An interview with the author of “Taiwan Travelogue”

The Economist. China has long sought to isolate Taiwan internationally while demonizing those who promote a distinct Taiwanese national identity. But a new generation of Taiwan ese authors is now thwarting those efforts by winning new audiences and accolades across the globe.

Recently, Glass Sight, a novel by German Taiwanese author, Lu Wei Liao, was nominated for the prestigious German book prize.

And in May, Taiwan Travelogue won the Booker International Prize, making its author Yang Shuangze, the 1st Taiwanese writer to receive the award and the 1st to win it for a work originally in Mandarin. I'm Jeremy Page, The Economist's chief China correspondent based in Taipei.

And I'm Sarah Wu, The Economist's China correspondent based in Beijing.

And today on Drum Tower, we meet the author and English translator of Taiwan Travelogue, and we'll be asking, what does a work of historical fiction tell us about Taiwan today and about attitudes towards colonialism in East Asia?

This is Drum Tower.

From The Economist.

Hi, Jeremy. Good to see you.

Great to see you, Sarah. How are things?

Things are good here. I was thinking about you and how you've been practicing for your scooter exam. How are things going?

Not so good, I'm afraid to say. I feel like I should be compiling my own kind of Taiwan travel log about my sorry experiences. I've been crisscrossing the country trying to take this wretched scooter driving exam. So over the last 2 weeks, I've been down to Jiayi.

Oh my gosh.

I'm to Xinjiu, but both times I've failed.

Oh, no. So,

yeah, I'm really really miffed.

Jiayi is so far to go for a scooter exam.

I know. It feels kind of ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as failing when everyone else who sits at the same time as you passes. If

it's any consolation, 1 of my best friends in Taiwan failed her scooter exam, I think, like, 7 times. But now she is really loving going into the mountains and to the beach, so hang in there.

I think that's a comforting thought. Hopefully, it won't take me 7 times.

Thank

you. Yes. In every sense. Yeah. Today, we are talking about Taiwan Travelogue.

This is a fictional travel diary written in

the voice of Aoyama Shizuko, a Japanese female writer who is invited to Taiwan to do a book tour and to travel around the country. And this is during Japanese colonial rule in the 19 thirties. She also eats an awful lot of food

and develops a slightly complicated relationship with her local guide and interpreter.

Yeah. So much food. That was the 1st thing I heard about the book. People told me they got hungry while reading it.

Yeah. I certainly did.

And we'll get into why Yang Songzi decided to make food almost like a protagonist of the book later on. But going back to 2020 when the book 1st came out in Mandarin, it named Songzi as the translator and Aoyama as the author.

That's right.

And some readers really thought that they were reading a long lost document that actually ruffled a few feathers in Taiwan.

Right. That had to be clarified a little, but it ended up being extremely well received in Taiwan where it won the Golden Tripod Award, which is the highest literary honor here. And then this year, it won the Booker International Prize, which goes to the author and the translator of a work of translated fiction. So it was shared between the author Yang Shuangfe and the translator Lin King. So it obviously generated enormous amount of attention in Taiwan, but it was also very striking because there've been several authors from Mainland China who have broken through into the sort of international market over the years including Mo Yan who famously won the Nobel back in 2012.

Also Liu Zixin whose 3 Body Problem later came to sort of wider fame when it was adapted into a Netflix series. But until now, authors from Taiwan haven't really had the same degree of success. Right?

Yeah. We're only starting to see them take off on the international stage. They do have a small following in China. My Chinese friends really like to read Chinese language books by authors in Taiwan, in Malaysia. And even though this book is unlikely to get published within China, some readers, especially the more cosmopolitan crowd, the cultural elite, can still get their hands on a copy.

Yes. That's right. And in fact, at 1 point, somebody put the question to a Chinese official about whether this book could 1 day be published on the Mainland, and the response was that Taiwanese authors should squarely face up to the history of Japanese colonial aggression and write things that help to promote cross straight relations. So I don't think that bodes particularly well for the book's official prospects on the mainland.

Yeah. And even though that's the official government stance on this book, the range of opinions online has been more varied. So when I was going through the commentary and the posts, there's still a lot of praise for the book, for the superb food writing. There's praise for postcolonial novels and really delving into these tricky periods. And interestingly, there is a lot of discussion about how to get copies of the book.

