Faraway
Translated by Jeremy Tiang
About
A fictionalized version of Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin travels to mainland China after his father — who fled decades ago, abandoning his first family to start a new life in Taiwan — suffers a stroke during a visit to the son he left behind. Now the protagonist must navigate Chinese bureaucracy, family guilt, and the impossible logistics of bringing a comatose man across political borders that were once permanent. Lo writes with the tragicomic precision of someone who knows that grief and absurdity are inseparable. The hospital becomes a stage for every unresolved tension in a fractured family, while the larger drama of Taiwan-China relations plays out in paperwork, phone calls, and waiting rooms. A novel about the distances between countries, between fathers and sons, and between the life someone chose and the life they abandoned.
