Taiwan Travelogue: When Travel, Love, and Empire Speak the Same Language

On the surface, Taiwan Travelogue is the story of a journey to know a land through its food, its scenery, and its people. But the further we go, the more the journey gives way to a harder question. Can one look at the people of a land from an unequal position and arrive at a true and fair understanding of them? That question sits at the heart of the novel that, in May 2026, won the International Booker Prize for its Taiwanese author, Yang Shuang-zi, and her translator, Lin King. It was the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to receive the award.

The story takes place in 1938, when Taiwan is a colony of the Japanese empire. Aoyama Chizuko, a young novelist from Nagasaki, comes to Taiwan at the invitation of the colonial government for a series of lectures. The official program holds little interest for her. She wants to see the real Taiwan, and above all to taste it. A young Taiwanese woman named Chizuru is hired as her interpreter and guide, an educated, multilingual, careful woman who gradually becomes Chizuko's closest companion. Their train journeys, local dishes, long conversations, and an emotional pull run together, yet the harder Chizuko tries to draw closer to Chizuru, the more an invisible distance remains between them.

That distance is the real heart of the novel. Chizuko may think of herself as a free spirit who keeps her distance from official colonial politics, but she is still a citizen of the ruling power. Chizuru, however much a friend, interpreter, or beloved, stands on the other side of that relationship of power. So even the most private feelings of the two women are not immune from history and politics. The Booker judges named this very duality among the book's chief achievements: a novel that works as a love story while laying bare the workings of colonialism and inequality within that same tie of affection.

Food, in all this, is far more than the story's ornament. Pork over rice, winter melon tea, and a whole array of local flavors are Chizuko's way into Taiwan. She imagines that by eating she can come close to the truth of a culture. But Yang Shuang-zi slowly calls that confidence into question. To see, to taste, even to love does not necessarily mean to understand. One can be enchanted by a culture and still fail to see one's own privileged position before it. In that sense Chizuko's insatiable appetite is both charming and comic, and also a metaphor for the traveler's desire to possess an experience she believes she can make entirely her own. Critics have repeatedly noted the bond in the novel between food, identity, and the relations of empire.

But the real game of Taiwan Travelogue is not only in its story; it continues in the very form of the book. Yang Shuang-zi wrote the novel as if it were a Chinese translation of a forgotten Japanese travel memoir from the 1950s. The Japanese author of that "original book" does not exist. The prefaces, footnotes, translators' notes, and afterwords blur the line between document and invention so thoroughly that when the book first appeared in Taiwan in 2020, some readers truly believed they were holding a translation of a historical text. Lin King then translated this "fictional translation" from Mandarin into English, adding a fresh layer to the play of language and history. The result is a book in which translation is not merely a means of carrying a text across; it is one of the story's main subjects.

This point takes on a personal meaning in the author's name as well. "Yang Shuang-zi" is a literary name that originally belonged to Yang and her twin sister, Yang Jo-hui; Shuang-zi means "twins." Jo-hui, who did the historical research for their shared work, died of cancer in 2015 at the age of thirty. Her sister, Yang Jo-tzu, kept the name and went on writing under it, in the belief that the work of Yang Shuang-zi is still the joint labor of two sisters. Her novels tend to set the history of Taiwan, relationships between women, and the era of Japanese rule side by side.

Lin King's translation is also central to the book's global success. She faced not only several languages and registers but a text that deliberately pretended to have already been translated. King has said she and her editor chose a bold, maximal approach to the footnotes, languages, and layers of the text, even where it meant breaking some conventional rules of translation. Before the Booker, that same translation had already won the 2024 National Book Award for translated literature in the United States.

Taiwan Travelogue is a book about the past, but it does not stay locked in the past. It is about who gets to tell history, who translates another's language, and which voice is heard or erased in that act of carrying across. The love between two women, the train journeys, and Taiwan's colorful tables sit on the first level of the story, but beneath all of them runs the question of power.

Perhaps that is the novel's most important achievement. It looks for colonialism not only in armies, governments, and political borders, but in looking, speaking, translating, and even loving. And it reminds us that sometimes the distance between two people comes not from a lack of love, but from a history that began before the two ever met.

Reading guide and judges' view, The Booker Prizes ↗
An interview with the author and translator, The Booker Prizes ↗
Food is politics, and so is travel: a review on translation, Taiwan Insight ↗

Translation assisted by AI