So I think a lot of Chinese people who want to read books not published on the Mainland, they will get PDF somehow. But online, there's discussions of getting these books through secondhand market. So I think the people that this book does get through to within China have a more diverse set of views.

Yeah. I think it's fair to say there's also been quite a lot of criticism on social media from within Mainland China. People saying that this sort of glorifies Japanese colonial rule in the 19 thirties, a period when Japanese forces had also occupied much of the Mainland and indeed were responsible for a series of atrocities there. And we're also seeing some of that tension spilling into the international arena. Just at the beginning of October, the author Yang Chuanze was at an event in Munich to promote the book, discuss it, and apparently according to some reporting, the Chinese consulate in Munich called up the venue and tried to get it shut down.

There was also a suggestion that the interpreter who was hired then failed to translate some of the more politically sensitive terms from Chinese into English and vice versa. So, you know, I think that speaks to the level of sensitivity about the subject matter particularly in Mainland China.

Yeah. And I think it reflects that this has just been a huge soft power win for Taiwan. After the Booker win, Taiwan's president, Lai Qingde, met with the author and translator. And I remember photos from that reception being shared by my Taiwanese friends on social media. There was this immense sense of pride.

And Lai had vowed to build a so called national team to take Taiwanese literature global. It's really interesting to see Taiwan diversifying from only this chip diplomacy with their semiconductor prowess to thinking more about culture and literature. And the culture ministry has been quick to point out that they've played a big role in this. They funded the book tour in The US. They funded translation programs and grants for writers such as.

So the culture ministry has really praised this book for lifting Taiwan's global profile.

And it must be infuriating for the Chinese government because they have invested billions over the years in soft power with pretty mixed success, I think. Even though some of those Chinese authors I mentioned have been extremely successful on the international market, the Chinese government hasn't always really known how to dealt with that because some of those books delve into some complex issues that don't always fit too comfortably with official Chinese narratives. So you haven't really seen a simultaneous effort by the Communist Party to really sort of embrace and promote those authors.

Mhmm.

And I think they're also probably unhappy because of the subject matter because it promotes a narrative of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, which doesn't really fit with the communist party's official history, which focuses very much on Japanese wartime atrocities. I think that's 1 of the things that interested me most about it because it was 1 of the 1st cultural works that I've encountered here which really tries to examine this period in Taiwan and also to try to unpack maybe public attitudes both in Japan towards Taiwan but vice versa. You'll know this, Sarah. 1 of the striking things about coming here to Taiwan, especially if you've spent a lot of time in China, is that Japanese influence is incredibly strong and attitudes towards Japan are pretty positive in general. You see that all around you when you've just walked the streets, there's lots of Japanese colonial architecture, even the headquarters of the presidential administration is an old Japanese colonial building and a lot of old transport infrastructure, industrial facilities that were built by the Japanese and you can still see here.

But you see it also in the food, in the way that people interact, in the bureaucratic culture. Yeah. So I think the relationship between Taiwan and Japan is very, very different from that between China and Japan.

And in the Taiwanese case, it's especially interesting because I think the Japanese rule is so often compared to what comes after. You had the white terror period with martial law and these really politically repressive years under the Kuomintang. And now today, I think a lot of the Taiwanese are thinking about threats from China. And so I think in comparison to what comes after so many Taiwanese end up viewing that Japanese period more favorably even if complex feelings still remain.

Yes. That's right. And, course, it's not that there weren't Japanese atrocities under its colonial ruling in Taiwan. There absolutely were. But I think it's fair to say that they were more severe and more widespread on the mainland in the Nanjing Massacre, for example.

Yeah. Absolutely.

The fighting on the mainland during the 2nd world war was also more severe. It caused more destruction, civilian casualties. But it's also true that in that 50 year period of Japanese colonial rule, 1895 to 1945, the Japanese invested a huge amount in modernizing Taiwan's infrastructure and industry, and that formed the foundation for the Taiwanese economic miracle from the 1950s onwards. The other really interesting thing about this book is that it explores some of these issues about colonialism through the medium of food. It describes the main protagonist, this touring Japanese author as having a monstrous appetite.

