In R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story, a reader looks for self in the protagonist.
Outside the open door of a Humanities Quadrangle lecture room, I had, like every other person straining their neck to catch a glimpse of the podium, arrived too late to secure one of its 187 seats. We were jostling to see award-winning novelist Rebecca F. Kuang, also a doctoral candidate in Yale’s East Asian Languages and Literatures department and, in Spring 2025, an instructor of the popular essay-writing seminar, English 1020. There was already a group of spectators sitting cross-legged on the floor at the back of the auditorium, and the mass of eager students was still growing behind me.
I was there partly to get credit for my creative writing seminar and partly because I had read some of Kuang’s work. Kuang’s seventh novel, Taipei Story, was released on September 8. I had found some of her past novels, like Babel and Yellowface, to be somewhat overengineered. But, as a Chinese American Yale student figuring herself out, I had hoped that Taipei Story, a novel about a Chinese American Yale student figuring herself out, might especially resonate with me.
The story is based on Kuang’s own experience as a child of Chinese immigrants, grieving the death of her grandfather while abroad. Like her protagonist Lily Chen, Kuang processed her loss during an intensive Mandarin program at National Taiwan University. Taipei Story grew partially from diary entries she wrote during her time abroad. “The novel is written from a place of insufficiency, regret, and shame—feelings I’ve been steeped in as I’ve been mourning, and feelings I think are familiar to anyone in a diaspora family web,” Kuang wrote on her Substack in April.
After a week of reading about Lily’s friend drama and tourist adventures, it became clear that feelings of insufficiency and shame do play an important role in shaping Lily—unfortunately, they also make up her entire character.
From the very first page, Lily makes a distinction between “real” Chinese people and Chinese Americans: the latter, with their summer tans and ruddy cheeks, “always looked like Chinese people put through a broiler.” When she begins to visit some of Taipei’s most popular tourist destinations with her peers, her lack of cultural authority consumes her. Lily imagines embarrassing herself while ordering food in Mandarin, wondering how cashiers can tell she is American before she opens her mouth. These details, coupled with a few descriptions of her strained familial relationships constitute Lily’s entire character in the first half of the novel.
Why, then, does Lily want to learn Mandarin? A generic statement about “trying to reconnect with heritage” is all that Kuang does to set up the stakes of Lily’s summer before the novel reaches its climax, when her grandfather passes.
Despite Lily’s desire to become more culturally fluent, she is unable, in Kuang’s own words, to think about Taiwan’s geopolitical history “beyond binary ideological frameworks.” While visiting Beitou, a region once colonized by the Japanese, Lily remembers one of her teachers explaining that, in comparison to mainland China, Taiwan experienced relative peace and order under the Japanese regime. When it comes to forming her own judgement on this claim, however, she quickly defers to teachings of her previous history classes—who was she to say that any colonizer was better than another when she had already been taught that “colonialism was bad and self-determination was good”?
In the middle of a friendship falling-out, Lily’s mother informs her via text that her Gonggong has passed away. Now, Lily cries on the floor until her ribs hurt, and she can’t sit up straight. She blows her nose until she feels “like a spoon had dug out everything wet and dirty inside.” Her Popo, or grandmother, can barely speak because of a stroke, and Lily can feel her slipping away. She wrestles with the thought that she may never be able to recollect her family’s history.
Her grief finally allows us to understand the real stakes of the novel, which are Lily’s dreams of making her family whole again. Unfortunately, these revelations come too little and too late.
In 2018, Kuang told the South China Morning Post that she found it difficult to get her family to speak about the past. Lily’s character growth echoes Kuang’s own attempts to learn about her family history during grief. Kuang’s maternal grandfather fought for Chiang Kai-shek, and her father’s family experienced the Japanese occupation of Hunan.
Like both Kuang and Lily, I grew up the daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants. As a kid, I felt ashamed of looking so Chinese yet not speaking fluent Mandarin. It’s the impulse to be recognized as the person she is assumed to be—adequently Chinese—that drives Lily’s desire to establish the missing cultural authority in herself.
That very understanding of her as a person, however, makes me wish all the more that Kuang portrayed her as a full human being from the start. Diaspora children may very well feel out of place in the home countries of their families. And yes, they are stuck in a limbo trying to assimilate into both the cultures their parents have immigrated to and the cultures they left. But what Kuang fails to demonstrate is that none of these things are what should make Lily who she is.
Even the details of Lily’s trauma, which make her whole in the minds of readers, don’t make up for real personality traits, beliefs, hobbies, or interests, because all trauma is unique. We don’t even learn what Lily studies at Yale.
I ended up leaving Kuang’s lecture on language learning early. I had already been marked for attendance for my creative writing seminar and was getting tired of peering through the gaps between people’s bodies just to catch the edge of Kuang’s jet black hair. To be honest, much of what Kuang was saying about symbolic systems of language was getting tedious.
When Taipei Story was released, Kuang published another Substack article. In defense of her character, Kuang wrote that Lily is “just a girl.” I can’t help but wish that she could have given this girl just a bit more.
Velvet Wu is a junior in Davenport College.
Illustration by Jane Callanan.
