The Distance Between Words
There are places we inherit without ever quite possessing them, and languages we love before we know how to speak them. In Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue and R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story, Taiwan becomes the setting for precisely this kind of beauty: a place encountered through translation, appetite, memory and longing, where the desire to understand another culture, another person, even one’s own family, repeatedly collides with the limits of what can be known.
The novels arrive from very different directions. Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, is set in 1938 under Japanese colonial rule and won the International Booker Prize in 2026. Its protagonist, Japanese novelist Aoyama Chizuko, travels through Taiwan with a young Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, gradually falling in love with both the island she encounters and the woman through whom she embraces it.
Taipei Story, published later that year, belongs to the present. Kuang’s Lily Chen was born in China but raised in the United States. After her first year at Yale, she goes to Taipei for an intensive Mandarin programme, carrying the familiar diasporic hope that language might unlock something dormant: generations, history, perhaps a more convincing version of herself. Instead she finds heat, mosquitoes, awkwardness, social embarrassment, incomprehensible characters and the humiliating discovery that inherited identity does not function like an ancestral password.
Both novels are, in their different ways, about the seduction of access. For Chizuko, access comes through travel. She wants the Taiwan beyond official colonial banquets, and Chizuru leads her towards its trains, markets, domestic kitchens and extraordinary food. The novel is almost edible. Meals arrive with the soft radiance of memory: winter melon tea, braised pork rice, fruit and elaborate rituals become vehicles for history, intimacy and pleasure.
Yet Yáng steadily unsettles the traveller’s fantasy that curiosity is sufficient protection against power. Chizuko may be sincere in her affection for Taiwan, even disdainful of imperial pomp, but she remains Japanese in a Japanese colony. Her freedom to travel, consume, inquire and desire is not shared equally by Chizuru. This imbalance reaches into their intimacy. Chizuko wants Chizuru to become legible to her, yet the interpreter remains partially withheld; Translation can bring two people exquisitely close while preserving an ambiguous distance.
The novel’s form deepens the deception. Taiwan Travelogue presents itself as the rediscovered work of Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist whose 1938 journey through colonial Taiwan was supposedly preserved, translated and republished across several generations. Its introductions, afterwords, scholarly notes and tangled publication history appear documentary, but are largely invented.
Yet the fabrication grew from tantalising scraps of reality. While researching in Japan with her twin sister, Yáng encountered a postcard bearing the name “Aoyama Chizuko”. From that surviving name she constructed an otherwise fictional writer, placing her within meticulously researched colonial history and in conversation with genuine Japanese travel literature about Taiwan.
The result is less historical reconstruction than an invented archive: Yáng creates the female testimony history might have contained, while continually reminding us how precariously the past depends upon what happens to survive. That preoccupation with survival carries a more private resonance. Yáng’s twin sister, Yáng Jo-hui, had helped research the historical background of the novel before her death in 2015; Yáng later retained their shared pen name, Shuāng-zǐ, meaning “twins”, as tribute.
There is no similarly ornate literary masquerade in Taipei Story. Its voice is immediate, dry and self-lacerating. But Lily also wants a route back towards the people she loves. Kuang dwells beautifully on the strange mechanics of acquiring a language: the exhaustion of decoding signs, the embarrassment of sounding childish, the moment when previously inert symbols begin to carry whole structures of thought. The novel proceeds in short, diary-like episodes, often placing Chinese beside English so that linguistic transformation becomes part of the reader’s experience.
Then Lily’s grandfather dies, and the emotional temperature of the novel changes. Suddenly her imperfect Mandarin represents more than embarrassment. It contains conversations never held and questions that can no longer be asked. The novel becomes concerned with what remains when access to another person has been interrupted: fragments of language, inherited stories, memories, and the dangerous human habit of assuming that there will always be more time.
Here Taipei Story draws characteristically close to Kuang herself. Her own grandfather died while she was undertaking an intensive language programme in Taiwan. She had imagined becoming sufficiently fluent to interview him properly about his life, but continually postponed those conversations, embarrassed that her Chinese was not yet good enough. The imagined future never arrived.
This gives the novel one of its quietest and most painful insights: waiting until we can speak perfectly may become another form of silence. It is another point where the two works illuminate one another. In Taiwan Travelogue, translation creates an illusion of transparency between coloniser and colonised; in Taipei Story, linguistic inadequacy feeds the illusion that genuine intimacy can safely be postponed until greater fluency arrives. Both assumptions fail. Language matters enormously, but neither novel permits the fantasy that the right vocabulary is enough.
Their travellers also portray important divergences. Chizuko arrives in Taiwan from the imperial centre, possessing privileges she only imperfectly perceives. Lily arrives from the American diaspora, culturally adjacent yet unmistakably foreign, searching for an inheritance that Taiwan cannot simply hand back to her. Her grandparents are in Guangzhou; Taiwan is not her lost homeland. Indeed, that displacement is part of Kuang’s point. Lily chooses Taipei partly because it offers enough cultural proximity to explore her Chineseness while giving her room to fail.
The comparison therefore becomes richer when the books are not treated as interchangeable stories of cultural belonging. One concerns colonial power and the danger of mistaking fascination for equality. The other examines diaspora and the fantasy that ancestry guarantees recognition. Different histories produce different kinds of estrangement.
Stylistically, they could almost be inverse reflections. Yáng writes through abundance: food, footnotes, false documents and competing languages accumulate until the novel seems luxuriantly overgrown with meaning. Kuang strips things back. After the intellectual machinery of Babel and the fantastical architecture of Katabasis, Taipei Story is strikingly ordinary: classrooms, cafés, family messages, bad decisions, and vocabulary exercises. The New York Times described it as Kuang’s most muted work and a significant turn towards realist literary fiction.
Its modest scale is part of its appeal. A mistranslated sentence can matter as much as a geopolitical argument because, in ordinary life, sometimes it does. Neither story ultimately delivers the uncomplicated Taiwan its protagonists initially seek. The island resists becoming scenery for someone else’s revelation. Beneath contemporary Taipei lies Indigenous histories, Japanese colonialism, Chinese migration, authoritarian rule, American influence and the unfinished political questions of the present.
Both books turn on a particular form of belatedness. Their characters discover that understanding does not necessarily arrive when it is most needed. A history may become legible only after its witnesses have gone; the words required for intimacy may be learned only after the conversation is no longer possible; What remains are fragments.
Taiwan Travelogue asks what disappears when another culture is translated too confidently. Taipei Story asks what may disappear while we are still trying to find the language through which to reach it. But both understand that intimacy is not the reward for finally eliminating misunderstanding. It begins, more tentatively, with recognising how much may always remain beyond our grasp.
