When Pi eventually makes landfall in Mexico he's questioned by some Japanese businessmen concerned with insurance claims on the vessel whose wreck caused Pi to take to the life-raft. They refuse to believe his fantastic story, which includes an account of a floating island that consumes humans who venture onto its shores. So Pi makes up another, more conventional, story to please the businessmen. Instead of the highly-colored truth of an orangutan, a hyena and the tiger, he invents a tale of aggression and brutality that his questioners immediately understand as "real." This alternative story includes a Taiwanese boy who ends up being slaughtered and eaten by the vicious ship's cook.
The Taiwanese, in his early 20s, is described as follows. "He was beautiful. He had no facial hair at all and a clear, shining complexion. His features — the broad face, the flattened nose, the narrow, pleated eyes — looked so elegant. I thought he looked like a Chinese emperor."
This must be one of the more significant appearances of Taiwan in English-language literature to date. And Life of Pi does fall into the category of literature. It's major on two counts. First, it advances the possibilities of the novel, having for most of its duration no protagonists other than the narrator and a tiger. Its main precursor in this is Robinson Crusoe, though there are echoes of Gulliver's Travels as well.
Far more importantly, though, it's a meditation on the current status of religion. Martel thinks that the contemporary supremacy of a scientific and atheistic view of the world in the West is inadequate to the nature of reality. Our planet is, he believes, gorgeously rich in ways that science can't explain, and doesn't attempt to explain. That richness — and unexpectedness — is represented by the life on the raft. The alternative narration Pi offers to the Japanese, by contrast, represents the account of life offered by science — bleached of all color, boringly predictable, and by implication motivated only by greed, self-interest and the mechanics of pain and pleasure.
Literary shipwrecks have been seen as symbolic of the death of religion ever since Moby Dick. The point that Life of Pi so brilliantly encapsulates, however, may not be that although the ship of faith sinks a lifeboat of faith can still survive, but instead that one day the matter-of-fact, rational, vivisecting and godless approach to the world will disappear beneath the waves, but the marvels of actual life will — human destruction of the environment permitting — carry on, and with any luck go on for ever. It's nice to think that future generations will see Taiwan as having had a place in that story.
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