Book Specs 📖

• Author: Yang Shuang-Zi
• Translator: Lin Kang
• Genre: Metafiction, Literary Fiction
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Pages: 320

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Aoyama Chizuko, a well-known Japanese novelist, is sponsored by the colonial government to conduct a one-week lecture series in Taiwan where she develops and ravenous appetite for local food and an interesting relationship with her interpreter.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• The genius of the book is in the questions that remain after reading: a mark of great literature. It made me think about my own experiences as a tourist in someone else’s home and how the colonial histories still pervade our mindsets. On the surface level, our consumption is of food/things but on a deeper level, the status of visiting, of a spectator, of someone that is there to take, absorb, capture, how does that make us different from colonizers? I’ve said this before many times before changing my own methods of travel: the new generation of “country counters” is in the same business of seeing countries as places to conquer/status symbols as opposed to places to understand.
• Other great questions provoked post reading: Where does fiction start and end – in a book and in real life? What is lost in translation? Even when we speak the same language, what is lost in communication?
• I came into this book semi-blind because it won the International Booker Prize this year, and so there was already chatter about the book’s meta-framework. Having been to Taiwan two years ago, the locations mentioned became more relatable. I was able to appreciate my own travels and how they’ve enriched by education of the world. This book could not have come to me at a better time: I finished it on my way to China to live in a foreign place and learn something new:)

“Quotes”🗣

“Travelling is living in a foreign place. As in, experiencing all four seasons of normal life in a foreign place. Leaving behind a home environment where one’s habits have settled into old, tired ways and spending one’s days somewhere else, trying to find some new feeling in the mere act of being alive in this world. In this sense, traveling is a way of cleansing one’s body and mind–starting afresh.”

“There’s no greater human happiness than being able to eat the food that one craves“

“When out of favour, attend to one’s own virtue; when favoured, attend to the virtue of the world.”

“…it’s human weakness that makes us more afraid of the unknown than of the things we know for certain.”

“If one thinks about the origins of what one eats, it really feels as though a small dining table holds the multitudes of whole oceans and continents.”