Book Review: Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi
Nothing has ever made me want to travel to Taiwan as much as this.
My review of Taiwan Travelogue is somewhat off topic in that there’s no particular finance or money angle with this book review. There is, however, an obvious geopolitical angle, which itself has global economic implications. But that is dealt wth in the novel only in the most sideways fashion. The story is slyly, almost stubbornly apolitical, even though a novel title Taiwan Travelogue is inherently a geopolitical statement in 2026.
The “action” of Taiwan Travelogue, such as it is, reads as a domestically-focused description of a tour of the local food and sights of the island nation, and a years-long travel of a writer and her local guide. The fictional narrator describes herself as a Japanese novelist with a “monster” in her stomach. The children’s story “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” almost acts as an inspiration for Taiwan Travelogue.
As the guide in the novel likes to point out, the narrator begins most visits to a new Taiwan location with the same question: “Is there anything good to eat here?”
The answer inevitably is that yes, there is something good to eat.
I now want to go to Taiwan, and I also want to eat my way through the island like a very hungry caterpillar. I enjoyed this novel far more than I expected. The central relationship portrayed is original and unexpected. Beautiful and thought-provoking.
Here is a strange confession about my own experience of reading this book: I knew the novel had won the 2026 International Booker Prize before I began reading it. I later saw that it had won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature.1 But I had otherwise read no jacket-cover information or reviews of the book until I was 2/3rds of the way through. I hadn’t seen any of this because I was listening to the audiobook rather than reading the text.2
As a result, I thought the time-frame for the action of the novel was modern day - the 2020s. This gives the book a very particular spin reading it today, because - as I learned when I eventually read about it online - the action of the novel takes place in 1938.
I honestly, actually, thought the references to the Japanese Empire, “The War,” and to Taiwan’s status as a colony of the Japanese mainland was a form of alternate history. I thought the author was playing a kind of game like in Philip Dick’s The Man In the High Castle - a book and later TV show about an alternate history in which the US has lost World War II to the Nazis.
Although this was a giant error on my part - the book straight-up is meant to portray 1938 Taiwan3 - I don’t think my mistake detracts in any way from the novel I read nor, I assume, the intent of the author.
We have to assume the intent of the author (slyly but nonetheless intentionally) was to celebrate the fact that Taiwan in the 2020s is a real place, with real traditions, worthy of respect and preservation and celebration. It is not simply a would-be colony of either the Japanese Empire’s Southern Expansion Policy of 1938, nor of course the People’s Republic of China expansion policy of 2027.
Colonial power dynamics are the central subject of the novel. Using the Japanese example from 1938 is a great way in to the topic.
Publishing a celebratory food-and-culture novel about Taiwan, in the 2020s, has an agenda. The substitution of Japan-as-colonizer for the imminent and intended swallowing up of Taiwan by mainland China cannot be anything but politically pointed.
The odds seem to be that Taiwan will become geopolitically front and center in the coming years. I wish I had known more about Ukraine before 2022, about which I have now become an obsessive in the past 4 years. I am late to learning about Taiwan, but this novel is a very good place to begin.
The book was actually first published, in Mandarin, in 2020.
I also subsequently learned that the text-based book is full of footnotes. And that the further conceit of the novel is that this is a “found manuscript,” written about 1938, translated from the Japanese in the 1970s, and only into English in 2015. Anyway, the book works even in the incorrect version which I had made up in my head, about the alternative history in which Japan runs Taiwan in the modern day as a subordinate colony.
In retrospect the references to telegrams and almost exclusively train travel were a giant clue, but again I thought that was just clever alternate history, like steam punk novels sometimes substitute anachronistic technologies into the present day.