Who Am I In Chinese? Review of R.F. Kuang’s ‘Taipei Story’

Chinese-American Yale freshman Lily Cheng flies to Taiwan one summer to join a Chinese language learning programme. Lily’s parents immigrated to America when she was a baby so she is technically a “heritage speaker” but her Chinese vocabulary is limited. At Taipei, she is determined to immerse herself fully in the Chinese language and reconnect with her ‘Chinese self’. Becoming fluent in the language will let her communicate better with her extended family, especially her grandparents who live in China, she hopes.

R.F. Kuang—author of the bestselling novels Yellowface  (a literary thriller laced with satire), Katabasis (contemporary fantasy) and Babel, or the Necessity of Violence (historical dark-academia fantasy)—sticks to realism in her new novel, Taipei Story (HarperCollins). Lily’s lostness; her struggle to become fluent in Chinese, by no means an easy task; and her search for belonging are poignantly sketched.

This is Lily’s first visit to Taiwan. She had taken an Introduction to Chinese History course at university, which has given her a broad overview of China and Taiwan’s past political churnings and Taiwan’s current geopolitical status. She has read up about Taipei and gathered a smattering of facts. For instance, she knows the city sits inside a valley on an island—this means “an abundance of rainfall”.  But Taipei holds many surprises and no amount of reading can fully prepare her for the lessons it has to offer.

On arrival, when Lily and Anna (her friend from language class), catch a train from the airport to Taipei main station, Lily doesn’t feel like a tourist though she is lugging around a bulky suitcase. She does not have family in Taipei and she is not Taiwanese, but she has come here “to learn—to form a deeper relationship with this place”. That, she believes, makes her different from “the White European tourist descended from the enslaver”.

She does gawk out of the window at the “hills blooming into mountains” and the profusion of high rises as the train speeds towards Taipei. But hers is not the clueless tourist’s wide-eyed gaze. “My chest tightened, and as I watched the hills rising and falling around us, my eyes prickled,” she says, wondering how to make sense of this feeling. “Could you be homesick for a place you had never been?”

Observations like these are what make her journey worth following. Her wry sense of humour is always at hand to give her perspective—on both her situation and that of others. When she is waiting at Logan Airport to catch her flight to Taipei, she sees many Chinese American students who are about to undertake the same journey as her. She know they had all read the same travel blogs, had made the same bucket list of dishes to try out; they were “all departing from the same airport on the same day, circumnavigating the world for precisely the same purpose”.  She realises that this coming-of-age journey of hers isn’t all that unique. “As it happened, lots of students were on a journey to reconnect with their culture,” she acknowledges wryly.

Lily’s efforts to do well in the intensive language learning programme will resonate with anyone who has tried to master a language. It takes painstaking effort. She fumbles a lot initially. Misunderstandings ensue (some humiliating, some hilarious) as she tries to grasp the nuances. What keeps her going is the hope that being good at Chinese (the language) will make her better at “being Chinese”. To her credit, she is ready to spend hours “throwing her mind at walls of text, breaking them down to comprehension”. She does get better at it as the weeks go by. 

While dissecting Lily’s family dynamics, Taipei Story gives readers an inside look at the Chinese diaspora in the United States. There are loads of expectations (academic excellence in the strictly conventional sense for instance) placed on Lily and her siblings within the family circle and the community; there’s constant needling about the younger generation being too Americanised, which makes them feel guilty about assimilation at some level. Kuang unravels the complicated threads of immigrant lives with sensitivity as the narrative unfolds.

I read the International Booker Prize-winning Taiwan Travelogue (Shuang-zi Yang; trans. Lin King) a few months ago. A richly layered story about colonialism, romance and power set in the 1930s, it traces the travels of a Japanese woman and her companion, a brilliant translator who is fluent in Taiwanese and Japanese, across the island nation. Taiwan comes alive in the pages of the book and the relationship between the two women are deeply and intimately impacted by the country’s history. In Kuang’s Taipei Story, Taiwan remains the backdrop of Lily’s story, close, but elusively out of reach.