Movement Injuries

Christopher T. Fan explores two new novels, Brian Hioe’s “Taipei at Daybreak” and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s “Taiwan Travelogue.”

By Christopher T. FanJune 24, 2025

• Fiction

• History

YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND: most Taiwanese people do not think of themselves as Chinese. It’s a point that gets lost in conversations about Taiwan. As the geopolitical competition between the United States and China intensifies, Taiwan is increasingly seen as a potential flash point. It’s also increasingly seen as a linchpin in global capitalism. During 2021’s chip shortages, Americans were shocked to learn about Taiwan’s predominance in the semiconductor industry.

The conversations we have about Taiwan are rarely concerned with what actual Taiwanese people think. Taiwan is not just semiconductors, and it’s not just a geopolitical crux. It’s a country the size of Maryland with a population of 23 million, a complicated history of multiple colonial occupations, and Indigenous societies that are thousands of years old. It’s foolish to generalize about what the Taiwanese people want, but today at least three things are abundantly clear. First, they don’t want to be reduced to pawns in the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. Second, on the question of unification with China, 85 percent want to punt the question—they prefer the ambiguous status quo and just want to be left alone. And finally, on the question of identity, an increasing portion of Taiwanese people—two-thirds in recent polls—think of themselves as Taiwanese only. That statistic is even more bracing considering that less than 2.4 percent consider themselves Chinese only.

It wasn’t until relatively recently that Taiwanese people were officially allowed to have an identity at all. Expressions of Taiwanese identity were suppressed for so long that it’s hard to know now where to begin inventing one. That hasn’t stopped Taiwanese people from trying, and over the course of Japanese colonialism (1895–1945) and the Kuomintang (KMT) Party’s period of martial law known as the “White Terror” (1949–92)—marked by intense censorship, surveillance, and political persecution—many paid dearly for the attempt, suffering punishments that ranged from exile and imprisonment to assassination or worse.

The most significant recent assertion of Taiwanese identity was the spring 2014 Sunflower Movement, a student-led protest against a proposed trade agreement with China that many feared would erode Taiwan’s sovereignty. It unleashed a society-wide desire to lay claim in a more full-throated way to a Taiwanese identity and to Taiwan itself. Named for a gift of sunflowers from a local Taipei florist to the students and activists who occupied the legislature for three weeks that spring, the occupation inspired an entire generation of young Taiwanese, many of whom changed the course of their lives to become involved in activism, politics, and cultural production.

In 2024, a year that saw incumbent leaders all over the world booted from office in favor of change, any change, Taiwan elected, for the third consecutive time, a president from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—a party that was once explicitly pro-independence, but now pragmatically defends Taiwan’s autonomy under the status quo. The DPP’s electoral success was just one of Sunflower’s many legacies. The movement also emboldened the activists in Hong Kong who launched the Umbrella Movement in the fall of 2014, which shut down key portions of the city for nearly three months and led to the world-historical street protests of 2019 and 2020 that opposed Beijing’s tightening grip. While contradictory and uneven in many ways, one of the most exciting possibilities to come out of these solidarities is a political horizon beyond nationalism. For some observers, what they additionally hold in common is resistance to Chinese neo-imperialism in the region—a challenge to Beijing’s “Mandate of Heaven.” And for some, Taiwanese identity, precisely because it’s inchoate, presents an opportunity to imagine collectivities unbounded by the hegemony of the nation-state.

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As wide and deep as Sunflower’s influence has been, it hasn’t often been directly depicted in cultural production. It makes an appearance in the Taiwanese television show Days We Stared at the Sun (2010–11, 2017) and is the subject of the documentary Our Youth in Taiwan (2018). It’s also referenced at the end of the film On Happiness Road (2017) and in the documentary Invisible Nation (2023). But as far as literary representation in Chinese goes, there’s not much beyond Hsu En-en’s 2024 novel Biànchéng de rén (“The Becoming”). The movement has instead been more widely registered in works inspired by its revolutionary spirit, such as the #MeToo-themed television show Wave Makers (2023) and Lin Yi-han’s novel Fang Si-chi’s First Love Paradise (2017; tr. Jenna Tang, 2024). Other works, such as Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s 2020 novel Taiwan Travelogue, are more indirect in their acknowledgment of the movement but are no less profoundly shaped by it. Set in Japanese-controlled Taiwan in the late 1930s, the novel’s staging of the affective and colonial relations that suppress Taiwanese identity fits squarely into the movement’s postcolonial and anti-colonial sensibilities.

