What happens when you arrive in a place expecting to find answers to the supposed gaps in your identity, only for everything to unravel? It is supposed to be “your second home” and they’re supposed to be “your people”, yet no one is there to welcome you, notice you or pat you on the back for attempting to “rediscover” your roots because why should they?
As Rebecca F Kuang writes in her Author’s Note, Taipei Story is a book “about getting things wrong”, and indeed a lot goes comically south for Chinese American protagonist and sophomore Lily Chen as she embarks on a 10-week trip to Taipei to study Mandarin and get in touch with her heritage.
Lily arrives in Taipei bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, taking in the city’s main tourist attractions and culinary delights, making friends with those nearest to her, eyeing up a potential crush and feeling hopeful about her Mandarin abilities all in the space of a single chapter. That is, until she finds herself slapped in the face with the cold, hard reality of culture shock – something she once rolled her eyes at when her American college professors warned her about it – as how could something like that even be possible for someone like her, in a place like this?
Lily soon comes to realise that she is in fact “very insecure about her Chineseness” as she struggles to “become a subject in the culture” she thought she knew. She feels hurt when cashiers address her in English and becomes embarrassed when she notices how much she stands out among the local Taiwanese people when out in public with her fellow Asian American classmates. Discovering that she may actually be lacking in a part of her identity that she took pride in showing off back in the States, she is plunged deep into an identity crisis that becomes all the more confusing to navigate, as after all, Taipei was supposed to be her “homecoming”.
Everything starts going wrong as her perceived rejection from a city she assumed would welcome her with open arms begins to consume her with resentment. She hates her roommate, her apartment is suffocating, she despairs over her Mandarin. Even the guy she initially pursued turns out to be awful and in hindsight,someone she never actually liked but chased to score points over her roommate who fancied him first . Things get messy and Lily ends up isolated and friendless, and then a relative in Mainland China passes away. But could the events and conversations that follow this tragedy curtail exactly what she may have been missing to understand and accept the Chineseness tied to her sense of self in a way that is finally devoid of ego and superficiality?
Read more: ‘Yellowface’ Author Rebecca F Kuang Explains Why America’s Higher Education Is Broken
Lily Chen is far from being a likeable protagonist and at most times is insufferable to say the least. Her inner voice is simultaneously as egotistical as it is a mass of anxious spirals that span anywhere from the politics of friendships and relationships to the literal historical and geopolitical state of the Pacific. But truthfully, how many of us have also been here and wasted time overthinking the exact same topics? Would this story have hit quite as close to home (more than you might have wanted it to) if she were in fact completely perfect?
From navigating the Chinese language as a “not really native” but “heritage speaker” – which Kuang describes as “a bizarre patchwork of near-fluency and shocking foundational gaps” – to realising that your fragmented sense of self may mirror exactly that of your language ability, Taipei Story uses the arduous process of learning a foreign language as an allegory for the similarly uneven process of coming to terms with one’s identity.
You cannot learn a language to fluency overnight, just as you cannot expect the “missing pieces” of your identity to be handed to you on a silver platter upon arrival in your “motherland”. So for members of the Chinese or Asian diaspora who have spent most of their lives overseas, Kuang’s unfiltered account of a homecoming sans rose-tinted glasses perhaps may ring a little too true.
