“WHEN DOES FOOD stop being just food?” During last year’s George Town Liter-ary Festival (GTLF), Taiwanese author Yang Shuang Zi tackled the question in a conversation about Taiwan Travelogue, her novel unravelling Taiwanese identity through meals and menus—recently longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Yang’s appearance was supported by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Malaysia, which has been playing a growing role in bringing Taiwanese writers to the region in recent years.
Set in 1938, during Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, Taiwan Travelogue follows a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, on a railway journey across the island. With her local interpreter, O-Chizuru, she recorded what she ate, saw and encountered along the way.
At first, the book reads like a charming gourmet travelogue, but it does not stay light for long. Aoyama wanted closeness, perhaps even friendship, yet the colonial structure made intimacy hard to separate from authority. As the meals accumulated, so did tension: desire, dependence and the unequal terms on which people were allowed to know one another. Built on fictionalised narration and reconstructed encounters, it raises questions of authorship, translation and what it means to “retell” history.
Yang frames the novel through four key elements: history, the railway, food and yuri (a genre of media focusing on intimate relationships between female characters). Yuri does not always imply relationships of a romantic or sexual nature; it can also describe companionship, strong friendship or deep emotional and spiritual intimacy between women.
