Transcription
Like, what is the role of food here? It's a very useful literary tool. You like Taiwanese food, you like, you should read this. So, it kind of opens some doors uh to different readers.
Hey, it's Emily Wu. Today, we speak with translator Ling King on Japanese colonization in Taiwan, food, and the work that led to the US National Book Award for Translated Literature. This is Cover to Cover.
Welcome, Lincoln.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Congratulations on your translation.
Thank you so much. In 2024, it won the US National Book Award for translated literature. This was a first for Taiwan.
Indeed. Yeah, it's still pretty surreal.
I love reading historical novels and this is a really rare one about Taiwan during the Japanese colonization which spanned from 1895 until the end of World War II. I want to turn the page to your process of translating the book and also to talk about the author Yangu. She is known for her popular fiction. They're very accessible. She grew up reading Japanese manga with her twin sister.
Mhm.
Can you give us a sense of who Yangu is?
Yanu is a pen name um that in Japanese is Yo, which means Yang twins. Um and that's because um Shanzi whose real name is um and her twin sister Ro they started writing um when they were teens you know kind of fanfiction um of Japanese manga or of Taiwanese stories and um when they started composing together um Roi the younger sister was a historian. She knew Japanese, was building an archive of Taiwan under Japanese rule, and they were a team um trying to document, you know, reinvent, reinvision women's lives during the Japanese period here in Taiwan. Roe passed away when they were 30 of cancer and Rosa has continued writing um under the twin name. I think this is one of the the most amazing things about this. It talks about such a difficult history in Taiwan, such an important history. It was 50 years uh but yet it was in such a way that was incredibly incredibly accessible.
So set the scene for us. Now this book, it takes place in 1938. At this point in history, it's been four decades since the Japanese arrived in Taiwan and the Japanese Empire have already occupied all of East Asia and they are beginning of their ambition into Southeast Asia. So they see Taiwan as a launchpad to the south and this is the point when our narrator arrives in Taiwan. Who is she? What is she doing here? And tell us what happened.
So she is a young Japanese writer um a novelist um named Aoyama Chisukul. As a woman um she was kind of a rarity as a result of the success of her novel and its film adaptation. Um she is kind of being paraded around by the Empire um as part of their effort to promote the southern expansion project. She's very resistant to the kind of imperial agenda, but is also very curious about the so-called South. And she ends up coming to Taiwan um to do a lecture tour, a book talk tour um around these the main island. She's matched with a translator who becomes um kind of she's her translator, but she's her cook, she's her fixer, and a love interest. She meets a young woman, uh, Taiwanese woman who speaks perfect Japanese who used to be um a teacher of the language of the Japanese language um and so access her interpreter. This woman who's even younger than her by a little bit um seems to know everything and is so calm and suave um but very demure at the same time. And um she just kind of becomes obsessed with learning more about this young woman, befriending her. She represents a whole generation of Taiwanese who grew up entirely under Japanese rule. They grew up speaking Japanese as the national language, but at home they're still speaking Taiwanese or Haka or the various indigenous languages.
In the 1930s, Taiwan, um we saw kind of tremendous population growth and also the growth of entertainment and business. It was a very lively period.
Yeah. They didn't know it then, but we're nearing the end of the Japanese period and it's sort of I guess peak assimilation, peak infrastructure in terms of how the Japanese um planned it um before the war effort has really begun even though it's you can start to hear the drum beat.
Can you talk about the two different perspectives here? So on the one hand, we have the perspective from the narrator who's a Japanese writer. She's here writing a book on her own, but really she wants to reject the proceed to the south towards Taiwan national policy, but yet she falls into that, right?
Yeah. Even as someone who identifies as anti-imperialist, um Ayama is arriving here and she's amazed by the sort of spectacular scenery here. Contextually it's important to know I suppose that uh the Japanese saw Taiwan truly as like the tropics the south um and you know had planted our cocoa our palm trees here were planted around that time and it's sort of to to stage this idea of Taiwan being this exotic land and she's not immune to that to being awed by those things even though she wants to learn about Taiwanese culture. She wants to eat the authentic cuisine. Her reactions tend to be quite, you know, touristic.
This is anything from a temple to the type of food um that's grown locally.
Exactly. Yeah. You know, seeing lean or something and just feeling like what is this? You know, never seen a wax apple. Wax.
A wax apple.
From the Taiwanese perspective, we have Chisuru is the name of the other main character. um she was born in Taiwan, is ethnically Taiwanese, and has been educated entirely, like you said, under the Japanese system. Um, another kind of sort of local uh group that's introduced is um the Japanese who were born in Taiwan and raised there entirely. So, ethnically Japanese, but on some level identify more with Taiwan as home. And back in Japan, they are also regarded as other for the reason that they've never lived on, you know, the land that is core to the empire of the sun. So we kind of have these multiple perspectives in addition to other ones of more minor characters that appear. So already Taiwan is painted as a very multicultural u society where people have all sorts of identities that are maybe even clashing um within one person.
