A young reporter hides his identity and talks his way onto a fishing boat to escape his postwar island’s military-led bloodbath. However, the remote island in the Ryukyus where he lands continues to present dilemmas that leave his fate in the hands of others.

In the spring of 1947, with Lee Tsan-Yun’s fellow reporters mostly either imprisoned or dead, he sees escape to the “Land of Serenity” with Chen’s cryptic instructions and a hand-drawn map as his last best hope. Trekking from Taipei to the Yilan coast, he catches a fishing scow bound for the Yaeyama Islands with just the map, a gold chain, a picture of his crush, and his memories.

Lee sees himself fated to a life of mediocrity and just “getting by”. Before becoming a reporter, he enrolls in Tokyo’s Waseda University on a benefactor’s endowment, but when the funds dry up, keeps up the pretense of being a student while making ends meet writing homework for former classmates. Finally professing love to his university crush at the end of the war, he is devastated to learn she is already married. Returning despondently to his hometown, he takes a job as a cub reporter; but, unlike his ambitious colleagues, is there only for the steady paycheck. However…when the nightmare finally comes, it is to him that a respected pillar of the community turns, out of desperation, for help.

So what about this so-called “Land of Serenity”? Would he be able to complete the mission entrusted to him? With nothing to go on, he clings to the kindness of strangers…even though some, he finds, expect something in return.

Land of Serenity is the first Taiwan-authored novel inspired by the real-life stories of Taiwanese émigrés to the Yaeyama Islands in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture. For the people of Yaeyama, contact with Taiwan has long been heavily colored by smuggling, illicit immigration, and conflict, with their experience largely elided over by chroniclers and historians alike. Pan Yutang’s emotive style of writing lends palpable authenticity to Lee Tsan-Yun’s sense of insecurity and bewilderment, showing powerlessness as a state of mind common to all fated to live through history’s epochal turning points.