Wu Chuo-liu's novel The Orphan in Asia (1976) treats with great sympathy and sadness the issue of Taiwan's identity-confusion as a colony of Imperial Japan (1845-1945). The novel, set in Taiwan in the 1930's and 1940's, shows the degree to which Taiwan had been totally subjected to the imperial power of the Japanese empire, colonized by this hegemonic colonizing force. The protagonist Tai-Ming moves from an early sense of sympathy with the colonizers, an eagerness to be “assimilated,” to an increasingly hostile stance toward the Japanese government, its agents and soldiers who are controlling his Taiwanese homeland. He comes to see that he can never, as he had once thought, “become Japanese,” that as long as Japan rules Taiwan he must forever be a non-citizen, a no-self (because non-Japanese) from the perspective of the rulers. Here the novel's central issues of ethnic and cultural identity－particularly complex in the case of Taiwan, since the potential confusion of Taiwanese－Chinese identity had already existed, in this island province of China, for centuries before Japan took control in 1895－are interpreted in terms of current theories of identity as (or in relation to) space: individual, social and linguistic space, the space of the “body” (individual and socio-political), cultural space and colonized space.