The language of belonging: On R F Kuang's 'Taipei Story'

The road to one's future is arduous and uncertain, and the journey down one's past is even more so. In R. F. Kuang's newest novel, Taipei Story, we join college freshman Lily Chen as she attempts to traverse both.

I did not know what to expect with this book. Academic, fantastical, and of great magnitude are the words I would usually use to describe Kuang's works, and as I read on, it became quite clear that this book wasn't any of those adjectives – and nor was it trying to be.

Instead, Taipei Story is intimate, realistic, uncomfortable, and sometimes painfully ordinary. Lily begins the novel by signing up for a Mandarin language learning programme in Taiwan. She embarks on this journey hoping for a grand revelation about her culture, her past, and her roots, expecting a magical reunion with her Chinese-speaking grandparents as soon as she's fluent. She is quite certain that 10 weeks in Taipei will help her recover what she has lost.

But how do you reclaim something that has, at some point, ceased to be yours?

Lily is Chinese American, her family is from Guangzhou, and she has grown up surrounded by the idea that China is part of her identity. Yet her relationship with that identity is mediated through her parents, education, and the assumptions of other people.

Kuang handles this question with surprising subtlety. Lily is not simply searching for her roots; she is invested in proving that she belongs. Early in the novel, she judges other Chinese American students for being insufficiently Chinese, only to realise that their Mandarin is no worse than hers.

Thus it becomes a performance and, subsequently, a competition: which Chinese American in the group is more Chinese than the rest? Who deserves to learn Chinese more? Who belongs more?

This is where the novel's central concern with language becomes especially concentrated: Lily's Mandarin is simultaneously the thing that connects her to her heritage and the thing that reminds her that she has inherited only fragments of it. She can recognise words but struggles to read them in context; she can construct a sentence but cannot always express what she actually means.

The language pledge at her intensive programme forces her into precisely the sort of discomfort she has spent years avoiding. Her progress is consequently not presented as a triumphant reclamation of her heritage. It is work: repetitive, embarrassing, exhausting work.

And then the other shoe drops: her grandfather has passed away.

For Lily, this spells out a certain degree of yielding in her pursuits. In managing this loss, we learn that Lily's insistence on learning Mandarin is not entirely selfish, and that a secondary purpose was to communicate with her grandparents. And now, with far too little effort made far too late, she finds herself without any purpose at all.

Taipei Story handles grief with measured grace.

Lily's Mandarin is simultaneously the thing that connects her to her heritage and the thing that reminds her that she has inherited only fragments of it. She can recognise words but struggles to read them in context; she can construct a sentence but cannot always express what she actually means.

In her classes, they speak about grief as a language exercise and even in this, Lily struggles, only because her control over Mandarin is not strong yet and whatever she says feels superficial. In her mind, Lily is comparing the losses faced by her and her classmates and feels inferior in her grief; she only lost her grandfather; someone else lost their actual father and didn't even get to hold a funeral due to quarantine requirements.

Even in her grief, her sense of not belonging deepens.

A crack forms, and the disconnect between Lily and the Chinese past she was chasing to pin down her identity widens. She can no longer talk to her grandfather; her grandmother is too far away in China, and a significant lack of understanding reveals itself between her and her mother.

This lack of understanding duplicates itself, and Lily is suddenly plunged into a world where she is lost both in Taiwan and in her family. She tries to navigate for herself, but to no avail. How do you find belonging in a place you have never been to?

It is here that the plot begins to thin, but after spending the entire book inside Lily's head, it makes sense that it does so. The fantastical summer Lily had imagined is now dwindling after she faces the fact that she knows nothing of her past, and ultimately the magic starts fizzling out.

The days slow down. So does her progress in Mandarin. Anna, Lily's roommate, once bright and bubbly and a steady companion in this strange new world, now seems shallow and unsympathetic. Lily's mother heads to China for the funeral, with a layover in Taiwan, and for every second that they spend together, the farther away from each other they seem to go.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Taipei Story, however, is its characterisation. Lily is not particularly easy to like, and that is precisely why she works. She can be petty, competitive, judgmental, insecure, and deeply self-conscious. She wants to be knowledgeable and authentic while knowing that she is neither. Her friendship with Anna is particularly well handled because it is allowed to become ugly.

Lily can resent Anna, misinterpret her, and construct elaborate reasons for disliking her, only to discover that these feelings are less permanent than she imagined. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the novel's emotional centres because it survives the misunderstandings that initially seem capable of destroying it.

For Lily, light shines through in the form of perseverance.

She realises that there's no way out, and no matter how much misery her life brings to her, she simply cannot give in to it. She struggles, and endures, and finally, she has completed the course.

A minute process of growth has taken place.

Lily realises that sometimes the only way forward is to admit how much you do not know, and then start learning.

By the end, when she retakes the same language examination she struggled with at the beginning, the change is obvious precisely because the material itself has not changed. The passage she once could barely decipher is suddenly readable. She has not become a different person; she has simply learned.