Getting it wrong in Taipei Story
By Julia Smeding
Stories about heritage, language and looking in from the outside are nothing new for Rebecca F. Kuang: a writer who was born in China and immigrated to the United States when she was four years old. She is mostly known for her fantasy novels: The Poppy War trilogy and Babel, or The Necessity of Violence. Within these novels, she explores colonialism and the cost of war. Babel offers a fresh perspective on translation and how meaning changes and gets lost. These are themes that ring true throughout her entire bibliography.
Her writing cannot be confined to one single genre. In the satirical novel Yellowface, Kuang wrote her first work within the literary fiction genre. Tackling racism within the publishing industry, Kuang, in the novel’s acknowledgements page, writes that Yellowface is “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.” Additionally, in her novel Katabasis, the main character undergoes a long journey to the underworld to find her thesis advisor, whom she accidentally sent there through a ritual gone wrong. What follows is a deeply philosophical journey about purpose, grief, and relationships. The feeling of being isolated is something that can be found within more of her works, most notably in her latest work, Taipei Story. By now, she is a well-established writer whose work is being read by millions around the world.
Taipei Story
In her most recent novel, Taipei Story, the themes of grief, family, and culture are more present than ever. The book follows Lily Chen, a college student who embarks on a journey to Taipei to follow an intensive language course. She hopes to connect with her Chinese family while fully immersing herself in the culture. The beginning of the Programme is wonderful, and Lily is quickly off to a flying start.
However, this newfound confidence quickly dissolves: her classes are extremely hard and she can’t get along with her roommate. She feels disillusioned and, after relentless gossiping from her classmates, finds herself isolated in a city she desperately wants to belong in.
After receiving the news of a devastating loss in the family, Lily tries to piece together memories about her family and find a way to connect to the culture she feels so disconnected from. What I loved most is that the grief here feels incredibly internal and realistic. So much of Lily’s grief exists inside her own thoughts, memories, regrets, and the questions she realizes she can no longer ask. There’s this constant feeling of loss hanging over the story. Not just the loss of a person, but the loss of connection, language, history, and understanding.
While I expected Taipei Story to focus mainly on its grief narrative, I found myself enjoying its commentary on language study and identity a lot more. Kuang proposes the idea that you can have an entirely different personality when you try to communicate in a different language. The way Lily felt this insecurity and gave into this competitive feeling of “Who can be the best at being Chinese?” is very interesting. In a Sept. 9 interview with LitHub, Kuang stated the following:
It’s a great source of shame and embarrassment when you don’t have the fluency of the language that your appearance or social position would indicate that you should have. And people also treat their varying levels of fluency as games of one-upmanship. When you go to a Chinese restaurant with a bunch of other Chinese Americans and one of them can just rattle off all the names of dishes on the menu and you can’t even ask for tea, the attitude being signaled is, “Oh, I’m better than you. I’m more Chinese than you. I’m more connected than you.” So, a lot of people don’t speak in Chinese because they don’t want to signal, with their accents or poor grammar, that they are less than.
This “bizarre pecking order” can be seen in the novel. The other students immediately write off the white kids and their advice on where to go in the city. Lily and her roommate Anna are considered heritage speakers and despite them both having never stepped a foot in Taipei, they are looked to for guidance by the other students. They are expected to be aware of cultural codes and to possess a basic grasp on the language already. Not wanting to be seen as a fraud and losing her heritage status, Lily is constantly running to the bathroom to quickly Google things. It doesn’t take long until Lily feels like she is in over her head. Anna and Lily decide not to live in the school’s dorms but opt for an apartment in the heart of the city instead.
They do this because they want to fully immerse themselves in the culture and, as a result, master the language just that much faster than their peers. The culture shock hits fast and hard and Lily is quickly humbled by it. She is exhausted after the first week and can’t do much other than sleep. She is plagued by constant mosquito bites which feel like “a dozen hot knives digging into my flesh.” Navigating the city turns out to be a lot harder, too, as her daily commute gives her frequent headaches. Lily describes looking at street signs and subway stops as “having to do long division every time I opened my eyes.” She finds the language a lot harder than she expected and the program is asking a lot of her. There seem to be social norms she can’t quite reach, and she struggles to connect with her fellow classmates.
