pillars stage.

Undulating tropical palms encircled the main Organik stage, with the artists Oceanic and Danielle pictured above.

Some of the festival's top locals played in Red Pillars. On Friday there was Toumingren, Chang's DJ alias, who carved through propulsive electro, house and acid. By 11 PM, someone dancing next to me was already sweaty and half-naked. He moved in a way that seemed worlds apart from the militant, robotic motions of familiar Berlin dance floors. His gestures felt, for lack of a better word, organic.

Then there was Nagano's Saturday performance, a crowning moment when the cocktail of kinetic energy, alcohol and music magically came together. The influence of US dance music came through in his brazen selection of Mike Dunn Presents Mr. 69's raunchy "Phreaky M.F. (MD Remix)." Later, I found out that Nagano, who is of Taiwanese and Japanese origin, spent his formative years in Chicago as a student and DJ, hanging around smartbar and the now-bygone Vision.

Yexiao, another Pawnshop DJ, once asked Nagano point blank: "Why do you play so well at Organik and so-so at other places?" He found it hard to explain. "I look at myself as a pure vibe DJ and for the past ten years, Organik always provides the best vibe [because of] the curation," he said. "Another reason I can think of is that I play well in a nature setting."

After Chang at Red Pillars on Friday was the Taiwanese-American Robert Yang, AKA Bézier, formerly of San Francisco house crew Honey Soundsystem. In 2019, Yang told DJ Mag about the inspiration for 府城, a five-track EP recorded in his grandmother's vacant apartment in Tainan. "My saving grace [after losing my father] was travelling with my friends to the US through Asia, leading up to the Taiwanese Organik Festival Hualien," he told DJ Mag.

Yang hadn't visited the country since he was 11, only returning several years later as an adult in 2013. "In the few years leading up to my grandmother's passing I was visiting Asia more regularly trying to reconnect with things I had shunned in the past," he added. "I started looking back again at Asia and Taiwan to unlearn some negative tendencies and habits I acquired growing up in white suburban culture."

Tendrils of lobster claw, birds of paradise and laceleaf flora hung over the indoor Red Pillars stage, where the artist Kerena played.

Bézier's story bears similarities with my own. I'm also from the US and my grandmother, who died two years ago, is coincidentally from Tainan. Until this trip, I hadn't gone back to Taiwan since I was 12, inadvertently estranging a part of myself that was both foreign and yet familiar. The process of unlearning that Bézier mentions also involves unifying two disparate parts of yourself. When racism imprints into the psyche, it's not just painful and humiliating in the moment, but also damaging over time. It compels recipients to betray the cultural heritage that's most capable of healing them, creating a vast gulf between generations. It's a core wound that many Asian Americans and other members of the diaspora share.

My three-week return to my ancestral home began at Organik. There, I felt the relief of no longer being the minority in the crowd. I marvelled at the range of pan-Asian and Taiwanese artists on show, comforted in the knowledge that the lineup wasn't centred around a specific identity due to a lack of representation. Rather, it was a direct reflection of a cornucopia of underground talent. Between sets, I ate quintessentially Taiwanese dishes that I hadn't been able to find or recreate myself since I left New York for Berlin five years ago: pork chop over rice, clear daikon radish broth, and beef gua bao buns topped with sour pickled mustard greens and finely ground peanuts. Asian households are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to words of affirmation, so food is the most evocative form of familial love. It's through the palate that the bittersweet experience of reconnection became most obvious to me.

Organik's food vendors served traditional Taiwanese dishes such as braised beef gua bao buns.

I wasn't the only one who quickly felt a sense of belonging. Organik had a way of humbling many through Taiwan's renowned hospitality. One of my colleagues praised the festival's coordinator for the exceptional communication and organisation, boldly claiming it was "honestly the best, if not the best." Acts of selflessness were commonplace: someone gave me four cigarettes when I asked for one, while a vendor with a shy smile treated me to free lemon tea and even sat with me when I lost my friends in the early hours of the morning.

These gestures reflected Taiwan's overwhelmingly kind atmosphere. During dinner, another colleague recounted an extraordinary encounter with a local resident. After getting stranded while taking a gondola to Maokong, a tea-harvesting district in Taipei, he approached a stranger for help. The man personally drove him to the nearest transportation hub, providing snacks and water along the way. He even pulled out a 1,000 New Taiwan Dollar bill from his wallet to ensure there was enough to cover the return trip to the hotel.

Simone de Kunovich closing out Organik with a three-hour sundown set.

On Sunday, the festival's final day, the churning clouds above stubbornly held back the rain. Clusters of attendees donned their oversized, Pepto Bismol-pink Organik T-shirts and raved barefoot, their hair wild from the wind. Only the main stage was open. Simone de Kunovich played Organik's valedictory three-hour set. During Call Super's set beforehand, the Italian DJ dryly remarked, "He's playing a bit bouncy and euphoric. I think I'm going to go in the opposite direction." While Call Super's selections exuded light and levity, de Kunovich ventured into a penumbra, playing techno with hints of electro and trance. Equiknoxx's "11 AM with Frankie Bubbler " was a highlight, as was the closing track: "Sex On The Beach" by DJ Assault. Lackadaisical vocals floated over handclaps and syncopated kicks, singing, "Let's have sex on the beach / laying in the sand / just you and me hand-in-hand / come on…"

During this final moment, Yang appeared. It was reminiscent of our first encounter at the festival on Friday night. As we stood amid fleeting silhouettes in front of the main stage, he turned and said, "As long as there are happy faces around me, I'm happy."

Revellers with happy faces dance in front of the main Organik stage.