Before I went to Taiwan this spring, I wanted to read the English translation of Taiwan Travelogue as an introduction to this island that I knew very little about. But a delay in placing my order meant that I didn’t possess the copy in time, and reluctantly, I embarked on that trip without it. While travelling through the western coast of Taiwan, from Yangmingshan National Park and Taipei all the way to Alishan and Tainan, the thought that I was perhaps etching my own travelogue never left me. Only the thought of this book waiting in my letterbox in London could urge me to return.
Taiwan Travelogue is written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ in Mandarin Chinese, as though it were a rediscovered translation of a Japanese text from 1938. Translation, thus, is the elixir that this novel distils itself into, to be drunk before attempting to understand the aspiration for authentic travel, the intimacy between the colonised and coloniser, and the history of Taiwan through culinary and linguistic artefacts. With a generous use of footnotes and liberal annotations, the novel uses the old names of the settlements and cities, and clarifies the different pronunciations of names in both Japanese and Mandarin. These footnotes are utterly useful, drawing readers to an image of Taiwan through language that shimmers, totally uncatchable and yet sought after.
The book begins with a forewarning: the relationship between the two main characters in this story, Aoyama Chizuko and Ong Tshian-hoh, or Chi-chan, is affected by Aoyama’s position as a coloniser, and this notion sits between the spaces of this story. The invented introduction by Hiyoshi Sagako makes this known; they are the words of someone in a limbo between the colonised and the coloniser, a Taiwan-born Japanese.
When the writer Aoyama Chizuko is invited to the Southern Island to do a book tour and simultaneously write a travelogue, she does two things. The first is to roundly refuse to be a spokesperson for the Japanese imperial “Southern Expansionist Policy,” and the second is to declare that she seeks a genuine and lived experience of the island. As a result, each chapter of this book is named after a course in a traditional Taiwanese banquet, and is a discovery of food and the insatiable hunger that the writer feels, to devour the most authentic version of Taiwan possible. But her role as a visitor from Japan becomes a net she cannot escape.
Aoyama-san first meets Chi-chan by accident, when the younger woman inadvertently acts as a translator at the time when the writer attempts to make a purchase in a local market. The distance between them, from then on, is laboriously bridged by Chi-chan, through her linguistic and emotional labour.
Aoyama-san’s bond with Chi-chan, who in fact shares her name when the characters are translated into Japanese, is most special and so, the ensuing heartache of the two characters becomes all the more visceral and layered as they travel and eat together with the “easterly wind” of language carrying them.
In the first half of the novel, their relationship is sweet, increasing in tenderness and reaching a crescendo in the sixth chapter, but the second half reveals tension between the two women. Chi-chan harbours some reservations towards Aoyama-san and her magnanimous advances. In doing so, she isn’t unreasonable, even though we only get to read her perspective once, towards the end of the book. However, for the majority of the novel, we remain as in the dark as Aoyama-san when it comes to Chi-chan’s true feelings, sharing the former’s frustration and yearning. The Mainlander-Islander dynamic between the two schoolgirls that they encounter on the book tour comes close to naming the tension between the two women, but naivete towards their social positions on the part of Aoyama-san serves as a constant hindrance. Their longing is both deep and endearingly childish.
The book has 12 chapters, each named after a course in a traditional Taiwanese banquet, and food is an active character, participating in mediating the two women’s dynamic in the midst of colonial Taiwan. One cannot look away from the unquenchable hunger in Aoyama-san’s stomach — it is mythical. She is ravenous for a true experience, assured that she has permitted herself the self-annihilation of her identity as a Mainlander and a tourist, to truly feel that she is the same as her namesake, Chi-chan, and the other Islanders.
I don’t think she is alone in this transgression, and authenticity in travel is certainly a far too common struggle. In the movie Winter in Sokcho, which is based on the book by Elisa Shua Dusapin, a young South Korean woman is smitten by a French writer and artist who comes to live in her small fishing village. She gives herself to him over and over again — through kindness, offers of home-cooked food, and her own time — seeking to be the bridge between her village and the Frenchman as the only French speaker. She seeks from him things that the “real-life” version of him cannot give to her, but the one in her head possibly could. He appears to adhere to the boundary between the resident and the tourist, even though she tries to erode this constantly, with all her attempts ending futilely. Chi-chan is similar, in that she too is a resident — an Islander — tasked with interpreting for this visitor and writer who has come to Formosa as a representative of Imperial Japan. But Chi-chan’s understanding of their situation is astute, and she works to enforce the boundary between Islander and Mainlander.
