Why This Taiwanese Book is Masquerading as a Rediscovered Japanese Novel

Written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King, Taiwan Travelogue masquerades as a translation of a rediscovered text from a Japanese novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, who sails to Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1938 and becomes infatuated with Taiwanese cuisine, culture, and her charming interpreter, Chizuru.

As the novel unfolds, Aoyama is forced to reckon with the impact of the imperialist regime she represents, and how those power dynamics inevitably bleed into her cherished relationships with the people of the island. With footnotes from both Yang and King sprawled throughout its pages, the reader must interrogate if they can trust Aoyama-san as a reliable narrator and her perspective as a colonizer on colonized land, and more importantly, ask themselves what biases their own interpretation of the story.  

I sat down with King to discuss the very meta process of translating a novel about translation, the impact she hopes English readers will gain from a queer story set in Japanese occupied-Taiwan, and how it feels to have translated the first Taiwanese novel to be longlisted (and therefore shortlisted) for the National Book Award in translation. 

Hairol Ma: First off, congratulations on being a National Book Award finalist for translation. How does it feel to have translated the first Taiwanese novel to ever make the longlist? 

Lin King: It’s all very surreal. It feels like a confluence of timing and what the book is about, since the content itself is about translation, but it was definitely a surprise. We’re also the only translated book from East Asia to be nominated in the longlist this year. I personally don’t have any expectations going into the winner announcement, because having gotten this far is already a first and historic win for us. 

HM: What drew you to translating this book? 

LK: I knew Shuang-Zi because of a short piece we did for an online chapbook from the Asian American Writer’s Workshop on queer Taiwanese literature, edited by Chi Ta-wei and Ariel Chu. Originally I wanted to translate the whole of that novel, but it was already attached to a publisher and another translator. Shuang-Zi told me she had a new book out, that I could read it and see if I was interested. After reading it, I thought that genre-wise, it might be an even better fit for U.S. readership compared to her first novel, and was personally fascinated with the idea of translating a faux translation. 

HM: There are so many layers to this novel: you’re now bringing us the English translation of a Mandarin novel disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text from a Japanese writer. What was your experience translating a novel about translation?

LK: It was a huge privilege in many ways. The original novel has the fictional premise of being a historical text translated from Japanese into Mandarin, with Shuang-Zi as the translator, and therefore already has a lot of footnotes. With the original Taiwanese publication, Shuang-Zi even got into a little bit of controversy with some readers who’d thought the book was a genuine translated historical text rather than being entirely fictional. Because there was already a “translator” in the story, the structure allowed me to interject myself as a translator in the text in a way that’s not normally done in English-language translations, where there tends to be an emphasis on “seamlessness” that makes readers forget that they’re reading a translation at all. Adding on to Shuang-Zi’s footnotes, I was able to make the translation almost academic in a sense, and therefore a lot more precise. And because the story is about an aspiring translator, it feels like there’s more room to get really specific about technicalities like romanization with accents or including different pronunciations of the same words. There’s more room for translation. 

HM: Yes, I wanted to talk about the footnotes: there are footnotes throughout this book, which have really added to its identity as a meta-novel about translation. What was your approach to placing your own footnotes throughout this work, and how did they interact with Yang’s footnotes? 

LK: My editor, Yuka Igarashi, and I had decided for the first draft to just be maximalist. Wherever there was any question about something, I added a footnote, and later we discussed which ones were necessary to keep. For example, one decision we made later on was to add a map, which removed a lot of footnotes about place names and geography.

In Taiwan, where a lot of books are translated from other languages into Mandarin, it’s not unusual to have translator’s footnotes even in fiction. In English, footnotes are rare unless it’s a “classic.” I hope our approach with this translation will challenge this norm.

HM: Japanese-controlled Taiwan is a time I haven’t really seen written about in contemporary English-language literature, although it is a time our grandparents and great-grandparents lived through. Could you share a bit more about the historical context this novel is set in?

LK: This novel is set in the 1920s-30s, when Taiwan was part of the Japanese empire. A lot of English-language readers might not know this, but Taiwan was governed by Japan for 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. During this period of time, the idea of Taiwanese identity had yet to be fully formed—it wasn’t a nation, but a place where indigenous Taiwanese peoples and migrants from China had settled and called it home. The idea of Taiwan as a nation wasn’t there. When Japan took over, people in Taiwan were told they were now children of the Japanese emperor. This included my grandparents, who were educated in Japanese as kids. In World War II, they fought in the Japanese army. 

After World War II, Taiwan was given to the Kuomintang, or the Chinese Nationalist Party, which had been defeated by the Chinese Communist Party and driven out of the mainland.There was relief among people in Taiwan, because they were now rid of the colonial hierarchy between the local people and the Japanese, but there was also disappointment, because the Kuomintang newcomers also held a lot of prejudice against the locals who had fought for the Japanese and spoke Mandarin poorly. 

This story just precedes the war, so we’re still smack in the middle of those 50 years of Japanese occupation. 

