The Stolen Bicycle

A writer's hunt for his vanished father's lost bicycle becomes a walk back through twentieth-century Taiwan. The map centres on old central Taipei: Zhonghua Road and the vast Zhonghua Shopping Bazaar the family lived and tailored suits in, and the Wanhua-Bangka district of temples, antique stalls and bicycle shops. The search reaches back to the Japanese colonial years and, far to the south-west, to the forests of the Burma campaign of the Second World War.

The narrator

Zhonghua Road and the old Zhonghua Shopping Bazaar

The lost bicycle

The narrator's family kept a suit-tailoring stall in the huge Zhonghua Shopping Bazaar, a warren of shops strung along Zhonghua Road in central Taipei, and it is here that his father and the family bicycle both disappear. The search for the missing machine sets the whole book in motion. The bazaar itself is gone: its eight blocks were pulled down in 1992 and replaced by an underground mall.

Opening chapters

explicit The novel names the Zhonghua Shopping Bazaar (Chunghwa Market) on Zhonghua Road, a row of eight linked concrete blocks the family lived and tailored in. The whole complex was demolished in October 1992, so this marks the site of the vanished market, near today's Ximen station.

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