Taiwanese identity has always entailed broader political visions. What’s remarkable about the post-Sunflower moment is that it has begun to shape not only Taiwanese identity but Taiwanese American identity as well. Brian Hioe’s important debut novel Taipei at Daybreak (2025) is the first Sunflower novel written in English, and is significant as a work of Asian American fiction because it offers something relatively rare in that archive, a transnational revolutionary bildungsroman. It follows a Taiwanese American protagonist named Q.Q. from his high school political awakening and feelings of anomie in an Upstate New York suburb through his college years at NYU, where he becomes an Occupy Wall Street participant, and then to his decision to leave the United States—first for Japan, where he becomes involved with the anti-nuclearization movement, and then for Taiwan. Q.Q. isn’t sure what propels his journey leftward, but at least some of it is disillusionment over how “Occupy had become what it had claimed to oppose—a logo, an ad, a sign.” Lest we mistake his political commitments for political conviction or courage, he takes every opportunity to remind us that it’s more likely boredom, a death wish, or guilt over his KMT background—his grandfather “had been part of the Taiwan Garrison Command and […] had a direct role in the killings during the White Terror.” We also come to suspect that he could be motivated by a more pedestrian and “sneering” rejection of liberal Asian American identity politics: “As a Marxist, I had viewed racial identity and all forms of nationalism as divisive, a distraction from the task of world revolution.” Lurking behind all of this is a feeling of “emptiness” that he occasionally addresses as “V,” an absent presence that never manifests and never responds until the novel’s shocking end.

When Q.Q. arrives in Taiwan in 2013, he has no clear plans for himself. He falls in with a group of mostly English-speaking young expats and locals, and joins them a year later when they storm the chambers of the national legislature to begin the Sunflower occupation. Fast-forward a bit, and in the wake of the occupation Q.Q. and his friends launch an online publication called Daybreak with the goal of sustaining the movement’s radical energies. After “somehow drift[ing] into graduate school,” as happens to the best of us, Q.Q. returns to Taiwan in 2015, where he resumes his role as “a flaneur among the bloodstains.” He and his Daybreak comrades participate in another occupation, this time of the Ministry of Education in protest of the KMT’s proposed changes to history textbooks that would have amplified Chinese identity and diminished Taiwanese history. It’s there that Q.Q. comes face-to-face with the Grey Wolf, a notorious KMT-backed gangster who leads violent attacks on demonstrators. This confrontation becomes a test for how far Q.Q. is willing to go for his beliefs. There by his side, adjudicating his efforts, is the ever-present V.

For those familiar with Hioe’s biography, Q.Q.’s story matches it very closely. After participating in the Sunflower occupation, Hioe became one of the co-founders of the online publication New Bloom, which has become the most important English-language venue in Taiwan for left journalism and criticism. Hioe himself generates the vast majority of the website’s content and has become an internationally recognized commentator on Taiwanese politics. New Bloom runs a café and event space in Taipei called Daybreak.

If Taipei at Daybreak is a work of autofiction, then the name of its protagonist and its addresses to “V” are our only indications that the book is something other than straightforward autobiography. Its status as autofiction resonates with the novel’s skepticism toward truth, as well as the nihilism that is constantly threatening to pull Q.Q. under. He’s afraid “of being trapped in a bad infinity and that everything was just a re-combination of what had come before. That really there was no abstract and concrete, no progress or regress, just a hollowness without end.” When you put it that way, who really cares about the difference between fiction and autobiography?

