“A flower whose name I didn’t know had bloomed in the garden of the cottage.” — Shuang-zi Yang in Taiwan Travelogue
Literature is an artifice that enables humanity to explore and get closer to truth. Taiwan Travelogue, written by Shuang-zi Yang and translated by Lin King, opens with a framing artifice.
Here, translator “Hiyoshi Sagako” offers an introduction to the 2020 Mandarin Chinese edition, in an essay titled “A Truncated Dream, a Foreign Splendorland.” The “translator” is of the Wānshēng race or “Japanese people born in Taiwan,” which Japan was occupying that island. In that time, the Japanese were the “Mainlanders,” and the Taiwanese were the “Islanders,” and so lesser. In the social hierarchy, the wānshēng were seen as “homeless, casteless ghosts.” The supposed translator writes:
By blood we belonged to the great Yamato race, but as Japanese citizens we were ‘subpar’ growing up on the subtropical island, our use of the national language, Japanese, was often nonstandard, and few of us had ever seen snow or ‘truly’ experienced the four seasons. Even if our bloodlines were ‘pure,’ many Japanese argued that we could not possibly possess the true ‘spirit’ of the Japanese people. Thus, the wānshēng were often regarded as inferior.
The author of Taiwan Travelogue is “Aoyama Chizuko,” born in 1913. The novel starts with what looks like prefatory materials. It begs the question of why a meta-illusion is necessary. Why is it necessary to have the main character be a Japanese national (“Mainlander”) traveling through Taiwan and “documenting the Island” it in a time of occupation?
Aoyama Chizuko, from Nagasaki, Japan, is a feted novelist whose book, A Record of Youth, was made into a film, which has made its way to various parts of Asia. A publisher has asked if she might travel to Taiwan, the “Land of the South,” and perhaps write propaganda about it for the Empire of the Sun (Japan), but she declines. The idea of travel to promote Japan’s imperialist “Southern Expansion Policy” (takeover of Taiwan in the “East Shina Sea” and farther) is anathema to her. She knows that soft power overtures may be a precursor to hard power takeovers, and vice versa. She is a freethinker of her time:
The idea of using my pen as a weapon for war—ha! I think is laughable and petty of a nation that calls itself the Empire of the Sun. Of course, I could never explicitly say anything like that in public. But there is nothing I dislike more than social etiquette at the expense of reason—including irrational ideas like women must marry..If one day, the war reaches a stage when writers must wield their pens like guns, I would probably ross mine and run away. And if the day comes that I must marry, I would shave my head and become a nun.
The idea of exploring Taiwan, though, sticks, and it inspires her travel-lust. She tries to acquire funds to go from her aunt, who raised her, but is declined. She is invited by the Taiwanese Government-General and a women’s group out of Taiwan, to engage a series of lectures and travel writings of her own choice. She ends up in a cottage on the Yana River and starts to explore the land. She has a gargantuan appetite to try the various foods of this subtropical / tropical island.
She wants to take her time to live as a local and to eat common foods. She is introduced to Ō Chizuru (aka Ông Tshían-hóh), a Taiwanese native four years her junior and an elementary school teacher of Japanese, who becomes her translator. Chizuru was not born into privilege, but she has a nimble mind, an eye for details, and a head for multiple languages: Hokkien (Hoklo dialect), English, Japanese, and French. She is engaged to be married at the end of the year to an older man through an arranged marriage.
The two embark on travels through occupied Taiwan, with Aoyama-san full of appetite and enthusiasm, and Chizuru (nicknamed “Chi-chan” by Aoyama to differentiate them from each other, given that their names share a character) eager to please and to fulfill Aoyama’s curiosities and interests. In some senses, Aoyama is more worldly, certainly more daring and risk-taking. Chi-chan is more provincial in terms of risk but more ambitious with languages (perhaps traveling vicariously through words and other abstractions). Theirs is a complementarity, the two traveling as a unit as more effective than each alone.
The work evokes both the culture of Taiwan and that of Japan, with recursive perspectives each of the other, in a complex interplay. Both young women seem to see the status quo and the ultimate subsummation of Taiwan into Japan as fated, as if assuming a different future would be a bridge too far. Aoyama and Chi-chan are singular individuals, and they connect and clash in ways that only who personalities can. The time period, too, is singular, in the lead-up to the invasion of Japan’s military to other islands and lands of East Asia in WWII.
Taiwan Travelogue, as a novel, explores the social fissures in the divided societies of Taiwan under occupation. There is the residual traditionalist Qing Dynasty-inspired culture with discrimination against “career women.” There are tensions between the occupying Japanese “Mainlanders” and the Taiwanese “Islanders,” who are disrespected and referred to in “Hey, you!” parlance. The Japanese novelist and Taiwanese translator stay on safe topics of food and culture and language and geography but avoid political discussions.
In this novel, Taiwan is itself a character, with a celebration of its foods and practices and peoples and landscapes. The novel may be read as a culinary adventure of sorts:
Geh: Fresh fish and shrimp, etc. from the sea, seasoned with large quantities of salt, sugar, cooking wine, and vinegar, stored in a large urn until fermented, then cured under the sun for over one month.
It is not a book for the squeamish:
Oh, I just remembered—there is a special technique in Hakka cuisine that involves mincing frogs or birds complete with the bones, which is then made into meat pies or meatballs. This, too, reflects the Hakka tradition of letting nothing go to waste.
The novel is at heart about the relationship between two memorable characters, evolving from employer-employee, author-translator, young friends, to potentially something more or something less.
Aoyama is not insensitive to what her country is doing to Taiwan.
“The Empire’s Southern Expansion Movement and so-called National Spirit Mobilization Movement had taken shape as imperial assimilation movements here in the colonies. Were they not, in essence, brute acts of erasing the distinctions of individual cultures? I couldn’t help but feel resistance and disgust whenever I considered the matter seriously.”
But she is aware that she is “powerless against the state of the world.” She has an internal self and an external one. There are limits to what she will say about the socio-political context in public.
The two women are able to somewhat share with each other, sometimes using their supposed drunkenness on occasion to speak more directly than politeness and social practices might otherwise allow. Chiruzu says to Aoyama-san:
One day, people will no longer remember the Islander (Taiwanese) way of life. But during the Qīng period, the Hoklo people also did the same thing to the native tribes’ ways of life here. How far back should one go when lamenting such cruelties? But the absurd thing about humanity is that we only feel the pain when we’re on the receiving end of it.
People groups squelch each other. Each reads the others’ nonverbals and can sometimes ferret out each other’s secret selves. Both are bright, and both have detective abilities in their ability to observe and deduce.
Taiwan Travelogue, first released as “a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer,” is a deeply observed and complex work. The nested illusions from the get-go evoke the ambitions of this well-crafted novel. This work speaks to a lost colonial history. For modern readers, perhaps, it evokes a sense of celebration for an island and its survival through the present. Perhaps there is an appreciation for how fragile societies are, which are constantly under threat from the countries more powerful in the near-abroad.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
