How Taiwan Travelogue Parallels Columbia’s Elitist Food Culture

Why the exploration of food and status in a novel about colonial-era Taiwan is relevant to our community today

Image courtesy of Austin Library Foundation

I first came across Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue in a bookshop in a small town in Massachusetts, run by the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. An unlikely combination, I’ll admit, but the book instantly caught my eye. Its cover hinted at its nesting-doll nature: A bowl of rice in a train window like a pupil in a half-lidded eye; the window’s framing paired with the sepia-toned photograph in the background resembled a deconstructed camera lens, a symbol of nostalgia. I knew, as book lovers just know: It had to come home with me.

Taiwan Travelogue was first published in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and translated into English in 2024 by Lin King, a graduate of Columbia’s MFA program. It won the prestigious National Book Award for Translated Literature, the Baifang Schell Book Prize, and the Golden Tripod Award. Disguised as a multi-layered translation of a rediscovered travel memoir by the fictional Japanese writer Aoyama Chizuko, the book is set in 1938 during Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan.

Purportedly, Aoyama Chizuko’s fictional “travelogue” is an exploration of Taiwan’s unique food culture. Each chapter is named after a different local delicacy, such as kue-tsí (roasted seeds), muâ-ínn-thng (jute soup), and tang-kue-tê (winter melon tea). Yet, underneath the thin veneer of food writing and the subtle romantic attraction between Aoyama and her interpreter, Ông Tshian-hȯh (“Chi-chan”), lies a scathing critique of colonial extraction, cultural arrogance, and socioeconomic division. Surprisingly, these critiques offer important lessons on how to actualize student activism at Columbia.

Sophia Evans/Columbia Sundial

In the beginning of the novel, Aoyama fervently insists on eating the “local” cuisine. Her hunt for authenticity leads her to try all sorts of street foods that “Mainlanders” (the term for Japanese people during this time period) usually spurn, a curiosity that other ethnically Japanese people living in Taiwan find strange. Before her first dinner on the island, Aoyama asks for “kîam-lâ-á” (stir-fried clams) and is told that her host no longer serves the dish after previous Mainlander guests “got sick and ended up in the hospital.” Later on, Chi-chan says to Aoyama that “the demarcation between the Islanders’ lóo-bah and the Mainlanders’ sashimi is the distinction between the dirty and the pure.”

The foods traditionally eaten by Japanese colonizers—sashimi, onsen-tamago, burdock root—were regarded as prestigious. By contrast, the dishes of everyday Taiwanese people—braised minced pork, jute soup, winter melon tea—were dismissed as inferior, fit only for field workers who could afford nothing more. For example, to mark Chi-chan as from a poor family, her distant relatives say she ‘grew up on jute soup.’ In comparison, when Aoyama describes homesickness for her family’s customarily lavish New Year’s feast, including various fish roes, glacé fish, and braised chicken, it is meant to signal to the reader that she came from a well-to-do family.

Underlying Yáng’s literary choices is the idea that the transmission of culinary culture is inherently political. As described in the novel, when Japanese colonizers moved to Taiwan, they brought with them “chikuwa,” a type of fish cake. Over time, this dish became assimilated into Taiwanese food culture as “chi-kú-lah.” Aoyama claims that applying Japanese culinary practices to the natural resources (seafood) of Taiwan is akin to “polishing raw stone into gleaming jade.” The language she uses implies a cultural hierarchy—the less “polished” culinary culture of Taiwan is made better when it becomes more Japanese. When the value of something is equated with proximity to power, even something so innocent as food becomes imbued with political meaning.

The traces of this culinary hierarchy are still visible today. Take a look around Morningside Heights and you’ll find that the food trucks serve mostly halal, Mexican, or “less prestigious” Asian food such as Chinese, Tibetan, or Thai. Take the 1 downtown and you’ll find that French, Italian, Japanese, and Greek restaurants generally price themselves higher than Chinese, Indian, Thai, or Mexican places. Often, I’ve come across restaurant reviews that read, “Chinese food shouldn’t be this expensive,” or “the prices here are outrageous, I get better tacos from the food truck for $1.25 each.” The cultural expectation is that some foods are worth less than others, but who gets the power to decide that? Why should they have this power in the first place?

This sort of social signaling is not accidental. Earlier this year, I downloaded Beli, the community-based restaurant-ranking app that’s been spreading like wildfire among foodies nationwide. On Beli’s “Universities” leaderboard, Columbia ranks second in quantity of reviews, behind only NYU. The restaurants ranked as the “best” by Columbia students on the app were uniformly expensive, ranging from the cheapest (Ha’s Snack Bar, Le French Diner, Eyval), averaging $50-100 a person, to the most expensive (Atomix, whose chef’s counter tasting menu runs $395 a person, not counting the wine pairing). The absurd prices are one thing—in such an economically stratified city as New York, there are bound to be dining options that the average person cannot afford. However, what stood out to me the most was the fact that not a single cheaper option made it onto the top ten list of Columbia students’ aggregated rankings.

