Early in Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, the narrator, on a late night time practice, watches her touring companion turn into engrossed in a e-book. When she asks about it, the girl balks on the interruption. “Her soul,” the narrator observes, “appeared to fit again into her physique.” A very good e-book can briefly steal your soul, changing it with its personal.
However some books make you combat for that privilege; Taiwan Travelogue is one. Translated from Mandarin by Lin King, the novel about love, colonialism, conflict, and meals—which this week gained the Nationwide E-book Award for translated literature—is deliberately constructed to make its soul tough to find. The e-book is framed as a brand new Mandarin translation of an autobiographical 1954 Japanese novel by the writer Aoyama Chizuko, which was itself based mostly on her earlier assortment of journey columns. (Chizuko is a fictional creation; the unique Mandarin version of Taiwan Travelogue sparked controversy by itemizing her as its writer, and Yáng because the translator.) It’s supplemented with footnotes by Yáng, in addition to notes by Chizuko and numerous (fictional) students.
All these layers of commentary serve to make the story’s emotional middle tougher to entry, and extra fulfilling when you’ve earned it. The novel follows Chizuko as she spends a yr in Japan-colonized Taiwan beginning in 1938. Whereas engaged in a lecture tour organized by the colonial authorities, she writes journey dispatches in an try to understand one thing of the true nature of her host nation. She tries, as nicely, to study the true nature of the interpreter who serves as her information, a younger Taiwanese lady who, underneath the colonial authorities, has been given the identify Ō Chizuru.
From the beginning, Chizuru enchants Chizuko. (The novel makes a operating joke of the similarity of their names.) She is mild however steely, warmhearted however reserved, full of unusual data and pursuits, enormously expert at hiding her emotions. Chizuko’s emotions for Chizuru, which stay purposely ambiguous—she refers to them as friendship, however they sound like romantic love—come to dominate her time in Taiwan. She is a blunt lady, who bluntly needs two issues: to find the supply of “the resilience and vitality that coursed by means of this formidable colony,” and to be nearer to Chizuru.
Chizuko’s chosen instrument in each investigations is meals. In her mid-20s—only some years older than her information—and already a famend novelist, she is obsessive about consuming: Her household teases her that she has a monster’s urge for food. Upon her arrival in Taiwan, she is decided to eat her method to the guts of the island. She just isn’t inquisitive about losing her time with the standard Japanese meals typically eaten by visiting “mainlanders”—a time period used all through the novel to consult with the colonists—however as an alternative within the island’s delicacies, from the richest delicacies to the only stews. And over these meals, she tries to determine her enigmatic translator and kind a real connection.
In attempting to know each island and interpreter, Chizuko finds at finest partial success. However her gustatory quest for intimacy nonetheless yields perception—primarily into the ways in which style, amongst all of the senses, most defines the essence of an individual. It does so partially by tying them to the time and place during which they dwell.
However when your homeland has been underneath overseas management for hundreds of years, your tastes are inevitably formed by that actuality—by the culinary traditions the colonizers deliver with them, and by the makes an attempt to take care of conventional flavors within the face of erasure. Chizuko sees Taiwan—managed by a collection of rulers together with the Dutch, China’s Qīng dynasty, and Japan—as a land of wonders in want of preservation earlier than they’re overcome by compelled assimilation and modernization. Chizuru gently factors out that colonialism has already turned a lot of Taiwan’s native tradition right into a relic of historical past. “How far again ought to one go when lamenting such cruelties?” she asks.
Chizuko is proudly against Japan’s imperialism. She insists on consuming completely every part that represents the “true” Taiwan, all the way down to a soup comprised of jute leaves, historically fare for the very poor, that Chizuru bluntly says “doesn’t style good.” However, it seems, Chizuko is adventurous solely as long as she feels safe in her personal id. Late within the novel, she is compelled to take a transparent have a look at how a lot her privilege as a mainlander has made her oblivious to the experiences of others, and the way simply the directness she prizes in herself can come throughout as coercive. Together with her sense of self painfully disrupted, she turns to the meals of residence, shortly abandoning her curiosity within the recent, shocking delicacies of Taiwan. “I ate solely neko-manma rice”—a dish {that a} footnote by Yáng describes as “easy Japanese family fare”—“egg over rice, or white toast with sugared butter,” she writes.
There may be an extra, complicating story behind Chizuko’s travelogue turned novel. Her preliminary columns about Taiwan had been written in 1938 and 1939, within the lead-up to World Conflict II; when she revisits this materials within the early Fifties to put in writing Taiwan Travelogue, it’s her personal nation that’s occupied—by the victorious Allied forces led by america. The top of the conflict meant the tip of Japan’s rule in Taiwan, a rupture that appears to have provoked, for Chizuko, a way of non-public loss: Her connection to an island that she had as soon as seen as a brief second residence was severed. It’s simple to think about that the tough expertise of life underneath one other nation’s occupation prompted her to revisit a second during which she herself had represented a colonial energy with out actually understanding her complicity.
Yáng has structured her novel like a matryoshka doll: an easy story surrounded by many twisting layers of thriller. Probably the most profound of these mysteries is Chizuru, herself an knowledgeable at attending to the core of issues. She is perpetually proven within the act of peeling or shelling meals that she then gives Chizuko. Roasted seeds referred to as kue-tsí, peanuts, fava beans, lychees, candy potatoes: She is consistently navigating previous spiky, powerful, finicky exteriors in order that Chizuko can benefit from the treats inside. Because the duo journey and eat their manner round Taiwan, with Chizuru at all times peeling, peeling, peeling, Chizuko tries to do some unearthing of her personal, making guesses at who this fascinating, discreet lady actually is.
Ultimately, Chizuko can not absolutely get to know her inscrutable companion with out first studying the reality about herself, which Chizuru ultimately helps her see. That reality: Energy—even when wielded unintentionally—obscures, making those that have it much less perceptive concerning the world round them. There’s a cause that Chizuko at all times mangles her makes an attempt to extract a delicacy from its shell—“regardless of enlisting each my fingers and my enamel, I might barely fish out the seeds” of a lychee, she writes—whereas Chizuru makes that work look easy. Solely one among them has needed to study the artwork of subtlety, the instrument of the disempowered.
Right now, Taiwan is autonomously ruled, however not acknowledged by most nations as unbiased. Within the days earlier than the American presidential election, China, which has in recent times ramped up intimidation towards the island, meaningfully steered that Donald Trump would flip his again on Taiwan’s protection if he returned to workplace. The reminder of Taiwan’s precariousness, perpetually prone to the whims of the larger powers invested in it, lends extra gravity to Taiwan Travelogue. Inside Yáng’s powerful evaluation of her well-meaning and essentially likable narrator lies a plea for introspection on the a part of the highly effective, and a reminder of what’s at stake when that duty is uncared for.
In a single quiet, telling scene, Chizuru takes Chizuko to reap jute crops to allow them to make the awful-tasting soup she promised. It’s a way more difficult endeavor than Chizuko had imagined: “Whereas skilled jute pickers might distinguish the usable, tender leaves at a look, novices couldn’t essentially inform the distinction even when touching them,” she writes. A soul—of a rustic or of an individual—is a young factor, hidden by the toughened tissue round it. It’s simple to destroy it within the means of discovering it. Simple, and brutal.
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