Taiwan Travelogue

 

Taiwan Travelogue / Yang Shuang-Zi
trans. from the Mandarin by Lin King
read by Sarah Skaer
Old Saybrook, CT: Tantor, 2025, c2020.

I listened to the audiobook of this recent International Booker prize winner. It was pretty good, although some of the narrator's choices for voices of the different characters grated on me a bit. I got used to it after a while - it's long enough that you can become accustomed! 

It's the story of Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese journalist and novelist who been invited to Taiwan in 1938,by the ruling Japanese government. She wants to get an understanding of this region so plans to stay for a year to get the real feeling of it. As part of this, she is assigned an interpreter - Chizuro is a young woman about her age, who even shares some of the characters in her name. They both love eating, so travel around the country eating local foods, among the official visits and readings that Aoyama must do as part of her contract there. She is delighted with her interpreter and wants to become close friends with her, but there is something that Chizuro always holds back. It takes until the end of the story for Aoyama to grasp why. 

This book was published in Mandarin, presenting itself as a translation of an old Japanese book. This is a clever way to distance the political climate of current Taiwan from Chinese politics but still make a strong point about colonialism and autonomy. It also shows clearly that colonialism is not only political or 'big picture' but that it affects intimate relationships just as much. 

So much for the ideas behind the book. What was my experience reading it? I felt it was a slow burn -- there is so much about food that I found myself getting bored. I think you have to be a real foodie to follow along with Aoyama's culinary experiments with excitement. However, there was enough other detail in the story that I knew there would be a payoff, so continued. I'm glad I did. The last couple of chapters made it all worth it. I can understand how food and regional cooking are also reflections of colonialism, and a visceral, daily way to show its effects. But the lengthy descriptions of food are just not highly interesting to me personally. 

Still, the characters and the relationships were worth following, and the book as a whole was a good read. Glad I was able to find this one to listen to this month!