And so she works as a metaphor for colonial resource extraction. But this also becomes a vehicle exploring the layers of history and culture in Taiwan and also the power dynamics and the evolving relationship between the author and guide and translator.

Reading it, it really made me think of the foods I missed from Taiwan. And as I was thinking about the types of food that I miss, each is related to a history, to migration. So whether it's like the haka restaurants... I love the haka restaurants in Taiwan.

Yeah. Me too.

Yeah. So then you're thinking about. 1 of my favorite stands in Taiwan was, so Onagiri stand. So that's related to Japanese history there. Or you think about Taiwan's known for its beef noodle soup, and that's a Weissenan dish.

And so there's this really interesting history of when you have these people, these Kuomintang veterans coming, what types of food they bring to the island.

1 of my favorite restaurants here is actually 1 that specializes in the kind of cuisine that was served originally on military camps here for soldiers who had come with the Kuomintang from all corners of China. They wanted their local dishes. So these camps became famous for producing a kind of simplified, maybe a little bit ersatz version of famous dishes from every corner of China, and you can still find some of these restaurants around Taiwan.

Yeah. Not even just every corner of China, but even the people who are based in Southeast Asia. There's Little Burma. The food there is really good, but also that comes with a really fascinating history

Mhmm.

Of the KMT there. So all of this is to say, I think it's really smart that they had picked food as a vehicle to explore many of these entangled histories.

Right. And those tangled histories are also encapsulated in the translation of these dishes because the names are mostly transliterated from the original Hokkien or Mandarin or Japanese rather than being translated into English. That was a deliberate decision by the translator because partly she says, you know, it's difficult to find the right words in English to describe some of these dishes, but also she wanted to reflect those layers of history and language that are reflected in the names of these dishes and to avoid a sort of cultural flattening that would come through translating them all into English, the dominant linguistic medium of the world today.

I think that decision to keep more of the original language really does help convey just how layered these histories are in Taiwan. And you got to meet both Swang Zi and Lin King who translated Taiwan Travelogue into English. What were they like?

Well, 1st of all, they're extremely gracious and generous with their time. We had a really interesting discussion. We met in a fabulous little bookstore, stroke cafe. As you'll know, Sarah, there are lots of these places in Taiwan and they are just delightful places to hang out. This is called Athena Books in sort of West Downtown Taipei, and we had a really fascinating conversation.

Shuang Zi and Lin King, welcome to Drum Tower. It's fantastic to have you on the show. And I wanted to start by asking you, Shuang Zi, in particular, why did you choose this particular period to set the novel?

I think a lot of contemporary writers, myself included, are revisiting the Japanese colonial era and it's not because we feel nostalgia for Japan's colonial regime or wish to summon it back, that would be completely wrong. Whether we are working to recover what kind of world, what kind of political situation Taiwanese people actually want. To put in more academic terms, we are trying to reclaim Taiwanese subjectivity. What does Taiwanese subjectivity mean? When we are forced to go back and sort through our experience of the Japanese colonial period, the martial law era of The Republic Of China was even more like a colonial government system.

When the state does things to us, are we simply supposed to accept them or should we exempt them, disentangle ourselves from them and then discuss what kind of country and what kind of future Taiwanese people actually want. I think this is what we are doing now, recovering our subjectivity and discussing how much consensus we can build going forward and where we will work together from here.

Lin, I wanted to ask you as well, how did you approach these very complex sensitive issues in translating this work which combines Mandarin and Japanese and Taiwanese Hokkien, of which are in some ways legacies of a colonial rule in the past in Taiwan's history. And I was wondering if you could talk in particular about how you approach that in relation to translating names of people and places.

Yeah. I went back and forth with my US publisher, Gray Wolf Press, and we decided there's no other way to do it. If you wanted to maintain this premise of it being a historical text, you have to use the historical names. And I think oftentimes in the Western world when we're reading translated literature from, say, Europe or South America, we're not as avoidant about using maybe their ancient names. Somehow, this felt like a higher hurdle for East Asian literature.

