Wintry Night

About

In the 1890s, the Peng family — Hakka Chinese settlers — clear dense forest in the mountains of Hsinchu to build a life in Taiwan, just as the island is ceded to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War. Three generations follow, through colonial rule, forced conscription into Japan’s Pacific campaigns, and the slow erasure of a way of life that was never recorded in the official histories. Li Qiao’s epic is one of the foundational novels of Taiwanese literature: a story told not from the perspective of empires or governments but from the people who cleared the land, buried their dead in it, and watched new flags rise over the same mountains. The wilderness is as much a character as the Pengs themselves — indifferent to politics, brutal in its demands, and the only thing that endures. A novel about what it means to belong to a place that has never been allowed to belong to itself.