How can a Taiwanese novel incorporate historical materials from its decades under Japanese colonial rule? How does two women’s travelogue become a work of fiction? This talk will examine Taiwan Travelogue’s use of a “Showa Taiwan Railway Gourmet Tour” as its storytelling framework, covering the novel’s early inspirations, conceptual development, research, fieldwork, archives-building, story conception, and writing process. The program will be conducted partially in Mandarin with interpretation. Taiwan Travelogue tells the story of two women, one Japanese and one Taiwanese, who grew up in different cultural backgrounds during the Japanese colonial period in 1938. Through a coincidental opportunity, they embark on a gourmet journey along the railway, exchanging culture and ideas. Yang Shuang-zi uses food and drink as metaphors, allowing readers to glimpse the contradictions between the Japanese empire’s treatment of colonial Taiwan, mainland Japanese people, and Taiwanese locals, as well as the differences in fate between men and women at that time. As independent individuals, women aspire to have independent professional identities and thoughts, but they face various difficulties and challenges. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships, with the writer-translator relationship mimicking Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan. And like many travel memoirs, the protagonist undergoes self-reflection while roaming an unfamiliar land.
New York City, NY; NYC