There's an instinct of we just wanna get our message across. We don't wanna confuse people more than necessary. But what if it is necessary to go into the weeds of these complexities in order to understand the story, which I think in this case, it was necessary. So we retained the accurate Japanese colonial pronunciations for all the Japanese spoken and then as much as possible for all the other languages spoken in Taiwan, whether that's or Haka, we tried to transliterate in a way that was accurate to what the characters are actually saying, maybe at the expense of some readers who just wanted a breezy read.

Another very important theme in the book is food, of course. And I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading all these descriptions of these fabulous Taiwanese dishes, and I'm determined to try every single 1 before I leave. Food plays this very central role in the book. It provides a structural role. It's also important conceptually.

Every chapter is named after a different dish, but it's also a vehicle for exploring the relationship between Japan and Taiwan, the relationship between Aoyama and Chizuru. Can you tell me why did you choose to use food in this way as the primary vehicle through which to structure the book and to explore these themes?

Food plays a very big role in this novel. You could almost say it is the protagonist. There are 2 ways of explaining why I needed to give food such a prominent place. The 1st is that Taiwanese people love to eat, but perhaps we are rather dismissive of ourselves. When it comes to presenting Taiwan to the world, it can sometimes feel as though we have nothing to talk about except food.

There's a certain self deprecation. But what I want to say is that food is really important to Taiwan. A large part of the reason is that different groups of people have come and gone and we have been shaped by many different regimes. Our geographical position has also brought a great deal of maritime trade to Taiwan. So Taiwan has developed a distinctive local culture through this repeated process of things arriving and departing.

Food has preserved traces of all that history. In that sense, food is a slice of history. When we talk about food, the fact that so many people love food is actually something cultivated by this environment, but we don't know why we have this food culture. So I hope I can talk more about food culture, its substance, its historical depths, its horizontal connections. That's why food matters so much.

That's the 1st point. The 2nd thing I wanted to explore is the relationship between food and women. Most of the time we think of women as the people who prepare food. In that role women tend to be seen as caregivers or as people who serve others. But I also wanted to explore the adamant of desire content in food.

Do women have desires of their own? When we talk about human desire, appetite and sexual desire are 2 of our most distinctive forms of desire. So in the novel I use appetite as an explicit symbol of female desire. By talking about women's appetites, I can also talk about women's pursuit of their ideas, of what they want from the world, and of their own personal desires. I wanted to emphasise the fact that women have desires too.

Women have aspirations of their own. In the past, very little attention was paid to that.

I read in another interview which you did that you had originally hoped that this could be published in China. 1st of all, I wanted to check if that's true. And if so, I wanted to ask what you were hoping for there. What do you think you could achieve by having the book published in China? And what way do you think that could contribute to communication and understanding between the 2 sides of the Taiwan Strait?

A large part of why I hope Chinese readers will read this book is that I think the way Chinese people view Taiwan is much the same as the way colonizers view a colony. If some of them are interested in reading this book, I imagine they probably have a greater degree of cultural or literary awareness. And perhaps after reading it, they will realize something. Even if China is economically powerful, even if China decides to treat Taiwan very well, it still cannot work. As long as the relationship exists within a colonial system, this kind of yearning, this kind of goodwill, these things bestowed from the top down can never produce a relationship of equals.

So if there is some truth that I'm trying to convey through writing this fictional novel, it is this: We don't need you to be powerful. It means nothing. We simply don't need it.

Do you think that's particularly important now given the state of relations across the Taiwan Strait? It's quite a tense time. So how important do you think improving understanding on both sides is and what role do you think literature can play in that?

I have 2 conflicting feelings about this. On the 1 hand, I place my hope in literature's power to communicate. On the other, I also know that literature is extremely slow and fragile, that it cannot truly shift the political situation. But I do think there's a possibility culturally of creating a particular kind of space, the literary space, in which we can try to talk about what each of us needs. At the very least, we can then know what Taiwanese people want.

We want freedom, we want equality, and we want the right to decide our own future. At least in literature, we can immerse ourselves in that possibility.