What's really fun about it is that we're taken on these sceneries through they ride the trains. They go to these iconic places not just in Taipei, right? It's all around Taiwan. There's a great map at the beginning of the book that shows all the places they go to. And these are historical sites that we grew up hearing about. One of the m major sort of frameworks for this book from Shanz's perspective is that the construction of um I guess the north south um railroad was completed on the western side of Taiwan. And so even young women had the mobility to move up and down very freely and travel, take day trips, um take short trips north and south. And so that's one of the premises for the book. Um, in the English version, we didn't emphasize this like railway obsession as much because unlike in Taiwan or in Japan or in Europe where people get really people are really proud of and excited by public transportation in the US, not really a thing. Um, so the railway is actually one of the central themes of the original composition process.
Right, which just really echoes the fact that the railway in film and literature has often been a device that describes colonization.
Yeah.
So in 1908 when the Japanese completed that railway connecting um the island from Tong from the north to Gausong in the south.
It was such an iconic moment that even the adopted brother of the emperor came for a ceremony.
Yeah. At the time it would have been a sign of civilization. But something that Shanza has talked about is also it transcended um the conventional kind of pockets of different Taiwanese ethnic groups that tended to, you know, self-segregate by virtue of when they arrived in Taiwan. But with the train being so accessible.
Yeah.
Everyone started to mingle more and merge more. And the point um 1938 when the story takes place is kind of when everything has gotten a little more loosey goosey in terms of those boundaries.
So you started translating this in 2021, right? And and a lot of what you just said about Taiwan being such a diverse society, right? Just in books there's so many languages and as they travel through they meet different types of communities and the Taiwanese interpreter was always always able to explain everything why one language exists one way one type of food exists another in this town versus that town um the history of the different communities I'm wondering um while researching this period and while translating this text and what you felt coming from somebody who is looking back to 100 years ago. Were there trades within the society that you still see signs of now?
I was actually stuck in the US um while working on sort of entirety that I was working on this because it was still um quite peak co um so I did most of this work in New York. It was hard in some ways to get my hands on materials um because I don't know algorithmically it it becomes impossible to search unless I get a VPN to pretend I'm in Taiwan or Japan. And so I felt very far away um while working on this and just learning a lot about this land that even growing up here I didn't necessarily know about. Um, and it did restructure for me the idea of how Taiwan has been diverse from the beginning. Um, it being colonial from the beginning when the Han people moved here or when the Dutch and right. Um, so it's always been a platform I guess for different voices. Uh, some were louder than others and that fluctuated over time.
I started working on this uh in earnest around the time when Russia invaded Ukraine. And that got me thinking a lot about language and the sort of transfer of power and what it means to, you know, have been one entity at one point and then completely another independent entity and then to have that challenged again. So, I thought a lot about the context of Taiwan and the peoples that have moved through and are still here uh in in terms of very timely and upsetting current events.
With that in context, um, conflict and colonizers, um, there's a moment in the book where the narrator realizes why as hard as she's tried to be friends with the locals, the islanders, as as she calls them, there's always this push back.
Mhm.
She was talking about a particular snack at this point and she says, "Wow, you know, the invention of the snack, we have to give credit to the empire for this, right?"
Yeah.
And then she says that the empire really has made the raw jade that is the island shine with the gleam of a jewel.
Yeah. She's marveling at this idea that oh it's if if this takeover hadn't happened this wonderful thing would never have existed and so we can't entirely say that um imperialism has been wholly bad because it has given birth to these wonderful things which is um I guess a really complicated sentiment that is actually really counter to western narratives of postcolonialism. Kind of colonialism bad. Um, this book kind of challenges that a little bit in having the narrator um go through these thoughts and then having other characters react to that.
How did you feel as a translator?
I think weirdly there is this sentiment in contemporary Taiwan where we appreciate that period of Japanese colonialism because it culturally or politically or historically distinguishes us from say China and um it's become you see so much restoration of uh Shawa period Japanese buildings to attract Taiwanese tourists but also So other tourists from all over the world including Japan um because they haven't necessarily preserved the buildings from that era the way we have. You see this a lot in like Tainan um or in certain parts of Taipei where uh the old Japanese houses are now tea shops or they sell like Taiwanese young creators um designs and it does become this weird dynamic where people have asked me in um the US and other places why does it feel like the Taiwanese don't hate the Japanese the way say the Koreans do. Um and I think it's because of that sort of you have been you know thrown from one colonizer to another. Um then there's this sense of nostalgia for earlier times. In that sense it does what Ayama expresses is probably what some Taiwanese think um of the Japanese and the time that they spent here in Taiwan.
