Editorial Content for Taipei Story

R. F. Kuang, the bestselling author of YELLOWFACE, returns with a moving yet surprisingly irreverent coming-of-age novel, TAIPEI STORY.

As a Chinese American, Lily Chen has never felt totally connected to her heritage. Being American often makes her feel like a “real Chinese person” who has been put through a broiler: ruddy-cheeked, full of hamburger-soaked blood, and divorced from any real understanding of what it means to be Chinese. However, after her freshman year at Yale, she is now spending the summer not in her parents’ homeland of Guangzhou, but off the coast in Taipei, Taiwan. She is involved in an immersive Mandarin language program at the esteemed National Taiwan University, which is essentially the country’s own version of Yale. 

After completing a grueling test and interview process, Lily is unsurprised to learn that the program requires her to speak only Chinese during and between classes. But as one of the only Chinese-heritage students in her program, she is often charged with being an expert in all things China --- from food, tourist destinations and shopping to language, customs and etiquette --- a duty for which she feels woefully unprepared. She often finds that words escape her when she needs them most. A simple restaurant order can devolve when modifications are requested, and her understanding of her own culture is limited at best, a result of the uncertainty of the Chinese diaspora.

"As adept at managing sly humor as she is at navigating an entire diaspora in a single paragraph, Kuang always packs an emotional punch, and her meta-like exploration of language as both bridge and barrier is highly sophisticated and stylish."

Despite these concerns, life in Taipei seems to be off to a fantastic start. But then reality kicks in. Not only are her classes rigid and grueling, but her roommate --- a fellow classmate whose entire personality changes depending on the language she is speaking --- is insufferable. She also is grappling with arguments she had with her sisters prior to departing. Her parents, who still hold strong connections to mainland China, are somewhat dismissive of her choice to study in Taipei, where she can neither reclaim their family history nor connect with her aging grandparents. 

This divide is emphasized by the fact that Lily’s “coming home” journey isn’t exactly that. After all, how can one return “home” to a place no one in their family has ever lived in, let alone visited? As she continues to attempt to settle in and reconnect with her culture, a reckless encounter with a male student puts her at the forefront of her classmates’ gossip. This would be bad enough on her New Haven campus, but it is far, far worse in a land where propriety is key and everyone has a tongue for vicious rumors. Before long, the “coming home” journey she envisioned starts to deteriorate.

Lily’s initial impressions of Taipei are bolstered by her grasp of the city’s history. Divided between capitalist and communist parties, it has long struggled with its connections to the mainland, to America and to its people, who in turn are torn by their desire for a free and democratic country and a return to the imperial empire. Identity, Lily is coming to learn, is less about a collection of words and a summarized history, and much more about learning to sit in one’s discomfort and grow from it. In a direct, wry, conversational tone, she muses about everything from the effects of the local food on her digestion to the nuances of language and how she is perceived.

And then the unthinkable occurs. Across the Taiwan Strait, on mainland China, Lily’s grandfather passes away. Closer than ever and yet a world away, Lily now must reckon with what this loss means to her family’s history and how she can reconcile her own identity with her family’s.

What follows is a poignant, often uncomfortable journey through cultural alienation, the half-life of assimilation, and the violence of the Chinese diaspora. Often awkward and insecure, Lily is deeply flawed and can be a difficult protagonist to latch on to at first. But this remove mirrors the very same one she feels from her own culture, turning this quiet novel into something of an immersive experience. But about midway through, Kuang turns up the heat, cranks up the volume, and forces Lily to transform --- not just as a Chinese speaker, but as a young woman coming into her own identity. Through both Lily’s musings and the people and customs she observes, Kuang maintains that there is no one way of being Chinese. So what does it mean to be Chinese?

The answer comes as Lily slowly starts to come to terms with her difficult, painfully relatable questions about identity. Interestingly, and perhaps most compellingly, her grief is not only for the loss of her grandfather, but for all of life’s unknowns: missed conversations, mistaken meanings and the limits of time. How, she wonders, can she get to know these people who share her blood and lineage when she first must conquer the language they speak and when time is always running out? In this way, TAIPEI STORY becomes a story not just of coming of age or identity, but about getting things wrong before you can get them right. 

Employing diaspora claims to authority and authenticity, Kuang also explores the ways that Taipei has been mythologized and misunderstood (by both Chinese and American peoples) and what it means when these fantasies are punctured. But don’t let these nuances and complexities turn you away. Just as she did in YELLOWFACE, Kuang plays with satire, wit and humor to poke fun at many of these discrepancies, as well as Lily’s own journey to self-acceptance and growing up. The resulting blend is both humorous and devastating, muted yet transformative. And through it all reigns Lily’s primary hunt for answers: What does it mean to be Chinese, and can one study hard enough, read enough and immerse oneself enough to be “good” at it? 

Driving her main point home --- that there is no one way to be Chinese (or anything else, for that matter) --- Kuang is careful to always arrive just short of a solid answer. She forces readers to grow with and alongside Lily, sitting in her discomfort, asking painful questions, and arriving at conclusions that we have no way of proving. As adept at managing sly humor as she is at navigating an entire diaspora in a single paragraph, Kuang always packs an emotional punch, and her meta-like exploration of language as both bridge and barrier is highly sophisticated and stylish.