TO THE EAST OF THE EAST, LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD in TRANSLATED LITERATURE

TO THE EAST OF THE EAST
PING LU (tr. Jeremy Tiang)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD in TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Min-Hui's travels from Taiwan to Beijing in search of her vanished husband in this multi-layered meditation on marriage and freedom from Taiwan's most sophisticated contemporary voice.

While chasing business opportunities in China, Min-Hui’s husband disappears without a trace, forcing her to uproot her quiet life as a writer in Taiwan and travel to Beijing, where the chaos of the city leaves her reeling. Does the Chinese government truly have her best interests at heart, and how hard are the authorities looking for her missing husband?

Marooned in the ancient capital, Min-Hui encounters the enigmatic Shangjun, a self-proclaimed human rights activist who seeks refuge in her hotel room. As their relationship blooms, Min-Hui allows him to read her novel in progress: a young Qing emperor confined within the Forbidden City becomes fascinated by pirate merchant Zheng Zhilong’s tales of the Taiwanese seas. All the while, Min-Hui contemplates the discord in the marriage she is desperate to save. Exploring the universal longing for freedom with her signature multi-layered narrative, Ping Lu interweaves Min-Hui’s search for her husband and her Beijing love affair with the historical backstory of her novel and unsent letters from her vanished husband.

To the East of the East offers a profound meditation on liberation, destiny and the contingencies of national histories by one of Taiwan’s most sophisticated contemporary voices.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: As best I recall, or can find evidence for, this is my forst-ever encounter with Ping Lu's work. Quite a force in Taiwanese literature, her publisher tells me in this book's attached biographical details "Ping Lu writes on a wide range of topics, including society, culture, gender, politics, history and human rights," then goes on to list Taiwanese literary prizes she has won.

Jeremy Tiang's translation tells me a lot about why that's the case. It's a layered, complex read; Min-Hui's marriage and its anger and stress, Chinese/Taiwanese political intertwining with its sibling/spouse/parent-child resonances that never settle into a predictable, steady state jitter and flare at each other; the history of the ancient culture is presented in an historical novel that's embedded in this modern palimpsest of story.

It's a lot. It's barely over two hundred pages. Pay attention.

I got a vibe as I read the story that I was missing something, that there was a layer of...a resonant bell ringing that I was too far away to hear but I could feel. I looked for reviews by native speakers to see if something was not in the translation. Turns out no, but in a curious way yes. Min-Hui gets two PoVs, one grieving, one knowing; the missing husband gets one; then there's the historical novel. In the observation of people who read the Mandarin version, there is a distinctive and different way the language feels between the PoVs. Like the lack of an English version of "tu" that hobbles Romance-language translations when a tonal shift in character familiarity or intimacy occurs, its shade lingers for the sensitive reader. English gives its speak/readers so much, but not a substitute for tenses, voices, and cases in other languages.

Min-Hui traveling the distance from Mexico City to New York City, with approximately the same change of prevailing culture, and discovering as a result that people who don't communicate are prone (doomed, I'd say honestly) to have different relationships, was a poignant story. Working out her feelings with the historical novel within the novel worked surprisingly well for me. I was not sold on it at first but came to see this technique as almost painfully poignantly demonstrating Min-Hui's functional overthinking issues that condemn her to a half-life of never reaching out, connecting; until one reads the letters it seems literally impossible for her to hope to change.

Never say never.