The best novels open the reader’s eyes and create a hunger for more knowledge. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue is exactly one of those stories. At the surface, it’s a foreign writer’s journey into the gourmand delights of a tropical island as facilitated by a local translator with whom she falls in love. Yet, underneath lies a gentle, but incisive, commentary on the colonial history of Taiwan, including how the past informs the conversation around the territory today. Masterfully translated from its original Mandarin Chinese to English by Lin King, Taiwan Travelogue has garnered international acclaim since its publication in 2020, receiving the 2026 International Booker Prize, becoming the first Mandarin-language novel to do so.
Each of the book’s 12 chapters is themed around nine different Taiwanese delicacies and three Japanese ones, setting the table for several mouthwatering depictions of food, from humble roasted sunflower seeds and simple wintermelon tea to a multi-course banquet featuring impressive meat and seafood dishes. The Japanese protagonist, Aoyama Chizuko, a voracious eater, desires to try as many local flavours as possible while on a government-sponsored trip through the colonized island in 1938. Ostensibly, she is there to write propaganda and give a lecture tour (although she is reluctant to do either). When she encounters her Taiwanese translator and assistant, Ō Chizuru, she finds a kindred spirit and invaluable guide to the epicurean bounty of Taiwan. Yáng makes food the language of love between the two characters, from the preparation and consumption of meals to the revelation of histories and memories in specific dishes.
Taiwan Travelogue draws the reader in with its pleasant armchair tourism before gently revealing the subtle dynamics of colonialism, classism, and sexism hidden at the heart of the relationship between its two main characters. Through her year-long sojourn across the island, Chizuko becomes infatuated with Chizuru while also becoming aware of an invisible obstacle between them that remains outside her grasp of understanding. The relationship never actually develops beyond Chizuko’s deeply felt emotional intimacy and declared (albeit one-sided) best friendship, but a clear sapphic undertone can be found from the moment they meet. The reality of their closeness is exceedingly complex due to the power imbalance that one character is far more aware of than the other. Eventually, a fatal lack of self-awareness drives Chizuru away, leaving Chizuko to wrestle with her feelings and memories.
In Taiwan Travelogue, the choice to write from the point of view of a Japanese woman is immediately notable. As a Taiwanese person herself, Yáng steps outside of her default perspective to slyly critique the colonizer’s position, which at first seems neutral and benevolent but is later revealed to be biased and harmful. Chizuko thinks of their relationship as being between equals (they have almost the same name!), but Chizuru is immensely aware of her lower standing as a Taiwanese person under Japanese imperial rule, as a concubine’s daughter relying on the favours of richer families, and as a hired translator/assistant to a self-made, financially independent writer.
Chizuko chooses to ignore these nuances, thinking that she is above them all, but her words and actions show her as more aligned with the colonizer perspective than she purports to be. She exoticizes everything in Taiwan, including Chizuru herself, whom she describes in as delectable a manner as the many foods she encounters. Another character later makes the subtext into text for her, pointing out all the things she missed in her faulty self-examination.
Throughout Taiwan Travelogue, Taiwan itself is also revealed as a startling complex, politically fraught, and diverse tapestry of people, languages, geographies, foods, and colonial histories despite its modest size. While reading, I became immediately interested in researching the history of the island, particularly the 50-year period in which it was colonized by Japan. And as someone more familiar with referring to China as the “mainland” and visualizing surrounding places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan as “islands,” I was mildly amused to realize that a Japanese person in the 1930s would refer to Japan as the “mainland” and Taiwan as the “island.” The privileged position that Chizuko holds provides an interesting window into Taiwanese culture as she traverses from one end to another and witnesses the full changing of the seasons, but her perspective remains limited, leaving readers to dig further on their own, if they wish.
With its evocative depiction of Taiwanese food, places, and people, Taiwan Travelogue more than lives up to its name. Along with its artful representation of colonial history, Yáng’s novel also acts as a bridge, translating the nostalgic past into the bittersweet present.
