I began reading it with no real idea of what to expect, which is refreshing for me. If you're at all interested and want to approach it with an equally open mind, stop reading this post now. But what I'll be saying here will hit you in the face in any reviews you are likely to find, so I'll proceed.
It's narrated by Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese woman whose first novel has been remarkably successful. She's on a tour of Japanese-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s to boost the film adaptation of her novel, but mainly to write her impressions of the colony and its people. She's a well-meaning liberal, quietly critical of Japanese imperialism, eager to go native as much as possible. Her guide and translator, Chiruzo, is even younger than she is, but exhibits amazing erudition and linguistic ability, and Aoyama becomes enamored of her, but "Chi-chan" keeps a wary distance. They travel widely and sample various Taiwanese foods; Aoyama has a "monster" appetite, and puts away plenty. Her account was published in Japan in 1954, and finally translated into Mandarin decades later.
Somewhere in the first hundred pages I began wondering about Aoyama's liberalism. I figured out that her account wasn't published until after the Pacific War and the Japanese Empire ended. Her intense interest in another woman seemed unlikely to have passed Imperial censorship at the time of her trip either. At that point I looked online for more information, and learned that Taiwan Travelogue is not a rediscovered work from the 1930s but a novel, published in Taiwan in 2020.
As for Aoyama's fascination with Chi-chan, it's ambiguous enough that a determined reader could take it for homosocial desire, but the author is married to another woman. so there's no need to speculate. (Further investigation shows that the book has been marketed as LGBTQ anyway.)
What made Taiwan Travelogue interesting to me was its awareness that Japanese was a colonial power in Asia, and Yáng's exploration of the power imbalance between the two women. There's a tendency to suppose that only whites can fetishize people from other cultures, and I think this novel will surprise many queer readers, be they white or non-white, on that score. From what I've seen in US news coverage and social media discussion of the tensions between the PRC and Taiwan, not many USAns are aware of Taiwan's history vis-a-vis Japan and China; there are many parallels to the history of Korea, which also was colonized by Japan. Lin King worked hard to find English equivalents for the way Japanese and Mandarin encode status differences, which makes the prose a bit awkward at times, but it's necessary. I was tickled by the way Aoyama refers to "the Mainland," meaning Japan, and "Islanders," meaning the inhabitants of Taiwan. I hope Western readers will recognize the analogy to imperial language in the US' and Europe's dealings with their colonial holdings past and present. I didn't find it a fun read, but it was interesting as metafiction, for its tracing of power imbalances, and for its at times overwhelming catalog of Taiwanese cuisine.
So, is Taiwan Travelogue a novel about people who look like me? Perhaps not, but we still have a lot more in common than most Americans know, or want to know.
