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Taiwan’s culinary ethnographers are familiar with older cities and districts such as Wanhua and Dadaocheng in Taipei as well as Tainan City, with its sweet sauces and fresh seafood. Taichung City, situated in central Taiwan and neither particularly old nor remarkably new, presents more of a culinary enigma. What flavors and foods does this city have to offer?

Folk culture enthusiast Yang Shuang-Zi begins this work by imagining the everyday culinary cravings of schoolgirls during the prewar Japanese colonial period before veering off into her own foodie adventures and memories spanning Taichung’s diverse neighborhoods. Eschewing appeals to age, reputation or authenticity, the narrative is inspired instead by the author’s own memories and experiences, imbuing this book with engaging stories and memorable insights.

Since the 1990s, a distinctive literary style that blends the real and imagined in intricately intertwined settings earned for Roan Ching-Yueh his reputation as one of Taiwan’s most outstanding contemporary writers and novelists. A Boat on Silvery Waves, with its artful amalgamation of distinct genres and writing styles, is a stand-out work in Roan’s catalogue.

The temporal flow in this work is reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the text unfurls in the rambling fashion of dreams during sleep. Roan transcends the emptiness and randomness of time to take readers back to an imagined childhood, carrying his and other writers’ memories with him as he fords time’s silver stream.

This book also pays heartfelt homage to the author’s most cherished people. Reaching the other bank of that stream, Roan summons departed loved ones and once more pays homage to Chi Ten-Shung, his most beloved author. So many lives lost but not forgotten are resurrected in these pages, which blend together what once was and the imagined into something akin to a photo painting.

This book engages readers on two levels. On one, the novel, set in Austronesian Taiwan, plumbs the geopolitical complexities of the Age of Exploration, narrating the experience from the perspective of those “discovered” by European adventurers.

The work, presented through the eyes of the Siraya people living in what is now Tainan City, is written from their perspective, with finely detailed descriptions of Siraya ways, their worship of nature, lifestyle and attitudes toward life juxtaposed against the covetousness of the foreign invaders.

Although set in Taiwan, this historical novel weaves a tale familiar to native peoples worldwide. More than decrying the powerful, the author shows his clear respect and honor to the oppressed. The theme and core messages here, while set in the past, seem equally resonant to our shared present and future.

Silent thrush is used in this work to describe metaphorically both the decline of Taiwan’s once flourishing Taiwanese opera from the 1980s onward and the women responsible for keeping opera troupes up and running. These women, facing the demands of the stage and uncouth audiences, are by necessity masters of compromise and a stalwart presence in the opera scene.

Despite contemporary taboos regarding homosexuality, women in this traveling opera troupe give one another the love and support needed to endure their nomadic existence. As members of an all-female clique, these women, proudly self-sufficient, handle life on their own terms, with drama and emotions on stage regularly bleeding into life off stage. Different from the upper-crust, urban settings of most gay literature, this novel stands out for its rural setting and focus on homosexuality in a traditionally marginalized working-class community.

This fictional story reads like a first-person screenplay penned in lithe and cheery tones. Once you begin, the narrative seems intent on keeping you in its grip, with nary a lull in the excitement and drama. The protagonist, an adept woman driven to turn her life around after a divorce by securing a stable job and income, takes a position with a problem-riddled cleaning squad. Although dogged by external pressures, the team’s attitude is fatalistic. “We’d love to find someone to blame, but who?”

The social issues raised in this story are a front to what is really a classic fairy tale that spotlights, not unlike the derision faced by the cleaning squad, the everyday challenges that women face living in a “man’s world”. Fairy tales like this persist because of the difficulties and unfairness of real life. They give hope to those bent on changing reality and offer an escape, however ephemeral, into romantic fantasy.

Being able to love is an ability. But no one ever tells using that allowing ourselves to be loved is also an ability. Love is not a given. It can be lost. It can be forgotten. But, if we’re lucky, we might, in some magical moment, recover love.

Author Chou Mu-Tzu describes many life paths in this book. Some twist and turn. Some are so faint they can scarcely be seen. Some unfold in ways that defy logic. But, just as all rivers return to the sea, all of these paths can be traced back to our need for intimacy, and our willingness to assume the burdens of intimacy.

Whether we speak of intimacy or love, both imply a kind of fatalism. Both have their source in our family of origin. With a kind of genetic logic, we replicate this inheritance, shaping it to the words that are fashionable at the time. Perhaps we call it an avoidant attachment style. Perhaps we use one of the countless phrases coined by gurus and spiritual teachers, calling it “the power of attraction,” or “the cosmic ordering service”, packaging it with a confectionary sweetness. In the end, however, it all comes back to the same thing: you weren’t loved well in childhood, and, as a result, you don’t know what real intimacy is.

Because this pierces the core of the inner emptiness and deficiency we hold so close, we struggle even more to draw close to one another, to depend on each other, hoping to receive a tiny piece of the life’s warmth.