Talya Zax, The Atlantic
‘Layers of commentary serve to make the story’s emotional center more difficult to access, and more fulfilling once you’ve earned it… A straightforward story surrounded by many twisting layers of mystery.’
Marcie Geffner, Washington Independent Review of Books
‘In the end, Taiwan Travelogue is much more than a feast for foodies or a tale for armchair travelers. It’s a journey into the hearts of two unforgettable women who may or may not be able to reconcile friendship, perhaps even love, with the enormous gap in their social status and the vast cultural differences of their lives.’
Lauren Yu-Ting Bo, Words Without Borders
‘Taiwan Travelogue is a fearless record of a complicated time in Taiwan’s history. It not only captures the physical details of the period of Japanese colonization—“leather oxfords and wooden geta,” majolica tiles, and an overall merging of Chinese, Japanese, Indigenous, and Western cultures—but also the difficult social experiences of the people who lived through it.’
Nitika Francis, The Hindu
‘Their dynamic poses intriguing questions – can a Mainlander and an Islander be friends? Can you love someone whose stature and upbringing forbid them from viewing you as an equal? Do they only love the virtuosity their kindness reflects on them? Taiwan Travelogue does not set out to answer these questions, but rather to reveal them, while paying homage to Taiwan’s ever-growing cultural amalgam.’
Eva Cheuk Yin Li, The Conversation
‘Taiwan Travelogue’s meta-fictional architecture is quietly audacious. Yáng frames the narrative through a fictional author, a fictional translator and their respective silences, making the unreliable narrator not merely a device but a structural argument about whose knowledge counts and whose remains obstructed.
‘What makes the book genuinely pleasurable, however, is its treatment of intimacy between the two women. The queer undertow is rendered through the minute economies of shared meals and unfinished sentences, through which Yáng smuggles the most profound questions about desire, friendship and colonial entitlement into the everyday.’
Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
‘As rich and heady as some of the dishes that Chi-chan prepares for Aoyama, Taiwan Travelogue is a multi-layered meditation on language and longing, and on the many ways in which we travel only to arrive where we started.’
