The Sense That Most Defines a Culture

Early in Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, the narrator, on a late night train, watches her traveling companion become engrossed in a book. When she asks about it, the woman balks at the interruption. “Her soul,” the narrator observes, “seemed to slot back into her body.” A good book can briefly steal your soul, replacing it with its own.

But some books make you fight for that privilege; Taiwan Travelogue is one. Translated from Mandarin by Lin King, the novel about love, colonialism, war, and food—which this week won the National Book Award for translated literature—is intentionally constructed to make its soul difficult to locate. The book is framed as a new Mandarin translation of an autobiographical 1954 Japanese novel by the author Aoyama Chizuko, which was itself based on her earlier collection of travel columns. (Chizuko is a fictional creation; the original Mandarin edition of Taiwan Travelogue sparked controversy by listing her as its author, and Yáng as the translator.) It is supplemented with footnotes by Yáng, as well as notes by Chizuko and various (fictional) scholars.

All these layers of commentary serve to make the story’s emotional center more difficult to access, and more fulfilling once you’ve earned it. The novel follows Chizuko as she spends a year in Japan-colonized Taiwan starting in 1938. While engaged in a lecture tour organized by the colonial government, she writes travel dispatches in an attempt to grasp something of the true nature of her host country. She tries, as well, to learn the true nature of the interpreter who serves as her guide, a young Taiwanese woman who, under the colonial government, has been given the name Ō Chizuru.

From the start, Chizuru enchants Chizuko. (The novel makes a running joke of the similarity of their names.) She is gentle but steely, warmhearted but reserved, full of surprising knowledge and interests, enormously skilled at hiding her feelings. Chizuko’s feelings for Chizuru, which remain purposely ambiguous—she refers to them as friendship, but they sound like romantic love—come to dominate her time in Taiwan. She is a blunt woman, who bluntly wants two things: to discover the source of “the resilience and vitality that coursed through this formidable colony,” and to be closer to Chizuru.

Chizuko’s chosen tool in both investigations is food. In her mid-20s—only a few years older than her guide—and already a renowned novelist, she is obsessed with eating: Her family teases her that she has a monster’s appetite. Upon her arrival in Taiwan, she is determined to eat her way to the heart of the island. She is not interested in wasting her time with the traditional Japanese foods generally eaten by visiting “mainlanders”—a term used throughout the novel to refer to the colonists—but instead in the island’s cuisine, from the richest delicacies to the simplest stews. And over these meals, she tries to figure out her enigmatic translator and form a genuine connection.

[Read: The 12 most unforgettable descriptions of food in literature]

In trying to understand both island and interpreter, Chizuko finds at best partial success. But her gustatory quest for intimacy still yields insight—primarily into the ways that taste, among all the senses, most defines the essence of a person. It does so in part by tying them to the time and place in which they live.

But when your homeland has been under foreign control for centuries, your tastes are inevitably shaped by that reality—by the culinary traditions the colonizers bring with them, and by the attempts to maintain traditional flavors in the face of erasure. Chizuko sees Taiwan—controlled by a series of rulers including the Dutch, China’s Qīng dynasty, and Japan—as a land of wonders in need of preservation before they are overcome by forced assimilation and modernization. Chizuru gently points out that colonialism has already turned much of Taiwan’s native culture into a relic of history. “How far back should one go when lamenting such cruelties?” she asks.

Chizuko is proudly opposed to Japan’s imperialism. She insists on eating absolutely everything that represents the “true” Taiwan, down to a soup made from jute leaves, traditionally fare for the very poor, that Chizuru bluntly says “does not taste good.” But, it turns out, Chizuko is adventurous only so long as she feels secure in her own identity. Late in the novel, she is forced to take a clear look at how much her privilege as a mainlander has made her oblivious to the experiences of others, and how easily the directness she prizes in herself can come across as coercive. With her sense of self painfully disrupted, she turns to the food of home, quickly abandoning her interest in the fresh, surprising delicacies of Taiwan. “I ate only neko-manma rice”—a dish that a footnote by Yáng describes as “simple Japanese household fare”—“egg over rice, or white toast with sugared butter,” she writes.

There is an additional, complicating story behind Chizuko’s travelogue turned novel. Her initial columns about Taiwan were written in 1938 and 1939, in the lead-up to World War II; when she revisits this material in the early 1950s to write Taiwan Travelogue, it is her own country that is occupied—by the victorious Allied forces led by the United States. The end of the war meant the end of Japan’s rule in Taiwan, a rupture that seems to have provoked, for Chizuko, a sense of personal loss: Her connection to an island that she had once seen as a temporary second home was severed. It’s easy to imagine that the harsh experience of life under another country’s occupation prompted her to revisit a moment in which she herself had represented a colonial power without truly understanding her complicity.

Yáng has structured her novel like a matryoshka doll: a straightforward story surrounded by many twisting layers of mystery. The most profound of those mysteries is Chizuru, herself an expert at getting to the core of things. She is perpetually shown in the act of peeling or shelling foods that she then offers Chizuko. Roasted seeds known as kue-tsí, peanuts, fava beans, lychees, sweet potatoes: She is constantly navigating past spiky, tough, finicky exteriors so that Chizuko can enjoy the treats within. As the duo travel and eat their way around Taiwan, with Chizuru always peeling, peeling, peeling, Chizuko tries to do some unearthing of her own, making guesses at who this fascinating, discreet woman really is.

In the end, Chizuko cannot fully get to know her inscrutable companion without first learning the truth about herself, which Chizuru eventually helps her see. That truth: Power—even when wielded unintentionally—obscures, making those who have it less perceptive about the world around them. There is a reason that Chizuko always mangles her attempts to extract a delicacy from its shell—“despite enlisting both my fingers and my teeth, I could barely fish out the seeds” of a lychee, she writes—while Chizuru makes that work look effortless. Only one of them has had to learn the art of subtlety, the tool of the disempowered.

[Read: I went to Taiwan to say goodbye]

Today, Taiwan is autonomously governed, but not recognized by most countries as independent. In the days before the American presidential election, China, which has in recent years ramped up intimidation against the island, meaningfully suggested that Donald Trump would turn his back on Taiwan’s defense if he returned to office. The reminder of Taiwan’s precariousness, perpetually susceptible to the whims of the greater powers invested in it, lends additional gravity to Taiwan Travelogue. Within Yáng’s tough assessment of her well-meaning and fundamentally likable narrator lies a plea for introspection on the part of the powerful, and a reminder of what is at stake when that responsibility is neglected.

In one quiet, telling scene, Chizuru takes Chizuko to harvest jute plants so they can make the awful-tasting soup she promised. It’s a much more complicated endeavor than Chizuko had imagined: “While experienced jute pickers could distinguish the usable, tender leaves at a glance, novices could not necessarily tell the difference even when touching them,” she writes. A soul—of a country or of a person—is a tender thing, hidden by the toughened tissue around it. It is easy to destroy it in the process of discovering it. Easy, and brutal.