HM: What was it like translating a novel about translation and its colonial impacts? 

LK: The book doesn’t explicitly condemn or condone anything. Even though the characters end on the note of “colonialism=bad,” there is still a lot of genuine love and affection, and a good-faith interchange of ideas and cultures that aren’t portrayed in a negative light. Ultimately the “lesson” taken away is imperialism=bad, jingoism=bad, but there is still a lot that the book does to make the case that interpersonal relationships born of these times aren’t purely bad. Translating these dynamics was challenging but fun for me, because there’s a lot of nuance to convey what people are missing as they speak to each other. 

HM: There are so many nuances in interpersonal relationships here. At its core, I read Taiwan Travelogue as a love story that is burdened by prejudice and complicated by colonial power dynamics, which are subtly communicated through the differences by which Chi-chan and Aoyama-san move through their cultural contexts. What was your approach to making sure these subtleties were conveyed to English readers? 

LK: On a linguistic level, Aoyama-san and Chi-chan talk a lot about the formality of language and the hierarchy it embodies. Because Aoyama-san is superior in social, financial, and ethnic status, Chi-chan, who works for her as an interpreter and sometimes assistant, speaks to her in Japanese honorific speech, “keigo”. One of the plot points is Aoyama-san trying to get Chi-chan to speak to her in casual speech because she thinks of them as “friends”. But that hierarchy is so ingrained that Chi-chan doesn’t, and doesn’t want to, drop the honorifics. Neither Mandarin nor English has honorific speech systems, so it’s a lot harder to convey the schisms. In the English translation, I tried to make tonal distinctions when someone is speaking formally versus casually—do they use contractions, idioms, big words, exclamation points? It was difficult to finesse the tone. 

HM: Through its layers of disguise, Taiwan Travelogue delivers incisive commentary around authenticity, colonialism as literal consumption, and of course, translation. What do you hope English readers will take away from this novel?

LK: This is complicated and is a political platform for some folks in contemporary Taiwan. There’s an idea that Taiwan’s current difference in identity from Mainland China in large part begins with this seismic shift we had during the 50 years under Japanese rule. Taiwanese society is largely made up of Minnan or Hakka people who migrated from Mainland China, and some people use this to argue that Taiwan remains culturally Chinese, but one irrefutable wedge is the half-century under Japan. I think if people in the West were to know more about this, they’d gain a better idea of at least one reason why Taiwan asserts itself as distinct in identity. I don’t know if Shuang-Zi intended it to be political, but I think it’s inevitable to read Taiwan Travelogue through a geopolitical lens. If English readers can learn even one bit of Taiwanese history, I’d consider it a job well done on our part. 

HM: This novel made me so nostalgic and extremely hungry for all the delicious food in Taiwan. Did you get to do any fun research around Taiwanese cuisine for your translation process?

LK: A lot of the food described in the book would be an educational experience even for Taiwanese readers, since it isn’t commonly consumed in modern Taiwan. That’s one of Shuang-Zi’s areas of expertise: food history. She can get very granular, so sometimes I ended up doing deep Google dives where I end up in some middle-aged Taiwanese man’s Facebook, because his hobby is to document the food in Taichung or something, and I’m relying on  “the commons” to see different pictures and descriptions of some bygone food. A lot of times I watched archival news footage about some vendor who used to make some specific food. Since I wasn’t able to physically travel during the pandemic, I had to imagine it.  

HM: My follow up on that is, If you could try one of the dishes in the book, which would it be? 

LK: That’s a trick question. It would obviously be the “leftover soup”, for the same reasons that Aoyama-san and Chi-chan ordered it, which I won’t divulge. 

HM: Are there any easter eggs in the book that we can watch out for? 

LK: For any manga or anime fans out there, Aoyama is actually named after the author of Detective Conan. Shuang-Zi and I are both fans.

HM: What impact do you hope Taiwan Travelogue will have? 

LK: Ever since the U.S. presidential election, I’ve been thinking about how this book will be received in the U.S. I’m promoting it at the Miami Book Fair at the end of November in Florida—a state that is famously banning books, and ones about LGBTQ issues in particular. And this is a queer book about Taiwan, criticizing colonialism. Before November 5, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but now it feels a little bit precarious. I wonder if this book will be banned, even though there’s no sex in it, and it’s not explicit. I wonder if it will prove more controversial than we thought. What if we’re entering an era where Taiwan has more freedom of speech than the U.S.?I wonder if the geopolitical shifts will affect how this book is read in the English language. 

Following that train of thought, I’m also nervous about the next four years and what that might mean for Taiwan. I’m thinking a lot about soft power, how clout comes from the degree to which people feel connected to a place or culture. With Japanese anime or Korean pop music, for example, when you build a fanbase, people learn more about you, grow attached to you, and they then have more of a stake in your well being and survival. One hopes that if people know more about Taiwan, through Taiwan Travelogue and other works, they would feel that they don’t want this culture to disappear.