"The most-positive feedback I've received has been about small, personal stories, like my childhood memories or how my parents nagged me when I made trouble," said Liao, who is now based in Shanghai. "I guess it's because small things remind readers in the mainland of similar experiences they had. By reading my stories, they realized, after all those years, that people across the Straits have fundamentally been living the same life. The ordinary stories about ordinary people bring connections and understanding."

Although cross-Straits exchanges and communications have been increasing steadily over the years, mainland residents still require special documents and permission to visit the island.

Taiwan is in a "special and sensitive time" ahead of January's elections, according to the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, which said the number of tourists from the mainland could decline, leaving literature as an important channel for mainland residents to get to know people living on the other side of the Straits.

Typing "Taiwan" in a keyword search on Amazon China, one of the country's largest online book retailers, prompts more than 9,000 results, twice as many as a search for "Hong Kong".

The cover design of Once Upon a Time in Taiwan shows an envelope bearing the sentence "A letter from a young man in Taiwan to the 1.3 billion folks in the mainland."

The book has garnered more than 1,000 comments on Amazon's site, with one reader writing: "It is a record of the life of an ordinary Taiwan resident, and the social events during the period. It gave me another angle for understanding Taiwan."

Another reader wrote: "The Taiwan I used to know was twisted. After reading this book, I found that their lives are just like ours ... His stories of school reminded me of my own childhood experiences."