Reading and conversation with author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (楊双子) and translator Lin King (金翎), followed by a book signing.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
3:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
Registration link coming soon.
The English translation of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's (楊双子) "Taiwan Travelogue" (臺灣漫遊錄) has made history after it became the latest winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024, making it the first work by a Taiwanese author to receive the honor since the category was established in 1967. Read more in this article.
Book Synopsis
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.
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.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (楊双子) is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism. Her works have been translated into Japanese and French.
Lin King (金翎) is a translator whose writing and translations have appeared in Boston Review, Joyland, Asymptote, and Columbia Journal.
See more about the book at Graywolf Press.