Kuang says in the foreword of the novel that it’s really just about Lily getting things wrong all the time. This seems to be true at the start of the cultural exchange program. Lily is quickly ostracised by her fellow classmates after a short weekend trip with a boy from the program, since her roommate has a crush on him, and soon, rumours start to fly about what happened between him and Lily on their hot spring getaway. Isolated from her peers, she receives a text message from her mother about the passing of her grandfather. She feels like she can’t properly mourn him, as she does not feel connected to the Chinese part of her family at all. What follows are snapshots of her life in Taipei: She spends a lot of her time wandering in the city on her own.
Going from hotpot restaurants she found online to guided tours and classical concerts, she avoids her classmates and the roommate in her studio apartment, which was too small for two people anyway. She also avoids her family — while feeling lost and wanting to connect with them, she ignores her mother’s calls and cannot go to her grandparents in Guangzhou because she does not want to go through the process of applying for a visa. We see Lily go through her life as a cultural exchange student. She practices her Chinese in class and slowly starts to get better at it. She tries to uncover more about her family. These small scenes come together to describe her life.
There are no big revelations: instead, we are invited inside her mind for just a bit. We watch her question her reaction to the news of her grandfather’s loss: does she feel sad? Should she feel sad? What does this grief look like for her? The story takes us from this conflict but offers little resolution. The change is within Lily, whom we see grow internally. When she complains during a class that “she sounds like an idiot,” her teacher aptly replies, “In fact, you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it.”
A huge part of this book talks specifically about experiences of diaspora and growing up in an Asian family, which I cannot personally speak to, but that didn’t make the book inaccessible to me. Lily is relatable in a lot of ways: her habit of trying to rationalize her way out of feelings, her not knowing what she is supposed to feel in a given situation, the sinking feeling she has when walking into a room and believing everyone is talking about her, her misunderstanding what other people expect of her, and all the ways we misunderstand what an experience is supposed to mean while we’re still living it. Maybe it is because this is a personal matter to me: my maternal side of the family is Lebanese, with half my family still living there. I do not speak the language and have never visited the country. When my grandmother passed away, I was left with a lot of the struggle and pain that I see in Lily. How do you mourn a person you barely even knew? You can’t ask them questions anymore.
Lily pierces memories together by talking to her mother, wandering around the city and interacting with the city to the best of her capabilities. Thinking about her grandparents, Lily states:
But I had meant to fix this. I had the perfect plan. I would study Chinese in college, become fluent in short order, and then I would have all the conversations with my grandparents that I had avoided before. In my imagination, my grandparents would always be there, frozen at the age that I had last seen them, waiting until I was ready to talk. I thought I’d get a second chance. I thought I had the time.
Other readers might see something completely different in the same scenes, and I think that’s the point. You are shown Lily’s experiences and how they affect her, but what do they make you feel? What do they make you think of? What does the “nothing” become when you look at it? Yes, Lily gets words wrong and sometimes meaning gets lost in translation, but the heart and soul of this book is in getting things wrong on a bigger level than just words: what is expected of Lily? How should she feel and act and study and learn? What is expected of her as a friend, a girlfriend, a daughter, a granddaughter, a Chinese American person? Deeper than her desire to be understood, Lily wants most to not be an outsider: in her family, in Taiwanese and Chinese culture, and in her group of chosen friends.
Lily goes through most of her character growth once she is forced to accept her true position relative to those of whom she wished to be a part of (which was ultimately something between insider, outsider, and individual). Yes, she gets it all wrong. And maybe that’s okay. At the end of the novel, Lily is at the airport, getting ready to fly back to America after finishing the program. It’s about all the times we go into something with certain expectations and realize only too late that we should have acted or felt differently before we ran out of time.
JULIA SMEDING (she/her)
I am a master’s student at Literature Today. I studied Media and Culture for my bachelor’s and I love anything film, media, and literature related. While I love going out and seeing my friends, I can almost always be found rewatching Twilight while trying to get my cat to come cuddle with me.
