Čarovná zahrada – Ang Li (2013)

The book The Enchanted Garden was first published in Taiwan in 1991. The story revolves around the character Zhu Jing-chung from the famous, albeit fictional, Zhu family of Lukang and touches on historical events including the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1985), the Japanese colonial period, the post-war authoritarian rule of the Kuomintang, and the modernized society of the 1980s built on the principles of a market economy. Thematically and structurally, the book intertwines the love story of the main heroine Zhu Jing-chung with real estate magnate Lin Si-keng (and her quest for self-discovery) and the family history of the Lukang Zhu family, through which the author expands the historical memory of the island to include previously taboo historical events, attempting to construct a Taiwanese national allegory. Thus, beneath the guise of a romantic novel, the work actually conceals a piece in which Li Ang consciously reconstructs Taiwanese history while also striving for a novel with purely Taiwanese themes. When the father of the main heroine, who symbolizes the declining Taiwanese elite long subjected to political oppression, deliberately replaces himself in his garden, where he has been long 'imprisoned' under the watch of Kuomintang soldiers, he…