While the autofiction label doesn’t bother Hioe, readers shouldn’t be so quick to accept it. This is very much a novel, even more so because it barely wants to be one. Readers will easily find in it thematic and tonal resonances with existentialist novels like Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864). One might also trace a more proximal genealogy back to the Japanese shishōsetsu (or “I-novel”) genre. Stylistically characterized as minimally fictional, confessional, autobiographical, and suffused with malaise, shishōsetsu entered Taiwan via the Japanese in the 1920s. Writers in the orbit of the New Taiwanese Literature (Taiwan Shinbungaku) movement took aim at the genre and sought to give expression to a Taiwanese identity by rejecting the shishōsetsu’s mumblecore vibe, privileging instead Marxist-inspired social realist modes. Nonetheless, the shishōsetsu’s elements were taken up by many of these same writers and influenced subsequent authors like Wu Zhuo-liu (a.k.a. Wu Chuo-liu), whose 1945 Japanese-language novel Orphan of Asia has become for many observers the sourcebook for understanding how multiple colonizations and hundreds of years of hinterland status have shaped Taiwanese subjectivity. One of Q.Q.’s nicknames, “Ah-Qiu,” additionally invites the reader to link the novel to the father of modern Chinese fiction, Lu Xun—specifically to his iconic character “Ah Q”, a poor, semi-employed peasant who constantly rationalizes his humiliations with delusions of superiority. Over the years, these strands have coalesced into an entirely distinct Taiwanese literary tradition, and they’re essential to Taipei at Daybreak’s style. Read as an expression of Taiwanese identity through the perspective of a Taiwanese American protagonist and author, both of whom are all too aware of the pitfalls of identity politics, the novel is emblematic, precisely in its improvisations, of a much broader project of post-Sunflower Taiwanese identity formation.

In addition to these reference points, Taipei at Daybreak is fruitfully read as a reflection on the conditions under which political commitment becomes possible. For American readers, this would join Hioe to a cohort of other contemporary novelists of left melancholia—like Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and Eugene Lim—whose protagonists perceive too sharply, and through no small degree of irony, the limited capacities of art, philosophy, and politics to offer visions beyond capitalist realism’s windless closure. Unlike these protagonists, however, Hioe’s Q.Q. takes action. This is very much a novel about action, and what violent action in particular clarifies and confuses. In addition to his direct involvement with strategizing about occupations, we also find Q.Q. putting himself in harm’s way to protect protesters from riot police and the Grey Wolf’s fellow gangsters. Each new action ups the ante for the next. When Q.Q. finally finds himself within striking range of the Grey Wolf during the 2015 protests, he contemplates killing the gangster. This would be the ultimate confirmation of what he’s truly made of—if he’s a true leftist or something lesser, a revolutionary cosplayer or mere nationalist. It’s at this point that Q.Q. recalls his KMT background and feels the vertigo of identification with Grey Wolf—someone whose background resembles his own more than he’d like to admit, and who is capable of the kind of action that Q.Q. has just realized he is unwilling to take.

One gets the sense that Q.Q. is hunting down the moment where it all went wrong, the hurt or the wrong move that initiated the chain of compensations that constitute his life trajectory. He ends up right back where he started, with the question of identity: “I was an orphan of Asia and America,” he laments, hearkening back to Wu Zhuo-liu. “Beneath and behind all those layers of identity, who was I?” The hunt to recover his “first nature” leads him to Taiwan. Standing in his way are guilt over his KMT background and a “post-revolutionary blues” that makes him question everything—what activists in the wake of Sunflower refer to as “movement injuries [yùndòng shānghài].” A sacrifice is needed, and Q.Q. is convinced this means offering his own corpse. Everything hinges on whether any of this will make a difference. What he’s left with is a skepticism that submitting oneself to a larger idea and collectivity will do anything to resolve these postcolonial contradictions. As it turns out, Taiwanese identity, or for that matter Taiwanese American identity, is not a panacea.

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Any attempt at expressing Taiwanese identity requires inventiveness. If you were browsing a Taiwanese bookstore in 2020 and picked up a copy of 臺灣漫遊錄 (Táiwān mànyóu lù, or Taiwan Travelogue), you could be forgiven for believing that what you held in your hands was a new translation of a 1954 autobiographical novel by Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese author, and that the translator was Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, a young Taiwanese writer known for her queer coming-of-age fiction. It would have drawn your interest because it’s not often that you find new editions of novels about Taiwan by Japanese writers from the colonial period. You would have had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the introduction by the Japanese scholar Hiyoshi Sagako, or the book’s four appendices, which include an afterword by Aoyama’s daughter, a translator’s note by the novel’s other central figure, Wáng Chiēn-hò (whose Japanese name is Ō Chizuru), an editor’s note by Wáng’s daughter, and a translator’s note by Yáng herself. But as you flipped through its pages, and the clues accumulated, it would have dawned on you that among these stewards of the text, only one of them, Yáng herself, is real. (Despite the novel’s homage, as a faux travelogue, to the origins of the novel form itself, its deception initially sparked controversy among Taiwanese readers.) Two if you were to have picked up the English edition, translated by Lin King, also an actual person (and fiction writer herself) who, along with Yáng, was awarded the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature as well as the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize.

