Name: Suzie's review of Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi
Item: Taiwan Travelogue
Rating: 3.5
Author: Suzie

Yang Shuang-zi

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

Taiwan Travelogue

Suzie

Srigata 

I fell in love with this book 10 pages into it and it continued to astound me all the way through its final translator's note. Immediately, I knew I wanted to shout about it to the whole world and beg for everyone in my life to read it. Being half-Taiwanese, I have heard slivers of stories from my dad's family on the time in which this novel is set, but Yang makes such a strong decision to set this one from the perspective of the Japanese colonizer who doesn't think of herself as such; in a way, I found myself relating to the narrator more as a born-and-raised American than as a descendant of the colonized Taiwanese, an ugly understanding that made me burst into tears throughout the final two chapters. But I don't think one needs to have a personal history with Taiwan or Japan in order to find meaning in this novel. We live in a world shaped by colonization and imperialism and and exploitation and imbalanced power dynamics and 

 has so much to say on all of that. Yang is such a talented writer (and King such a deft translator! Truly, I was awed by how her English translation added to the layers of language and metafiction so crucial to the story) that I had to pause every few pages to take notes on her writing. The characterization in this book is brilliant. Yang's physical descriptions are so lush. I obsessed over the complexities of the relationship between Aoyama-san and Chi-chan. Even the introductory note and afterwords are genius.

alice

I fell in love with this book 10 pages into it and it continued to astound me all the way through its final translator's note. Immediately, I knew I wanted to shout about it to the whole world and beg for everyone in my life to read it. Being half-Taiwanese, I have heard slivers of stories from my dad's family on the time in which this novel is set, but Yang makes such a strong decision to set this one from the perspective of the Japanese colonizer who doesn't think of herself as such; in a way, I found myself relating to the narrator more as a born-and-raised American than as a descendant of the colonized Taiwanese, an ugly understanding that made me burst into tears throughout the final two chapters. But I don't think one needs to have a personal history with Taiwan or Japan in order to find meaning in this novel. We live in a world shaped by colonization and imperialism and and exploitation and imbalanced power dynamics and Taiwan Travelogue has so much to say on all of that. Yang is such a talented writer (and King such a deft translator! Truly, I was awed by how her English translation added to the layers of language and metafiction so crucial to the story) that I had to pause every few pages to take notes on her writing. The characterization in this book is brilliant. Yang's physical descriptions are so lush. I obsessed over the complexities of the relationship between Aoyama-san and Chi-chan. Even the introductory note and afterwords are genius.

Suzie &
Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi

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Suzie &Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi

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Join the club

Suzie &
Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi