[Graywolf Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
A young Japanese woman buys a Taiwanese woman of around the same age a kimono. They are in Taiwan and it is 1938. It’s the height of the country’s Southern Expansion Policy, almost fifty years after the Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan making the country a colonial power in the Pacific. The Islander Ō Chizuru has been wearing a traditional chōsan in her work as translator and official guide to the Japanese writer. The writer, Aoyama Chizuko, having witnessed incidents where Chizuru was insulted and stated that a kimono would “act as a form of protection,” considered the robe a thoughtful gift. To her surprise, Chizuru refuses the kimono: “I’ve accepted my status as wild ginseng and have every plan to continue living my life as such.” She is proud to be Taiwanese, despite how the years of Japanese colonization have whittled down her culture. Chizuko insists that the gift is a friendly one and eventually Chizuru gives in.
This scene comes about halfway through Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, her first book translated into English by Lin King and which just won the National Book Award for Translated Literature. It’s one of many scenes that take place on the train that runs up and down the Island where Chizuko has come for a year-long lecture tour to talk about her book just made into a movie. Unlike many of the other scenes—on the train, in the streets, in the cottage where Chizuko lives—it does not contain food. But it is where Chizuko’s deep colonial bias becomes evident, despite her constant insistence that she is immune to her privilege as a citizen of the Empire of the Sun. Chizuko, the novel’s first-person narrator, is aware of her flaws, her impetuosity and obstinance. But she is not aware of her “blind spot,” as Chizuru calls it, which the novel, through Chizuru, reveals slowly.
In fact, Chizuru’s revelation of Chizuku’s blind spot is the central plot of Taiwan Travelogue. Taiwan Travelogue is also the name of the fictional memoir within the novel that Aoyama Chizuko writes about her year in Taiwan, published in Japanese twenty years later. Chizuko’s memoir is nested in a series of forewords, afterwords, and notes by the various translators, fictional and real—Chizuru (fictional, Japanese to Mandarin Chinese, first edition), Yáng (fictional [but the real author], Japanese to Mandarin Chinese, new edition) and Lin King (real, Mandarin to English). There are six notes in total, plus footnotes throughout the text by the translators Yáng and King. This narrative within a narrative, translation on top of translation, complicates the already complicated relationship between the two women. It emphasizes the human effort to cross cultural borders, how Chizuru as translator (and colonized person) is adept at crossing because she has to be, while Chizuko, as a member of the colonial class, expects others will translate for her, even if she’s not always aware of that expectation.
Like many well-off travelers , Chizuko is interested in learning the local culture. Each chapter is named after a local dish, like “Chapter 3: Muâ-Ínn-Thng/Jute Soup,” that Chizuru either makes or finds to feed Chizuko’s “monster’s appetite.” After Chizuko convinces Chizuru to abandon the hierarchical rule that says a subordinate shouldn’t eat with their boss, Chizuko discovers that Chizuru shares an outsized appetite too. These two women put away a prodigious number of meals that stretch the book’s realism as I imagined these women’s waistbands literally stretching: “It only made sense that I was full,” Chizuko thinks, “because the two of us had just consumed ten dishes from a banquet meant for eight people.” And though the colonial power dynamics are still present when they eat, a kind of equality glimmers between them during mealtime. Chizuru becomes equally excited by the smells and tastes, and she shares details of her life and Taiwan as they eat.
Another point of similarity between the two young women are their first names. This similarity that only becomes evident when writing or reading a review of the book, because first names are never used in the text itself. Chizuko calls Chizuru “Chi-Chan,” an endearing nickname, while Chizuru calls Chikuko “Aoyama-san,” using the formal honorific. Unlike their passion for food, their names for each other uphold the colonial system. They eat and are brought together; they speak and are kept apart.
Though Chizuko doesn’t shy away from letting Chizuru know how she feels about her, most of these thoughts are kept to herself. She delights in Chizuru’s looks, elegance, and intelligence. She thinks, “Chi-Chan was the only person in the world who looked good whether she was eating dojo loaches or loading her mouth with so much pork that her cheeks bulged.” She tells Chizuru not to marry, to come back with her to Japan. Chizuko’s definition of friendship is all encompassing, bordering on the erotic, and often infantilizing. This definition is informed by a particular colonial context—Japan’s presumption that it’s caring for a less well-off country, that it’s bestowing onto this country an enormous favor of love and support. The relationship also fits into a definition of yuri culture, an abiding subject of Yáng’s novels according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture website. Yuri is a relationship between women that is more than friendship but “falls short of romantic love.” Taiwan Travelogue is not Yáng’s first novel to feature such a friendship, and in interviews she has talked about how these friendships, free from the intervention or competition of men, can allow for more complexity between women. Chizuru’s decision to break up with Chizuko proves her self-determination more than it could if any man was involved.
When the Islander Chizuru insists that the two can never be friends, the Japanese Chizuko has to reconceptualize Chizuru’s generosity as something not freely given, which is impossible for her at that moment. Chizuko’s memoirs were published twenty years later as they were written during her time in Taiwan, with no reflection in hindsight. Instead, there are the fictional academic endnotes that highlight how the memoir is an important description of colonial Taiwan because of the “current [i.e., 1990] socio-political landscape, which is still easing it way out of martial law and the strict censorship on the subject of its colonial history.” The omission of Chizuko’s full realization of her regret, how she came to see her actions twenty years later, after World War II and the fall of Japan, after the US occupation, leaves a gap I found myself trying to fill with my imagination. Chizuko’s regrets are my own regrets and reflections about being a member of American cultural hegemony, whether I like it or not. The acts of translation throughout Taiwan Travelogue show how language hides our blind spots and how caring deeply for others might help to reveal them.
Amber Ruth Paulen is a writer and educator living in rural Michigan. She earned her MFA in fiction at Columbia University and is currently writing a multi-generational novel-in-stories. www.amberpaulen.com.
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