This metafictional tangle may send the mind reeling. Taiwan Travelogue’s maximal fictionality might contrast sharply with Taipei at Daybreak’s minimal fictionality, but both share the same preoccupations: Taiwanese identity and the risks of forging one. In fact, in the novel’s faux introduction, we are given a taste of the kinds of difficulties ahead: Hiyoshi recounts her objection to being identified as a “Japanese scholar,” insisting instead that she is “wānshēng,” a Japanese born in Taiwan who was thus classified as “subpar” in relation to Japanese “Mainlanders” born in the colonial metropole. Colonial hierarchies cut both ways, and one of the main things we learn from this novel as well as Hioe’s is that those injuries slice through generations and may never heal.

Taiwan Travelogue is a picaresque that begins in May 1938, at the height of Japan’s colonial regime in Taiwan. The novelist Aoyama Chizuko finds herself in Nagasaki, Japan, basking in the warm reception of A Record of Youth, a film adapted from her novel of the same title. Editors and magazines are falling over themselves to book her for speaking engagements, “offering, quite literally, handfuls of cash.” The fanfare eventually propels her into a lecture tour of Taiwan, where she intends to stay for a year, “experiencing all four seasons of normal life in a foreign place.” Her base of operations is the city of Táichūng—a meaningful choice of setting because of its distance from the seat of colonial administration in Taipei, about a hundred miles to the north, and its mediating position in Taiwan’s cultural geography. Her patrons, a wealthy Japanese family, provide her with a guide and translator, the aforementioned Wáng Chiēn-hò, a.k.a. Ō Chizuru.

Aoyama’s first-person narration weaves together personal reflection and dialogue, mostly with Chizuru, whom she addresses with the Japanese diminutive “Chi-chan,” and toward whom she almost immediately finds herself drawn. Formerly employed as a schoolteacher, Chizuru accompanies Aoyama to her lectures, takes her on excursions, and spends a great deal of time catering to her insatiable culinary curiosity. Chizuru reveals very little about herself and her mysterious past aside from her dream of becoming a literary translator. In her interactions with Aoyama, she is equal parts charm and distance. Aoyama later deduces that she was trained as a gē-tòa, a Taiwanese version of a geisha. Yet Chizuru’s demeanor is more than just a professional pose: it conceals a sensibility that Aoyama is incapable of developing.

Food takes center stage in much of this novel, and it’s very clearly used as a vehicle for presenting readers with a series of local histories that add up to a national portrait. Each chapter is named after a Taiwanese dish. The descriptions of these cuisines, their preparation and consumption, are lavish. Here’s how Aoyama explains to Chizuru a quandary about eating lóo-bah—also known as lǔ ròu fàn, a dish of braised minced pork over rice—that would be familiar to any Taiwanese person:

I’d say that long-grained rice is rather too dry and loose for this dish. Most of the broth ends up pooling at the bottom of the bowl, so you’d have to add more rice to soak it all up—but once you add more rice, you’d have to add more lóo-bah, too. In which case, don’t you fall into an endless spiral of pork and rice and pork and rice?

While many of the dishes described, including lóo-bah, are still easily found in Taiwan and beyond, others, such as muâ-ínn-thng, a bitter soup laboriously made from young leaves of the jute plant, are rarely eaten today.

Taiwan Travelogue becomes a museum of Taiwanese culture, and this is very much the point. Here, King plays an unusual role for a translator, contributing extensive footnotes (in addition to Yáng’s own) that provide rich details about Taiwanese, Japanese, and Chinese culture and history. As readers, we find ourselves learning about Taiwanese culture alongside Aoyama, with Yáng and King playing Chizuru’s role for us—and here a danger arises. We readers, Taiwanese or not, might be more like Aoyama than we’d like to think when, for instance, we share in her triumphant realization regarding the relationship between Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese cuisine: “[W]hile Japanese, Western, and Shina [Chinese] cuisine all constituted techniques that had been developed and honed through centuries of imperial dining, the colonial land of Taiwan did indeed have its own nuanced, established, unique, and finely crafted Taiwanese cuisine.” If this feels cartoonish and ethnographic—and smacking of exoticization—then Chizuru is totally with you.