In the beginning of the novel, Aoyama-san declines to defend or promote the Empire’s mission that sent her to the southern island, but she ends up doing so through her inherent bias as a visitor. No matter how authentic an experience she yearns for, there are parts of Taiwan and her hosts that remain inaccessible to her; that even quick translation and wit cannot reveal. Her forwardness, brashness, and gallantry make her an entertaining and warm guest, but do not do much to house her inside the context that she desires to understand. Where Chi-chan shows gentleness, charm, and diplomacy, Mishima, the Taiwan-born Japanese bureaucrat assigned to be Aoyama-san’s official guide, is curt and matter-of-fact. He speaks once throughout the novel, in a manner that wasn’t his usual robotic and comically formal way, at a carefully selected moment to make Aoyama-san aware of the “blind spots” that she had not considered in her “arrogance” as a travelling Mainlander. It turns out, Aoyama-san’s praises of the mainland for building transportation links, transplanting sakura trees, and importing other conveniences that she enjoys were concealing a subconscious fidelity to the Empire.
Chi-chan had already alluded to this earlier in the novel, and perhaps desired to explain this to the writer, but their dream-like intimacy stood guard against any such reality. She understood the intent of Aoyama-san’s protective behaviour towards her: the insistence on a kimono, to live comfortably in her house, and to not be treated poorly for her upbringing. And so, she couldn’t explain to her that although these were all heartwarming gestures, they could only be truly received as such by an equal. With the power dynamic that hung between them, these were interpreted as unnecessary protections that were only extended to her on a whim, by a being more benevolent than her.
We struggle with something similar today when a coloniser talks about the gifts bequeathed by their Empire, as though without strings, upon a passive population. But Mishima helps Aoyama-san confront this misplaced assumption at a brutal moment: the separation from Chi-chan. The ensuing loss of appetite is most uncharacteristic for Aoyama-san as she goes through this time of bereavement. She now must acknowledge the underbelly of their relationship: as writer-translator, mainlander-islander, and traveller-resident. With this, the novel unwraps itself towards the end, revealing Chi-chan’s inner world. She cascades into her true self — both in front of Aoyama Chizuko and in front of us as readers. We realise that, just like Aoyama-san, we too never really met the woman behind the “Noh mask.” Even Aoyama-san kept some of her observations a secret from us, revealing them both to Chi-chan and to us at opportune moments — a most exciting manner of narration.
Once through a fictitious translation from Japanese, and twice through a real translation from Mandarin Chinese to English, meaning is picked up like silt in a fast-flowing river, delivered to the reader with sentiment. This novel’s most magical victory is that it persuades a reader without knowledge of Taiwanese Indigenous languages, Mandarin Chinese, or Japanese of the importance of retaining all three. The coloniser and the colonised are subjected to this tension, maintaining a constant pressure on their attempts to be friends and lovers.
In “Amber,” the translator’s note to the 2020 New Mandarin Chinese edition of Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ writes that “a novel is a piece of amber, one that coagulates both the ‘real’ past and the ‘made up’ ideals. It is something that can be visited again and again in its unparalleled beauty.” This novel thus perforates the idea of a travelogue and sews through it a fictionalised, translated mediation of queerness and coloniality, using rich linguistic artefacts. The idea of the original dissolves, inking the deep waters through this piece.
Taiwan Travelogue is metafiction, couched as a clever translation, one that completely grips the value of this nature of work to convey the collective feelings of our condition in the world. A world where the descendants of a colonised people live in countries of their coloniser, read the books of another colonised people, in the language wielded by the coloniser of both.
Upon finishing this book, I couldn’t help but notice the one unfinished journey in Aoyama Chizuko and Ong Tshian-hoh’s promised travels: the sakura of Alishan, and I share their grief that it remains unvisited by the two in this life.
Kovida Mehra is based in London. She writes about memory, landscapes, travel, and extraordinary impulses from ordinary feelings. To read more of her writing, click here.
