Reading and conversation with award-winning author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (楊双子) and translator Lin King (金翎), moderated by Dr. Shu-mei Shih.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
3:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
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.
A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power.
“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.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (楊双子), whose real name is Yang Ruo-Tzu, is a versatile writer from Taichung, Taiwan. She dabbles in various forms, including fiction, essays, manga, video game scripts, and literary criticism. In 2020, she was named one of the Rising Stars of the Twenty-First Century by Wenshun magazine and was selected by Unitas magazine as one of the Twenty Most Promising Young Novelists. In 2021, she became the youngest-ever nominee for the United Daily News Literary Award. In 2022, Wenshun magazine again recognized Yáng as a Representative Author of Twenty-First Century Taiwanese Popular Literature. Her notable works include the novel The Season When Flowers Bloom (花開時節) in 2017, the short story collection Blossoming Girls of Gorgeous Island (花開少女華麗島) in 2018, and the novel Taiwan Travelogue ( 臺灣漫遊錄) in 2020. Taiwan Travelogue received Taiwan’s highest literary honor—the Golden Tripod Award. In 2024, its Japanese translation won Japan’s Best Translation Award, while the English version earned the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States.
Lin King (金翎) is a writer and translator based in Taipei, Taiwan, and New York. Her writing has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, Joyland, and Far-Near, among others, and has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She is the translator of The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin, as well as Taiwan Travelogue, a novel by Golden Tripod Award winner Yáng Shuāng-zǐ. Her translations from Mandarin and Japanese have appeared in Asymptote, the Margins, and Columbia Journal. Lin holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Columbia University, where she has taught undergraduate writing.
See more about the book at Graywolf Press.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Pacific Center