Therein lies the basis for the delicate irony that structures this novel, told from the partial perspective of a bleeding-heart colonizer. “I care about you, my Islander friend,” Aoyama pines, “and so I did a lot of research on the Island. How can I make you understand, Chi-chan? I truly, sincerely wish to be friends with you.” This friendship, as you might guess, was doomed from the start. It is not wise to consume one’s love object. Aoyama’s noblesse oblige blinds her to the inequalities of the colonial relation even as it expands her sympathy for the plight of the subjugated Taiwanese. As the bills for train trips, hotel stays, and food orders pile up, and as Aoyama’s infatuation with Chizuru—and Taiwan—deepens, readers may wonder: Who’s paying for all of this? The four seasons that Aoyama wishes to spend on the island are subsidized by the colonial administration’s Southern Expansion and Japanization (“kōminka”) efforts—cultural assimilation programs that launched just months prior to Aoyama’s arrival on the island. Aoyama never bites the hand that feeds her, and only in private does she express her disgust at Japan’s “brute acts of erasing the distinctions of individual cultures.”

Love the food, the people, and the place all you want; Chizuru can tell that the idea of Taiwan blossoming in your mind, and your understanding of the character of the Taiwanese people, no matter how well informed, can never overcome the fact that “it is ultimately impossible for a Mainlander [Japanese] and an Islander to share a friendship of equals.” For Aoyama, the very reality of her year in Taiwan hinges on Chizuru’s returned regard and affection, which the latter finally musters the nerve to refuse outright in a devastating gesture: “Please do not think of me anymore.” It’s the same predicament at the center of Hioe’s novel. Chizuru’s “Noh mask”—a reference to the impassive, expressionless masks of Japanese Noh theater that conceal as much as they reveal—is V’s emptiness. Taiwan is not a spa. It is not a theater for self-discovery, or a whetstone for sharpening one’s political sensibilities. It owes nothing to penitent colonizers, your identity quest, or the geopolitical order.

Is it possible for friendship to bridge this gap? Or is the best we can do a parting of ways: the “No, not yet” and “No, not there” that conclude E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924)? Aoyama begs Chizuru: “Do I have the right to tell you that you’ve been on my mind?” How much blood and sweat does Q.Q. have to spill for the cause, how many articles does he have to write, how much thought, how much lost sleep, how much “research,” to use Aoyama’s term, does he have to submit to the emptiness before Taiwan’s millions of voices will accept the end of his story and accede to his ultimate desire of being consumed whole? “[P]erhaps I was just a romantic at heart,” Q.Q., the Taiwanese American, reflects. “I was just a visitor, while they lived there. A part of me felt that my gaze was simply that of the voyeur.” It takes a long time for Aoyama to arrive at the same realization. But is it enough?

The metafictional layers that Yáng and her translator King have set up to mediate Taiwan Travelogue’s ultimate object are no mere gimmicks. They enact the collective production of Taiwanese identity to which Hioe and his novel also contribute. The worst that could happen would be for this provocative, inventive novel to be read as having definitively answered the question that Yáng has challenged it with: “What is a Taiwanese person?” Instead, the novel’s several interlocutors serve to convey a deep humility, as well as the urgency of protecting any possible answer’s conditions of possibility. These conditions will have been found, as Yáng explains, in the past as well as the future. “It is my wish,” Chizuru’s daughter writes in her editor’s note, “that one day, when Taiwan’s future has been reshaped by democracy, a complete version of this book will at last be able to reach readers.” Those readers, as both remarkable novels invite us to imagine, aren’t just the Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans who, as Yáng and Hioe have said of themselves, were inspired by the Sunflower Movement. These two novels are records of youth whose particularities are irreducible and yet will resonate with anyone, Taiwanese or not, because they introduce us to people whose futures are foreclosed. Q.Q.’s anti-romantic realization, when he briefly returns to New York after the events of 2015, is that people are the same everywhere: “Nobody seemed to be doing well. Whenever I went back somewhere, I would always find my friends were just slightly worse off than when I saw them last.” Who among us does this not describe? If we listen to the answers that Taiwanese people give to Yáng’s question, they might help us to answer an equally urgent question about why we’re all getting worse together.