There's one point where she's rejected by a local chef who says, "I will not serve Japanese people." And and in fact in Taiwan during that time from the 20s on um this is when a Taiwanese consciousness was um emerging as a form of uh self-determination. Um, it's very subtle and there are.
Yeah.
There are a lot of nuance moments like that I think where small acts of resistance on all sides um really make you think about our current situation as well as how it applies to you know other parts of the world and other dynamics.
I want to talk about food. This is because that this travel log. It's a cookbook.
Yeah. And Yeah. Many steps were recounted.
Every chapter is uh organized by a type of food. Um, they're all very symbolic and within the chapters, multiple types of food and multiple types of recipes are written in detail. It's it's very delicious. I got very hungry reading this twice in Mandarin and then English. Food is featured so prominently here. There's all kinds of foods. Japanese food that's very expensive. It's elite. It's it's uh sit down very proper. It's sushi. And then there's Japanese food that's been adapted using Taiwanese ingredients. And then you have Taiwanese food lob which is here. It's seen as a it's a snack. It's kind of a snack that only locals eat. I think it works on two levels. One, it's a really handy tool for talking about what we were saying before, cultural distinctions, um, historical evolutions of different groups coming together because of all the hybridity in food that happens when there's fusion, when there's innovation. On the other hand, it's also a very useful literary tool because it draws people in. You say, "Oh, you should read if you you like Taiwanese food, like you should read this. You liked in Kyong, you should read this. It has nothing to do with any of that, but it's sort of a lead in um that even if people feel, oh, I I'm not really into historical fiction. I don't really want to read about colonialism in my free time. Oh, if it's about food, you know. Um, so, it kind of opens some doors uh to different readers.
You're triilingual. You speak Mandarin, English, and Japanese. You write and translate between the three interchangeably.
Yeah. I mean, people are always really disappointed when I say this, but I do not claim to be a foodie and I really not a particularly good cook. I feel like the food was in some ways the toughest part um for me to translate. Yeah. Because a lot of it also some of it is sort of your hallmark Taiwanese dishes. Luren, um, winter melon tea, things like that. But some of it intentionally is obscure and is really confined to either a region or is no longer um common among any Taiwanese cuisine. So for that, you know, it was sometimes hard to picture and I found myself kind of looking up um old TV news featurettes um of introducing this dying type of street snack. And once again, because I was in New York at the time, I had to really sort of exert my imagination to to understand um some of the foods in here. And um what I found was so much of English description of food is French, you know, brulee, sauté, juliet, and um it's all very it's all French words that were just kind of imported into English. And I thought, is it weird to say like and then you julen the the celery for your haka, you know? Um, and so it became I became more aware actually of how English doesn't have a lot of words to describe food.
There's a quote from the fictional Shangu who writes a fictional afterward that I wanted that if you could read for us which I think I mean to me really sums up really nicely on um the purpose of the book.
Yeah. For a little bit of context, I sometimes get both she and I sometimes get um complaints from readers of both languages, but mostly the English um that this was a mistranslation because it says that it's the younger sister who's writing this, but um and the younger sister has passed away. But that's totally intentional. And um the idea is more that um Rozu is writing as Rojoy and kind of in the premise of this novel, it's Ro who was ill and not Rojoy. So it's it's not a mistake. It's kind of a really sad um sort of final layer to this onion. Um, okay. This book in all its forms has always brought forth its translators internalized feelings about the vicissitudes of life as well as inspired the hope to at last fully piece together this ineffable and true affection that took place on Taiwan Island and under the dictates of history and fate.
Thank you.
That to me really summed up, you know, why this exists. I want to thank you for translating this book and congratulations on the incredible award. Hopefully this will be translated in you know many many more languages to come and please give our regard to Shanu.
Thank you Emily.
After the audience has read this book what book would you recommend them to read?
Um, so to get a very very different sense of Taiwanese society, there is a book coming out in translation, I believe on October 24th of 2025, um, Spent Bullets um, by uh, I think the he's a Taiwanese author, but his pen name is Japanese um, Teria and he uh, is translated by Kevin Wang. It's coming out with Harper Villa and it's about Silicon Valley Taiwanese American or Taiwanese immigrants who were kind of top students in electrical engineering, computer science at National Taiwan University and then have immigrated to the Silicon Valley to work at the top tech firms. However, this is primarily a queer BDSM novel. I think uh to have these sort of opposite settings um in many ways is very representative of what Taiwan has become which is something that can hold um all these different stories.
Thank you Linking Writer translator award winner. Uh thank you so much for spending the time with us and talking about your work from cover to cover.
Thank you, Emily.