Taiwan Travelogue identity debate grows after Booker win
Taiwan Travelogue’s Booker win has amplified debate over Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past, China and what it means to be Taiwanese.
By James Whitfield · Staff Writer
4 min read
Taiwan Travelogue has turned a literary prize into a wider argument over Taiwan Travelogue identity, colonial memory and pressure from China. NPR reported that the novel’s 2026 International Booker Prize win has brought new attention to how Taiwan understands its past under Japan and its present-day political position.
The book was written by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated into English by Taiwanese American translator Lin King. It won the International Booker Prize for the year’s best fiction translated into English, bringing global attention to a story rooted in Taiwan’s 1930s colonial era.
What is Taiwan Travelogue about?
The novel follows Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese writer, as she travels around Taiwan while the island is under Japanese occupation. Her Taiwanese translator, Ō Chizuru, accompanies her, and the story examines the imbalance between them, their developing romance and their encounters with Taiwanese and Japanese people.
Through that relationship, the book asks how Taiwan should remember Japan’s rule. NPR reported that in China, some critics have accused the novel of softening or romanticizing colonialism and of reflecting what they view as Taiwan’s tendency to minimize Japan’s abuses during the colonial period.
Yáng rejected that reading in an interview with NPR. She said the novel was meant as a critique of colonial rule, arguing that even attempts by a colonizer to treat colonized people equally remain trapped inside an unjust system that took rights away from the people living under it.
Why has the book become part of Taiwan’s identity debate?
Yáng told NPR that Taiwan’s memory of Japan differs from that of China and Korea because Taiwan’s postwar experience was also shaped by the Republic of China government. She said Japan’s rule brought suffering and repression, while also becoming part of Taiwan’s modernization, leaving many people with mixed feelings.
After Japan left, the Republic of China arrived in Taiwan and, in Yáng’s account, quickly used governing methods associated with the previous colonial administration. She pointed in particular to language replacement, saying that rupture helps explain why some Taiwanese later looked back on Japan’s rule less negatively than people in China or Korea did.
Yáng also tied the novel’s concerns to her own family background. She told NPR she grew up among WaiShengRen, a term for people who moved from China to Taiwan as the Republic of China lost the Chinese civil war to the communists in 1949, and their descendants. Her own ancestors, she said, came to Taiwan from Fujian in the 17th or 18th century.
That background shaped her view that Taiwanese identity should not be defined by ancestry, Yáng said. She told NPR that people should be able to identify with Taiwan through attachment to the country and the land, whether they are new arrivals or have family roots there going back generations.
Yáng said her largest worry for Taiwan is not only war, though she said that concern is common. She told NPR she fears Taiwanese people could abandon a way of life built around democracy, equality and freedom, noting that Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996.
King, the translator, told NPR that rendering the book into English required more than sentence-by-sentence accuracy. She said literary translation involves conveying the spirit of a work, especially for a novel set in the 1930s, and that the English version required close interpretive work, including footnotes.
King also linked Taiwan’s reflection on colonialism to its current geopolitical position. She told NPR that Taiwan now relies on friends and allies, and that some of its closest partners are former colonizers, because it faces larger threats.
For King’s generation, she said, Taiwan has been known as a loud democracy, and many people therefore think of themselves as Taiwanese. She told NPR that outside allies often misunderstand that identity, especially when Taiwan is criticized for being too outspoken and risking angering China.
This story draws on original reporting from NPR.