Taiwan Travelogue
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Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ on Taiwan Travelogue
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A blank in the record, a refusal to disappearThe political urgency behind the novel is inseparable from a very specific contemporary fear. When she described the stakes, she was not talking about the 1930s.
Taiwanese people are suffering from an identity crisis. Some of us believe ourselves to be Chinese and then others believe that we are Taiwanese, and I wanted to express that somehow through my book. As Taiwanese people, we need to ask ourselves now — do we want to go back to being colonised? Do we want to have to live like that again? Be second-class citizens in our own land? I refuse.
The novel’s colonial setting was not escapism or nostalgia. She chose the 1930s because it let her examine a question that present-day polemic tends to foreclose: who counts as Taiwanese, and what that identity actually costs.
I, Shuang-Zǐ, write in order to answer the question of what is a Taiwanese person. I write about Taiwan’s past as a step into its future. [paraphrased from audio]
That framing also explains why she set the novel under Japanese colonial rule rather than in the present. The distance of a hundred years lets the question land before readers have raised their political defenses.
She identified a gap in how Taiwanese writers had already handled this period: the existing literature skewed toward suffering and toward male experience, leaving a different kind of story untold.
My pen name means ‘twins’. My late sister was not able to use this pen name while she was alive, and I wanted to bring her into the fiction. In using this name, and in creating this work, I am also including her in the act of creation.
Her twin sister Yang Jo-hui was a historian who had spent years building an archive of women’s lives under Japanese colonial rule before dying of cancer at thirty. The pen name, and the research, both passed to this novel.
How she wrote it
A fake memoir, a banquet, and the food regimes couldn’t eraseThe novel presents itself as a rediscovered Japanese-era memoir, complete with competing forewords, afterwords, and editorial footnotes from different decades. That apparatus was not a stylistic flourish. She wanted to embed the concept of translation inside the book’s own structure, because a text a hundred years old has passed through every regime that held Taiwan in between, and the fictional publishing timeline argues that those regimes left marks on it.
On the surface, the book may seem like a romance. That framework makes it possible to draw readers toward the deeper questions I wanted to discuss.
The romance frame and the false-archive frame are doing the same work from different angles: both lower the reader’s guard long enough for the colonial critique to arrive.
She decided the novel’s architecture before its plot. The twelve chapters correspond to twelve months, and she organized them around the progression of a traditional Taiwanese banquet from appetizers to dessert. Some of the dishes in the final chapters are historically obscure enough that she had to trace them through old news featurettes about dying regional street snacks.
Food can preserve local history in a way that is different from official history. For example, architecture from the colonial era may be removed or altered. Food remains inside daily life. It is carried on through culture. It becomes a vector of historical development. The by-products of colonialism are not only in documents or buildings; they are also in the food people touch and eat every day.
The craft problem once the ingredients were assembled was proportion: four different elements (romance, history, politics, violence) each capable of overwhelming the others. She described the compositional labor in terms of weight and balance.
There are different proportions between romance, history, politics and violence. The work was in deciding how those elements could exist together without one cancelling the other.
The research itself was costly in more than one sense. She put it plainly: ‘My savings went down; my weight went up.’
Taiwan’s 38 years of martial law, which ended in 1987, left a lasting reflex in the culture: keep literature away from politics, and stay alive. She wanted the novel to push back against that reflex directly.
Taiwan went through 38 years of martial law. Many people lost their lives or were imprisoned for saying things that authorities believed should not be said. That history produced a mindset in which people separate literature from politics. In making that statement, I am responding to that belief.
The personal thread
The pen name she kept for both of themThe pen name Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, meaning ‘twins,’ was originally shared with her twin sister Yang Jo-hui. Her sister died of cancer at thirty, while still building an archive of women’s lives under Japanese colonial rule. The novel inherited that archive. The acceptance speech at the 2024 National Book Award ceremony made the historical argument she has carried since.
More than a century ago, some Taiwanese people began making the assertion, ‘Taiwan belongs to the Taiwanese.’ Today, many Taiwanese continue to assert this. But now we are addressing it to a different audience. Before, we were saying it to the Japanese. Now we are saying it to the Chinese. [paraphrased from audio]
She has spoken about her sister’s death and its bearing on the novel carefully, reserving her most direct statement for the Litro interview. The fictional apparatus of a rediscovered memoir gave her a form equal to the personal weight: a text that arrives across time, carrying voices that nearly didn’t survive.
My pen name means ‘twins’. My late sister was not able to use this pen name while she was alive, and I wanted to bring her into the fiction. In using this name, and in creating this work, I am also including her in the act of creation.
On what’s at stake
Colonialism’s logic, then and nowChinese readers accused the novel of romanticizing Japan’s colonial presence in Taiwan. She answered that objection at NPR by naming exactly what she thought the criticism misread about the love story at the book’s center.
Clearly, they have not understood the book. I am completely criticizing colonialism. My criticism is this: even when a colonizer tries to treat the colonized equally, the conclusion is that they still cannot do it. It shows us that colonialism is pervasive, and that the colonial system is fundamentally bad.
The love story between Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese travel writer, and千鶴子’s Taiwanese guide carries the argument in its plot: affection across a colonial hierarchy cannot dissolve that hierarchy. She stated the mechanism in the Guardian interview, leaving no ambiguity about what the romance is for.
It’s a story about love, but it is also a story about how love cannot overcome power dynamics. Love doesn’t overcome the differences between ruling-class and second-class citizens.
She extended the argument from the novel’s colonial setting to contemporary Taiwan, naming the political belief she wanted to challenge in readers who hold it today.
Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics. But I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown.
Her most urgent fear about the present is not military. It is that Taiwanese people will make a political accommodation before grasping what they would be surrendering. She put the timeline in concrete terms at NPR.
Of course, I worry about war; everybody does. But my biggest worry is that Taiwanese people will give up on our current way of life and the pursuit of democracy, equality, and freedom that lasted more than a century. Taiwan only had its first direct presidential election in 1996. We only gained the right to choose who governs us directly thirty years ago. Are we really going to give that up so quickly?
What she wants us to sit with
Recovering what official history let go blankThe novel’s fictional premise, a Japanese-era memoir that survived censorship under two successive regimes and finally surfaced, is also a statement about what readers owe their own archives. She made that point explicit at the Taipei Times, turning the novel’s conceit into a direct address.
Sometimes history briefly disappears; it becomes a blank. But as long as there are descendants willing to search, I believe history can be completed. [This book is] a call to readers all over the world: We can go and retrieve the histories that were once lost, our mothers’ voices, our grandmothers’ voices. We have to recover them ourselves.
The novel remains unpublished in China, which is where she most wants it read. She described at the Taipei Times what she hopes the book could do if it crossed that border.
If this book can, in one way or another, make its way into China and be read by Chinese readers, I think we would have an opportunity for dialogue and communication.
The dialogue she is hoping for is specific: she wants Chinese readers to understand what kind of future Taiwanese people want, which she has said is not the future many in China imagine for them.