Yang Shuang-Zi: National Memoirist

THE PEN NAME came from grief. Yang Jo-tzu’s twin sister Yang Jo-hui died of cancer in 2015. Shuang-zi means twins and is written in Japanese kanji because of Jo-hui’s love for Japanese history. When Taiwan Travelogue first appeared in 2020, Yang presented it as a translation of a lost Japanese novel, listing a fictional writer, Aoyama Chizuko, as the author and herself as translator. Some readers did indeed believe they were holding a real account of a tour through colonial Taiwan. The novel is built on the question of who gets to narrate a place, and who gets credited for doing it.

On May 19, in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, Taiwan Travelogue won the International Booker Prize, be­coming the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to receive the award, and the first by a Taiwanese author. Trans­lator Lin King shares the prize equally. The novel had also won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature, the first Taiwanese book to do so.

The story follows Chizuko and her Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, across 1930s Taiwan, where a queer romance unfolds beneath the architecture of empire. Yang has said that Taiwanese people carry the memory of Japanese rule differently from Koreans, not through uniform resentment, but through nostalgia and distaste braided together. Taiwan Travelogue arrives at the uneasy recognition that empires do not disappear when they end; they remain in language, appetite, architecture, in the things people remember fondly against their own judgement, and in the stories a nation permits itself to tell about who once ruled it.

Yang, 41, also writes manga, video game scripts, essays and criticism.