There may be all sorts of reasons why Columbia students are inclined to rank more expensive restaurants higher in their “Been” list on Beli. The atmosphere of the restaurant, service quality, presentation of the food, quality of the ingredients used, celebrity status of the chef, and so on. But a part of me can’t help but question the integrity of these explanations. “Atmosphere,” for example, might refer to a vibey and spacious interior, but it often involves expensive design choices and bespoke dishware and cutlery. “Quality ingredients” are advertised by menu buzzwords—Hokkaido scallops, heirloom tomatoes, artisanal greens. But it seems disingenuous to claim that the restaurants not using any of these buzz-generating ingredients are “lower quality.”

This suspicion leads me to ask: Are the more expensive options ranked higher because the food is actually so much more extraordinary than the more affordable restaurants? Or are they ranked higher because people want to show off that they can afford to dine there—proof that they belong to the elite few for whom these ‘experiences’ are available? In other words, to borrow Chi-chan’s comparison, is it ranked highly because it is more “pure” than the commonplace options available to the rest of the population?

After all, a classic dish is a classic dish—it just so happens that classics such as bœuf bourgignon warrant a higher price tag in our collective imagination than classics such as beef chow fun. Whether we consciously mean it or not, such pricing differentials are often judgments on cultural value. They reflect the implicit biases of consumers who believe certain cuisines are more ‘prestigious’—and therefore pricier—than others. This notion reflects preferences shaped less by food quality than by historical power dynamics and ethnic stereotypes about class.

The irony of such expensive restaurants topping Columbia students’ rankings should not be lost. In a school with an overwhelmingly left-leaning population, the average stance on socioeconomic issues is that we ought to work towards equality. Students protest against the gentrification of Harlem, support Zohran Mamdani’s socialist policies over other candidates’ more capitalistic platforms, and pride themselves on being well-versed in Marxist literature. Yet, the students with disposable income reify class divisions when they spend their (or their parents’) money at New York’s priciest restaurants and publicly rank them as ‘better.’

While students don’t have an obligation to eat at ‘less prestigious’ or less expensive restaurants, there’s a clear contradiction: They publicly disavow extractive capitalism, yet display luxury dining experiences made possible by said extractive capitalism.

The parallel to Taiwan Travelogue’s depiction of colonialism could not be starker. Aoyama portrays herself as “just a novelist” while she is on her lecture tour in Taiwan, refusing to comment on Japan’s colonial tactics (known as the “Southern Expansion Policy) that suppressed the status of non-Japanese people. Yet, she still uses her position of privilege to inconvenience the people who serve her, asking for “Islander treats” like fresh pineapple juice and labor-intensive jute soup on a whim. When she comes across Japanese-Taiwanese fusion foods such as chikuwa, she even says, “the birth of Taiwan’s chikuwa is to the Empire’s credit.”

Aoyama’s capricious indifference to Japan’s colonial exploitation is not a quirk of her character. It contains an essential message that Yang is trying to drive home: Her hypocrisy is exactly how performative activists justify saying one thing and doing another. By paying lip service to the “rich local culture” of Taiwan, she portrays herself as an ally to the Islanders’ cause, all while refusing to confront the power structures destroying that very “rich local culture.” Aoyama is sympathetic but—crucially—not principled.

Are Columbia students any more principled than Aoyama? Most students here come from privilege. Most students here also claim to fight against the perpetuation of privilege and undue advantages for our generation and the generations to come. And yet, most students here will also enjoy experiences only accessible to the highest socioeconomic stratum and not blink an eye—activists when convenient, but otherwise complacent in a system that benefits them. Students with the means should question why they gravitate towards prestigious dining: Is it really about the food? Or is it about being perceived as proximate to wealth and chasing the high of an exclusive reservation?

Anthony Bourdain once said in an interview with Slate that “food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.” The value we attach to certain cuisines is indicative of the soft power, so to speak, of the countries and ethnicities from which these cuisines originate. As Aoyama eats her way through Taiwan in both the literal (culinary) sense and the figurative (colonial) sense in Taiwan Travelogue, we are reminded that the perceived desirability of food varies along socioeconomic lines. At Columbia, such a reminder has never been more apt or timely. In order to be perceived as authentic activists, students need to put their money where their mouth is.

There are plenty of delicious and affordable restaurants waiting for a Beli rating. It’s time Columbia students show them some love, too.

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Ms. Chen is a sophomore at Columbia College studying linguistics, economics, and East Asian languages & cultures. She is a staff editor for Sundial.

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The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.