Stolen Bicycle
Translated by Darryl Sterk
About
A writer in Taipei searches for a bicycle that once belonged to his father, who disappeared twenty years ago. Through Taiwan's community of antique bicycle collectors, each owner's story opens a window onto the island's layered history โ Japanese occupation, jungle warfare in Burma and Borneo, the postwar transformation of a society learning to forget. Wu Ming-Yi builds his novel like a collector reassembling scattered parts, weaving memoir, history, and ecological meditation into something that feels both deeply researched and strangely dreamlike. The bicycle becomes a vessel for everything a family and a nation choose to carry or leave behind. A book about objects and the memories that cling to them โ and what happens when you finally find what you were looking for.
