Taiwan Travelogue

By Yang Shuang-zi

Translated by Lin King

2020, trans. 2024

Graywolf Press


Taiwan Travelogue is ostensibly a newly discovered memoir of a Japanese woman writer who has just published a highly successful first novel, a coming-of-age story called A Record of Youth, and seen her work become a popular movie. The setting is 1938 Japan, so Aoyama Chizuko’s rise to fame is even more remarkable. Overwhelmed by a  press tour and intimidated by pressure to write a new novel, she decides to visit the Japanese colony of Taiwan to combine travel with a speaking tour of schools for girls and young women. For the sake of propriety and efficiency, Chizuko is assigned a female Taiwanese translator and traveling companion, Ông Tshian-hóh, who goes by the Japanese name Ō Chizuro. From this moment forward, though we see Taiwan and its people through the  point-of-view of the Japanese artist, Yang Shuang-zi presents us with a narrator lacking in self-awareness, chauvinistic, and ever desirous of being lauded, deferred to, and served. Initially, she might be forgiven; she is, after all, a creature of her time, conducting herself as someone who has benefited from the political, economic, and social change of the Meiji period, which afforded women like her more opportunities to pursue higher education and careers. Chizuko is an atarashii onna, a “New Woman” whose financial independence and reactionary stance against traditional marriage excited women and frightened men. She is also a creature of the Showa era, alive to the heady sense of entitlement and moral certainty of Japan’s pre-war ultranationalism. Chizuko views herself as a friend and perhaps even an ally of the Taiwanese people, yet her actions and tone-deaf commentary reveal a colonizer’s mentality and the beast that lies within. Yang paints Chizuko as someone who hungers after new sensations, especially “exotic” food. At first, she appears to be no more dangerous than a foodie, and to be fair, Yang introduces us to tastes, menus, and feasts that are as stimulating and satisfying as any gourmand-centered narrative could be. But Chizuko’s hunger never wanes. She hoovers up the fare of the major cities and presses her guide to take her deep into Taiwan’s indigenous culture, and yet she wants more. Yang portrays colonizer as devourer, and that is most evident in Chizuko’s lust to possess young Chizuro. Chizuko assumes the woman’s sexuality and imagines that her aura as a Japanese “New Woman” who might have just popped off the pages of a shojo culture magazine has captured her junior’s heart. Yang brilliantly upends the romance of the colonizer. Instead of a Japanese–Taiwanese heterosexual conquest, she gives us Chizuko, who is anything but a stereotype of Japanese womanhood. Loud, impulsive, and demanding, Yang’s Japanese tourist “others” her Taiwanese guide. She idealizes and idolizes the object of her desire, ascribing to her elements of Japanese beauty, body language, temperament, and mannerisms. Unable to help herself, she delights in dressing the young woman in kimonos. Chizuko speaks of Chizuro with patent homoerotic desire and assures the reader that her companion enjoys the older woman’s attentions, flattery, and gifts, but Yang’s blissfully unaware and unreliable narrator is completely unable to decipher what the translator truly thinks about her client. Yang Shuang-zi has created an engaging multi-dimensional novel, one that could easily become a long-lived touchstone for students of colonial history and literature, translation, East Asian studies, and women’s and gender studies.

“Chi-chan was the nickname by which I referred to her in the privacy of my mind; in reality, I called her by the more proper Chizuru-san, but I found it disorienting to think of her as such given the overlap in our names. Since she was born in the sixth year of Taishō1 and therefore was four years younger, I used my seniority as an excuse to nickname her as endearingly as I pleased. Chi-chan it is! 

Chi-chan’s dimples appeared. “No, Aoyama-sensei did not have to say so out loud. Perhaps you are not aware of this, but ‘Is there something good to eat around here?’ is rather a pet phrase of yours.” 

“Ha! A glutton can’t hide her true colors!” I put down my pencil and began snacking on the deep-fried fava beans on the table between us.”