Anglophones miss how central food is to most other cultures. Our conversational starters revolve around the weather as a way of breaking the ice with a stranger, whereas food has become just a source of fuel. In many other languages “Have you eaten yet?” as a greeting is a way to metaphorically (and sometimes literally) break bread. In Taiwan Travelogue, food brings together a Japanese travel writer, Aoyama, and her Taiwanese translator, Chizuru, but also seeks to highlight their different tastes. Ideas of the high-culture mainlanders more refined plates expose the colonialising soft power of Aoyama.
Set in 1930s Taiwan during the Japanese occupation and written from Aoyama’s perspective as a charming queer love story, the book explores deeper themes of colonisation, the nature of power in society, and the exoticisation of the other, all through the eyes of our unreliable narrator. Aoyama spouts the naïve phrases of the “evolved traveller” . She wants to experience the real Taiwan and berates, albeit gently, those with more insider knowledge than she does for suggesting the more usual tourist fare. This would be difficult to swallow if she weren’t so likeable. Effusively talkative and clearly smitten with Chizuru, seeing her understanding of herself and the power dynamics between her and the islanders is engaging rather than cringe inducing. It’s this likeability that makes her unreliable; we’re as trapped in her othering gaze as Chizuru.
The love story between Aoyama and the inscrutable Chizuru is one of hunter and prey. We learn little of the exoticised Chizuru until Aoyama’s enlightenment late in the story. Chizuru herself tries to escape Aoyama’s intimacy which allows Aoyama to grow, seeing the gap between what she knows of Chizuru, the islander idealised in her mind, and Chizuru the flesh and blood person.
Aoyama’s evolution is slow and stuttering, but ultimately rewarding. Through her voice, we also learn to question our own motives. Are we really as liberal as we might want to be or are we also performing; pushing back against those elements of the status quo that suit us?
Aoyama finally settles these questions for herself and is rewarded, and rewards us at the same time, with a bittersweet ending with Chizuru. Seeing them together—not quite as friends nor lovers, as the inherent power imbalance can never truly allow for that—but with a spirit of openness and some affectionate gestures. The barriers are never totally removed, but certainly eroded.
