Taiwan Travelogue

Careless People, cool.

Taiwan Travelogue.

Oh, I'm going to read Taiwan Travelogue.

I lived in China for a year in 2011 and anything related to Taiwan and China is always of interest to me.

Marianne read Walking on Broken Glass, Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling.

The colonizer planted an alphabet, and the harvest came for the colonizer, which is the one hopeful sentence in the segment, so I'll be ending it on that.

So the book that I was reading before this trip is called Taiwan Travelogue by the Taiwanese writer Yang Shuangzi, translated into English by Lin King.

And it just won the International Booker Prize after winning America's National Book Award for Translated Literature.

And it took everything I just described in Vietnam and showed me the Japanese version at a dinner table between two women.

And once you know that, one of the sweet parts about the book actually gets a little less sweet because a Japanese woman affectionately renaming her Taiwanese interpreter Chichen in the year of a state renaming campaign is the policy performed by as intimacy, and the book knows it and lets you feel the affection and the asymmetry at the same time.

Because Chi-chan speaks four languages out of necessity, well, Aoyama only needs her own, and the goodwill between them is genuine and completely insufficient, since affection inside an unequal structure doesn't dissolve the structure.

And the book pulls its final trick, which made it a scandal in Taiwan and makes it perfect for the show because Taiwan Travelogue was published in 2020 disguised as a real discovered 1930s Japanese travelogue in Mandarin translation.

Footnotes and translator's notes and all.