On the last day of March, Aoyama walks the full length of Taichū from her cottage to Chōkyōshitō, a route she has never taken in nearly a year of living there. Arriving near the Taichū Second High School, she circles the campus looking for the Ōng family’s courtyard home but loses her nerve before approaching any gate.

She ducks into a nearby general store and orders ramune soda. An elderly Islander shopkeeper brings her fresh, uncooked sunflower seeds. As Aoyama fumbles with them, she hears flawless Japanese from behind her. It is Chi-chan.

Aoyama speaks directly: Chi-chan has been on her mind, and she has come to say so in person. She presents a careful deduction of Chi-chan’s background: Tracing clues from her knowledge of Quánzhōu cuisine, her preference for coffee and bread, her dice skills, a comment from a cook about the name “Kohaku,” and the circumstances of a clam noodle meal, Aoyama concludes that Chi-chan’s mother died young, and that three of her mother’s gē-tòa friends raised her at Kohaku, which is not a person, but a café.

Chi-chan confirms the deduction is nearly correct. Her mother died before she started school, and the three women she calls her aunts educated her at Kohaku, a café in Shintomi District still in operation. They deliberately did not train Chi-chan in performance, intending to give her the skills to live securely on her own terms. Ōng Tshian-hōh thus became the public school teacher Ō Chizuru.

Chi-chan says something harder to reckon with: She acknowledges they were destined to meet, but insists a Mainlander and an Islander cannot be true equals as friends. Harder still, she claims she never opened her heart to Aoyama and never truly regarded her as a friend. She had deceived Aoyama from the beginning.

Aoyama is not surprised. She says she has long known that Chi-chan is guarded and capable of lying without showing it, and that this side of Chi-chan is exactly who she considers her closest friend. She then delivers a sincere apology, acknowledging her arrogance, her tendency to override others, and the cumulative harm she caused. She does not ask for forgiveness, only for Chi-chan to know she has finally understood her fault.

Chi-chan’s composure breaks. She thanks Aoyama, apologizes in return, and confirms that even within her shuttered heart, her feelings are real. They grip each other’s hands hard.

Aoyama announces she is hungry. Chi-chan laughs. They walk out arm in arm, naming dishes they love, until they reach the Taishō Bridge over the Midori River, where a cart vendor is already selling mitsumame fruit-and-jelly ice. Aoyama’s departure for Kyūshū is two weeks away; neither of them acknowledges this. They share one bowl of mitsumame on the bridge, which Aoyama remembers as being very sweet and delicious.

Aoyama Yōko, a professional artist and the adopted daughter of Aoyama Chizuko, recalls that Taiwan was a constant presence in her childhood.

When Yōko first read the manuscript of Taiwan Travelogue as a young girl and wept at its sadness, Aoyama confirmed it was a true story. This prompted Yōko to ask whether she had gone to see Chi-chan after eating the kiâm-nng-ko. That question led Chizuko to add a 12th chapter to her story.

The novel was published in 1954; after it went out of print, the remaining copies were destroyed in a windstorm. Before the 1970 reprint, Yōko traveled to Taiwan, but could not locate Chi-chan. The 1970 reprint is her way of fulfilling her mother’s dying wish.

As a preface to her Mandarin translation, Wáng Chién-hò (Chi-chan) writes from Columbia, Missouri, recalling Yōko’s 1976 visit to deliver the 1970 edition of Aoyama’s novel, as well as news of Aoyama’s death. Each morning over two weeks, Chi-chan shared memories of Aoyama over breakfast.

The note’s central anecdote is a cold-wave episode in late 1938 when Aoyama fell ill and Chi-chan brought her medicine. Aoyama demanded noodles instead. Over the course of that visit, Chi-chan produced seven successive bowls of noodles. After the last bowl, Aoyama proposed that Chi-chan marry her and promised that even if only one grain of rice remained, she would give Chi-chan half of it. Chi-chan admits that in that moment she felt she might actually have found happiness had she followed her to the Mainland. She closes by raising a cup to Aoyama across the decades.

Wu Cheng-mei, a literary scholar and Chi-chan’s eldest daughter, explains the long road to the Mandarin edition of Aoyama’s novel. Yōko had contacted Wu in 1975; it was not until Taiwan’s martial law ended in 1987 that Chi-chan expressed her wish to translate the novel into Mandarin for Taiwanese readers. She presented Wu with a completed translation she had finished a decade earlier in 1977.

Wu describes two formative moments when she recognized her mother as more than a mother: once when Chi-chan drove four hundred miles alone to visit her at college, and once when reading the novel revealed a version of Chi-chan entirely unlike the composed, deferential woman at home. An anecdote about a kimono from Aoyama, sold by Chi-chan’s husband after the war, gives Wu a sudden insight into the nature of her mother’s deference in her marriage. During a summer trip back to Taiwan, Chi-chan died peacefully in 1987 on the engawa of the family’s Taichū house, speaking Japanese words no one present could understand.

Wu notes that the 1990 edition of the novel is abridged due to censorship. She expresses hope that a complete version will one day reach Mandarin readers.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ describes discovering Aoyama Chizuko’s name on a postcard at the Hayashi Fumiko Memorial Reference Room in Kitakyūshū in December 2014, while researching colonial Taiwan alongside her late sister.

After tracing fragments of a Mandarin translation online and tracking the manuscript through the Museum of Taiwan Literature and a Japanese researcher, Yáng began translating in June 2015; illness extended the process to four years.

The note frames the book’s successive translators from Yōko to Yáng as a chain working to preserve an affection shaped by history and rendered ineffable by its time and place. Yáng describes the novel as a form of amber: something that holds both actual events and the ideals the author wished had been possible. The note is dedicated to Yáng’s late sister, the other half of the name Shuāng-zǐ.

Lin King, the English translator of the novel, explains several key decisions, and in doing so reveals the novel’s true nature as a contemporary work of fiction.

The note clarifies that the book’s author is Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, who initially published it under a fictional frame crediting it as written by Aoyama Chizuko and translated by Yáng. This attribution generated controversy and was corrected in later printings.

For the English edition, Lin chose to use Japanese colonial-era pronunciations for Aoyama’s speech and thoughts, retained tonal marks and accents in Romanized words throughout, and built on Yáng’s translator footnotes by adding further historical and cultural context for English readers.