What a Booker Prize-winning novel reveals about how Taiwanese people, especially the young, have started to describe themselves
"Not a chorus singing in unison, but something closer to a cacophony, full of contradiction and unruly spirit." — Lin King, translator of Taiwan Travelogue
Taiwan Travelogue is built like the thing it describes: a story wrapped inside a false attribution, inside footnotes, inside afterwords written by people who may or may not have existed.
This essay follows the same path, though more quickly. Beneath the novel's layered architecture lies a different question: how Taiwanese people, especially the generation that has known only a de facto separate Taiwan, describe themselves when they are not trying to persuade anyone else.
The Prize (得獎)
On May 19, at Tate Modern in London, Yang Shuang-zi and her translator Lin King became the first Taiwanese author and translator to win the International Booker Prize, and the first winners translated from Mandarin in the award's history. Yang used her acceptance speech to argue that literature cannot be separated from the place it grows from. For more than a century, she said, Taiwanese writing has asked what future, and what kind of country, Taiwanese people want.
Beijing responded without engaging that question. Days later, a spokesperson for China's Taiwan Affairs Office praised writers on both sides of the Strait for standing on solid minzu lichang (民族立場) and confronting the legacy of Japanese colonialism. It acknowledged the novel's historical setting while overlooking its deeper concerns. Yang has long supported Taiwan's independence. Her wife, Lai Ting-ho, joked that instead of being labelled a stubborn separatist, Yang had somehow been turned into an anti-Japanese hero.
Others made an even simpler mistake. Readers soon discovered that Amazon's Audible and the Dutch retailer Bol had listed the novel's country of origin as China. After a boycott campaign, Audible acknowledged the label was a factual error, while the publisher confirmed it had never supplied such metadata.
A literary prize does not settle who gets to describe a country. It simply gives more people a reason to try.
The Translator (譯者)
The novel reverses this problem. In 1938, a Japanese novelist travels through colonial Taiwan with a local interpreter whose job is to explain the island to her. The interpreter's intelligence is obvious but never truly her own to claim; she exists to make someone else understand. More than eighty years later, Taipei-based translator Lin King performed the opposite task, making a Taiwanese novelist legible to English readers without disappearing herself.
Literary translation usually asks translators to become invisible, as if the prose arrived in English on its own. Lin King deliberately resisted that convention. She preserved the novel's footnotes, multiple forewords, and shifting romanization systems, insisting that the English edition retain the same layered texture as the original.
She also refused to publish with any press unwilling to put her name on the cover, delaying the British edition by two years. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, she adopted another principle: she would translate only works from Taiwan.
Her goal was never to make one novel speak for an entire country. Instead, she wanted English readers to encounter what she called "not a chorus singing in unison, but something closer to a cacophony, full of contradiction and unruly spirit"; it is the sound of a healthy democracy.
A Name Kept Twice (若暉)
楊双子, the name on the cover, means "twins." It is the pen name of Yang Jo-tzu, but for more than a decade it belonged to two people. Yang and her identical twin, Yang Jo-hui, grew up together outside Taichung and began writing historical fiction as adults, with Jo-hui conducting the archival research while her sister wrote the prose. When they entered Taiwan's first Historical Fiction Award in 2014, which required a single name, they chose the word for twins.
Five months after a cancer diagnosis in early 2015, Yang Jo-hui died. Her sister kept the name. Every book published since bears both of them, whether readers know it or not. The novel's layered structure, praised by one Booker reviewer as a virtuosic performance of literary polyphony, even includes an afterword written in the voice of a translator named Yang Jo-hui.
Yang once described their partnership with a driving metaphor: she pressed the gas, her sister pressed the brake. She has kept the same hairstyle and appearance for the decade since her sister's death, telling one interviewer that changing her look would mean losing track of who her sister might have become.
What They Call Themselves (我是誰)
In 2013, Global Views Monthly allowed respondents to choose multiple identities. Ninety-seven percent identified as Taiwanese, 78 percent accepted membership in the 中華民族 (the Chinese ethnic nation), 75 percent chose Asian, 69 percent identified as Huaren (ethnic Chinese in a cultural sense), and 43 percent called themselves Chinese. Read together, the results tell a different story from the familiar either-or framing. Most people in Taiwan are not choosing between being Taiwanese and culturally Chinese. They are separating cultural heritage from political allegiance.
Much of that distinction rests on language. Huaren refers to ancestry and cultural inheritance without implying loyalty to any state. A Malaysian or Singaporean of Chinese descent can use it comfortably. Zhongguoren (中國人), by contrast, carries a political meaning alongside the ethnic one.
As one young Taiwanese writer put it, she is Huaren by ancestry but introduces herself as Taiwanese because she is describing a shared political future, not a family tree. Others reject the Huaren label altogether, arguing that sharing language and traditions with China no more makes Taiwan culturally Chinese than speaking English makes Australia culturally British.
Among younger Taiwanese, this outlook is often described as tianran du (天然獨), or "naturally independent." Tsai Ing-wen popularized the term in 2014 when she argued that support for Taiwan's self-determination was not an ideology younger people had adopted but the world they had grown up in. The label endured because it matched experience. A 2015 poll found that 98 percent of Taiwanese aged 20 to 29 identified as Taiwanese, while only 2 percent identified as Chinese.
Yet this generation also departed from earlier independence activists. Rather than rejecting the Republic of China (ROC) as an imposed legacy, many simply reinterpreted it. They grew up under the ROC flag and never saw it as foreign. Many are comfortable keeping its name and symbols while quietly discarding the constitutional claim to a mainland they have never known. It is less a rejection of the old framework than a redefinition of it from within.
The Question That Moved (認同)
Two years before the Booker win, accepting the U.S. National Book Award for the same novel, Yang made a sharper claim than anything she has said since. Some people today, she argued, consider themselves Chinese, just as some Taiwanese a century ago considered themselves Japanese. She offered no caveat about the two situations differing in origin or circumstance. The comparison suggests that national identity is less an inheritance than something shaped over time by the state and society people live in.
Yet identity has continued to evolve in unexpected ways. Young Taiwanese who grew up consuming Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili have not necessarily grown closer to Beijing politically. If anything, commentators describe them as more willing to separate culture from sovereignty, consuming mainland popular culture while maintaining a distinctly Taiwanese political identity. Cultural proximity and political distance have risen together rather than trading places.
The same shift appears among waishengren, families descended from those who arrived from the mainland after 1949. Researchers have found that younger waishengren are developing their own forms of Taiwanese identity, rooted less in ancestral origin than in a shared life on the island. Different communities are reaching similar conclusions by different paths.
Even so, a stronger Taiwanese identity has not produced greater enthusiasm for resolving Taiwan's political status. Long-running surveys show Taiwanese identification at record highs and Chinese identification at record lows, yet the largest share of the public still prefers to preserve the status quo indefinitely. Taiwan has become more certain about what to call itself, but no more certain about what to do with that certainty.
That brings us back to Lin King. She has said she will continue translating only Taiwan-origin literature until the day nobody tells her she should visit the island "while it's still there." It is less a translator's ambition than an acknowledgment of uncertainty. Taiwan may have reached broad agreement over its identity, but not over its future.
If Taiwan Travelogue captures that condition, it is not through harmony but through the contradictions and unruly voices that Lin King celebrated from the beginning.
Meng Kit Tang
Meng Kit Tang is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025. His research interests include cross-Strait relations, Taiwan politics and policy issues, and aerospace technology.