BEIJING — In “Green Island,” the novelist Shawna Yang Ryan tells the story of how the Tsais, a Taiwanese family, survive the “February 28 Incident” of 1947 and precariously navigate the decades that follow as Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, rules the island under martial law.

The date marks the start of a massacre overseen by Kuomintang troops recently arrived from mainland China, which killed 10,000 to 30,000 Taiwanese in reprisal for protests to their rule. For 50 years before the Kuomintang’s arrival, Taiwan had been a modern, industrialized Japanese colony — whereas China was a poor, mostly agricultural nation — and the mixture of peoples was uneasy. The Kuomintang government took over the island after the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in 1945. In 1949, its supporters fled entirely to Taiwan and moved the Republic of China there, after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists.

Here’s how Tillman Durdin of The New York Times reported the massacre, in a dispatch dated March 28, 1947, from Nanking, China’s capital at the time:

“An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku said that troops from the mainland arrived there March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead.”

The massacre story is little understood outside Taiwan, said Ms. Ryan, a Taiwanese-American who grew up in California and now teaches creative writing at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In her book, Ms. Ryan embraces the complexity of the situation, by not creating heroes but instead exploring the truth of compromise, survival and belonging.

Lightly edited excerpts of an interview with Ms. Ryan follow:

Q. Your novel is named after Green Island, where the Kuomintang held political prisoners including native Taiwanese, similar to South Africa’s Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held. Why that title?