By Chung Wenyin (鍾文音)

Translated by Gregory Laslo (樓克己)

If language makes an author yearn for the past, then the Author’s Reading Month this July in Czechia and Slovakia was the least nostalgic linguistic experience I have ever had.

That was because I read my work aloud in Mandarin, the mother tongue I am accustomed to. I felt as if I was both at home and abroad.

When I finished my reading and looked up to meet the gazes of foreigners and hear the air filled with a foreign language, I felt as if I had returned to my days of wandering Bohemia in my youth.

For years and years, I have left home alone and traveled alone, perching for a little while in one roost before moving on to the next. I am still doing all this alone, but where before I had worries, now I have none.

This was the first event I had attended abroad after my mother passed. I read “Please Don’t Die at the Height of Summer,” from my novel Farewell. In the blinding summer sunshine, my reading prompted melancholy and curiosity from audience members. The melancholy was from the middle-aged and elderly listeners (apparently some of them have been attending this activity every year for two decades). The themes of death and parting had prodded old wounds. The curiosity was in response to the many imaginings of Buddhist hospice care and final rites which my text described.

From my many readings, I can group the questions asked by audience members into a few broad categories: Does writing novels actually give you a sense of healing (since my reading included a certain sentence: “She wrote books to melt away the pain.”)? Some others are Buddhist sentiments on life and death, Taiwan’s transition into an aging society, foster home and long-term care issues, differences in culture and values between myself and A-ti, a nurse from Indonesia, future writing plans, and if my novels have been translated.

From these questions, I could see how invested the audience was in taking part in this international conversation.

As I used to be a traveler, I have gotten used to meeting people from other places.

Hence, finding new friends in new places was the greatest reward of this trip. And since I was traveling as an author, many of these new friends were involved in literature or the arts, which greatly enriched our discussions. Lucie, for instance, is the tall, elegant, and clever wife of Pavel, who is the director of the Větrné Mlýny bookstore and the organizer of this event. We chatted in English like old friends through the whole two-hour drive from Vienna to Brno.

Starting from Kafka, Hrabal, Kundera, the Prague Spring, and the Velvet Revolution, it was clear we shared a love of literature, and we did not want for topics. When Lucie found out that I had written a novel about mothers and daughters many years ago, she envied how I was able to have them reconcile and redeem themselves through the process of writing.Then she asked about my recent work, and I directly translated the title of my novel Mu Lei (木淚) as Tears of the Trees, which she said was a very pretty name. Only then did I discover that she had worked for six years at the Czech embassy in Ukraine, returning to Brno due to the war. Tears, survivors, Ukrainian refugee camps in Czechia…the more I heard, the more my heart ached with hers. When I mentioned Amiha, a character in Tears of the Trees who plants trees on land devastated by war, and how I was also interested in environmental protection, I found out Lucie was working at a foundation named partnerstvi (Partners).

Readings were not the only activities I found rewarding on this trip. The next day, I went to visit the foundation to learn about the local focus on environmental protection and how those ideas are integrated into daily life. The same day, I took a tram to see a photo exhibition held by Lucie’s close friend Denisa, named here I am. From that exhibition, I discovered the ambitions and artistic qualities of yet another female Czech artist.

Living in a different place, strangers gifted me new eyes.

It only feels like traveling when you start with getting to know one local person, and through them, meeting more.

This brings me to the deep impressions left on me by the Taiwanese accents which Czech translators sported. Whether it was Táňa Dluhošová, Director of the Czech Academy of Science’s Oriental Institute, or Simi, a translator in Ostrava, the Taiwanese accent of their Mandarin testified to the marks that studying in Taiwan had left on them, and made me feel very close to them.

I also came upon compatriots in unexpected places. I originally thought that in such a distant place, Taiwanese readers would be sparse. And yet before my first reading, in Brno, I was surprised to see a woman appear, holding a copy of my novel and asking for my autograph. She had even brought along her two little girls to listen to my reading. At the reading in Košice too, I met two Taiwanese who had driven two hours just to meet me—one who had married a wife from Slovakia, and an engineer sent abroad by his employer. They had heard about my reading in Košice from the Representative Office. After the reading that evening, they treated me to a Vietnamese dinner. We parted at 10 PM, and they set off on the two-hour drive back to the town they lived in. I am truly moved by this kind of love and support for Taiwan literature.

Many years ago, I traveled extensively throughout Austria, where I fell in love with the local style of painting and the Michelin coffee. This time, after the readings were all finished, I stayed on my own for a few days in Vienna, to reminisce about one whom my heart still holds dear.

Taking off the identity of an author, I returned to the near-tabula rasa of a simple traveler.

My mother tongue disappeared, and foreign words flowed into my ears.

I stayed a night in a youth hostel. Opening a window, I could see old houses painted by the sunset. The summer cicadas of my hometown were nowhere to be heard, but rather, they were replaced with the language of a foreign country on the other side of the partition.

Suddenly, like a dream, like a love thought immortal, the time for travel was over.

In such beautiful solitude, memories are an author’s assets. What is left to be said here can be reborn in novels and books.

Chung Wenyin (鍾文音)

Chung Wenyin is a writer by profession. She has been invited to participate in many writer-in-residence programs at universities in Taiwan and abroad, and is currently a guest professor teaching novel and prose writing. She has won many important literary awards and has published many travelogs, essays, novellas, and full-length novels. In 2021, Farewell won the TLA Annual Golden Grand Laurel Award. In 2023, the same book won the United Daily News’ Literature Award. Her latest novel is Tears of the Trees.