I'm sure you're aware that some of the criticism from within China, there's been some positive criticism. There's also been some negative criticism, including some comment from the government. There was from the Taiwan affairs office, I think, not a very lengthy comment, but they said something along the lines that you needed to sort of correctly understand Japan's role in the past. But I think the more obvious thing has been the sort of criticism amongst nationalist voices online in China, which have accused you of whitewashing Japanese colonial rule here and even having Stockholm syndrome. Tell me, were you surprised by that, and how do you respond to it?

As for this book receiving parallels reviews in China, I'm not surprised at all, although the positive reviews did surprise me a little, just a little. But I'm glad to see them discussing it extensively, or even having 2 extremely opposing views debating each other. That's fine too. Because what I actually hope is that when Chinese readers read a book like this, they might become aware of the relationship between government and people that within the real social landscape of China itself, there's actually a bit of colonial undertone as well? Could I even think about their own internal colonialism?

In other words, the behaviour of the Han ethnic majority toward other ethnic groups almost constitutes the exact same pattern: a powerful, friendly, self righteous kind of goodwill. Would they have any opportunity for self reflection? And how do they in turn treat different ethnic groups within their own country? So rather than caring about how they evaluate me, I don't care about that. What I care about is whether this book produces any real emotional shift in them.

Then do you have any thoughts on that as well? Was that something you were conscious of when you were translating, particularly in terms of how sympathetic you make Dayama's character? She's quite a likable figure at the same time as you convey... Well, at the same time as you convey her prejudices, her condescension Yeah. And her appetite.

Yeah. She is quite likable, and I wondered if that was... You were ever concerned that as an embodiment, she's sort of the embodiment of Japanese colonial attitudes. She was coming across as too sympathetic in a way.

When I 1st read the book, I thought she was so annoying up until, spoiler alert, there's a turning point where she's really put in her place, and that made me like the book. I was not enjoying the book very much until that point because then I finally saw that this is a deeply, historically, and politically critical work because if you get through to, I think, it's chapter 10, you'll see that it isn't at all an endorsement of Japanese colonialism and so much so that when we did an event in Tokyo, there were Japanese readers who came and apologized to us just on behalf of their people. The book, I think, is very much an admonishment of even if you think you are a good colonizer, there is no such thing.

Lynn, you were raised and educated between Taiwan and The US. As I understand it, you still split your time between them. So from your perspective, why do you think this book in particular resonated so much with American audience, British audience, other sort of English language speakers? What do think is the appeal?

I think, at least in The US education I received, and I think based on conversations I've since had with readers from North America, from Western Europe, from Australia, India, that we were educated with a much more prominent consciousness of the postcolonial narrative of anti imperial themes. But in East Asia, I feel like we don't talk about it as much. And in Taiwan's online discussions of Taiwan travelogue, I didn't see as many people talking about colonialism actually compared to when later on when we went to The UK especially, more so than The US. I think in the context of these big countries where a lot of people are immigrants, there's sort of a quicker access to a lot of these themes, it seems. We worked in Edinburgh for the book festival, received a lot of positive criticism, positive feedback from people who support Scottish independence.

You know, I think these are themes that are percolating in lots of these parts of the world that have layers of governance of different regimes that still feel really fresh to the collective memory. And, yeah, in a way, those discussions happen more outside of Taiwan than inside Taiwan, I think.

Fabulous. Yang Shuang Zi, Lin King, thank you so much for being on Drum Tower.

Thank you. Thank you.

Sarah, I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on that interview, but also I was wondering whether you feel that this book made you think differently about Taiwan or Japanese colonial rule or imperialism in general?

Yeah. I mean, both the book and the interview, I think it was really a treat to hear from both of them and some of their thinking behind it. And I completely agree with Lin that it's a really important historical political book through this relationship that takes us along. And I think it gets at that question that Sun Tzu put so eloquently around Taiwanese subjectivity. When I was living in Taiwan, I felt frustrated by how so much of media coverage on Taiwan is not really trying to figure out what Taiwan wants.

It's analyzed through this broader geopolitical lens. And I think part of that is it's really hard to understand what Taiwan wants because Taiwan is so diverse. Reporting on different stories that you just hear a real spectrum of views. It's not just green and blue KMT, DPP across age, across family histories. It's all really complicated.

But I do think this book is an argument for trying to get closer to understanding what the Taiwanese people themselves want.

Yes. I'd absolutely agree. Shuang Tze spoke very eloquently on that point. I was also very struck by what they both said about colonialism, listening to them talk and reading the book as a British person who spent a lot of time reporting in South Asia and in China. I've had to think a lot about the legacy of British imperialism in those places and how it shapes society and politics both back home in The UK but also across South Asia and to this day in China.

But you can also see shades of this in the way that the communist party deals with ethnic minorities within China and indeed in the way that it deals with Taiwan. I think there's 1 thing that the book didn't really get into which was the dynamics within Taiwan itself. Its relationship with Chinese imperialism because as you were talking about earlier, have this tension in Taiwanese society between the people who arrived from the Mainland in 1949 with the Kuomintang who came from across China and the people of Chinese heritage, mostly Han Chinese but who had been living in Taiwan for many decades, not centuries, from the 17th century onwards. There's also attention between those 2 groups and the indigenous population of Taiwan, which accounted for most of its people before the 17th century, but now only about 2 or 3%. They are not Chinese at all.

They are Austronesian ethnolinguistic terms. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of that, but perhaps that's asking too much. I mean, there are really so many layers in the book. And there are many other books which deal with that subject matter, but I thought that was in some ways glossed over a bit.

Yeah. I think that's a really good point because in the interview, Song Tzu talks about how she hopes this relationship between the Japanese author and the Taiwanese interpreter could also prompt reflection from the Chinese side about their relationship with the Taiwanese. And like you said, it could also prompt reflection on that relationship between the descendants of those who came after '49 and, for instance, the indigenous groups in Taiwan. And I think this book just really makes you think about how Taiwan is grappling with so many of these questions around power dynamics, around colonialism, not just in the context of the Japanese Taiwanese relationship, but with its relationships with China, with the West, and indigenous groups at home. This book also made me think of when I was based in Hong Kong, how British rule was viewed and discussed in comparison to Chinese rule.

And so this book that has these 2 women, this Japanese author and Taiwanese interpreter, talking about food, it's kind of incredible how it expands and touches on so many of these critical questions of our day.

I think it was also really refreshing just to have a work from a different corner of the Sinosphere. It's easy to overlook the much broader Chinese speaking world, including Hong Kong and Taiwan and the overseas Chinese community, which is even more diverse. It reminded me in a way of those films from Taiwan that achieved such success in the 19 nineties when I was a student learning Chinese. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and The Wedding Banquet in particular.

So good.

Directed by Ang Lee who went on to become big in Hollywood of course. But at the time, they really introduced Taiwan for many people for the 1st time to a sort of international audience and did it also through the medium of food to a large extent, which was a very important character in both films. So I thought of that several times in reading this book.

Yeah. And I'm really glad you brought up films. Those film directors from the eighties to early odds, so many of their films dealt with these kind of darker periods of Taiwanese history, A Brighter Summer Day or A City of Sadness. These are really powerful films that explore these moments in Taiwanese history that still have huge ramifications for politics and identity today. I remember 1 of my favorite shows in Taiwan was a retrospective on Edward Yang.

His film EE is 1 of my favorites. But I think just walking through all of these rooms with his films, it's this incredible space to explore these lived experiences during these periods. And Swang Zi kind of talks about literature being slower and affecting change. But whether it's literature or film, culture plays a really important role in creating space for discussion when politicians aren't talking or, when things are at a standstill in other arenas.

Great. Well, thank you, Sarah, for joining me for this episode. That's almost it for today. But if you enjoyed this episode and want to share it with someone who isn't already a subscriber, a reminder that you can do so by finding the episode on The Economist app, clicking the share button, and then selecting give as a gift.

And as always, you can email us on drum@economist.com, like Minna from Taiwan who enjoyed our recent Jensen Huang episode.

But for now, thank you for listening to Drum Tower. This episode was produced by Lucy Raw and Jie Hao Chen. Our editor is Rosie Gillett. Hannah Marino is our executive producer. Sound design is by Ting Li Lin, and Drum Tower's music was composed by Jocelyn Tan.

Shengfu Chen provided dubbing for this episode.