In Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang, college freshman Lily Chen travels to Taiwan for an intensive Mandarin program, hoping the trip will help her understand the culture she inherited as a heritage speaker. But the place she hoped she’d feel an instant connection to doesn’t feel like home. Quickly, her roommate Anna clocks that Lily is afraid of being seen for who she is: a foreigner breaking the unspoken rules of her host country.
The coursework is demanding, the summers are punishingly hot. Her anxiety spikes during unrehearsed interactions or when she fumbles for new phrases. Whenever a cashier responds to her in English, she feels she has lost a small battle: she has failed the litmus test of really being from there.
Her language skills are improving, but seemingly only enough for her to notice the gaps. Every new lesson only makes the distance more visible. Despite wanting to grow closer to her grandparents in Guangzhou, she avoids calling and misses out on applying for a visa to the mainland to visit while she’s overseas. Once she gets better at Chinese, she can get to know them, she thinks, hoping to move past their childish, awkward, faltering video calls, where they talked of nothing real.
But then her grandfather dies. He is no longer alive to answer her questions about their traumatic family history and migration to the States. And now that she is finally old enough to ask, her mother isn’t particularly interested in telling her.
Taipei Story follows Lily’s coming-of-age summer as she grapples with self-discovery and grief as the fantasy of homecoming breaks down. The novel is often sad and introspective, sometimes bemused by the systems that bring international students there—from wannabe CIA agents doomsday-planning against Chinese dominance to language influencers and radical academics who can’t read the foreign books they study.
Where Taipei Story shines is in her grief over her grandfather’s death, but also in this sort of strange regret for how she could’ve been—a nostalgia for a life she never had. Much of her days are spent feeling trapped by her limited language skills and adrift in a new place she expected to feel familiar. Her estrangement felt evocative and realistic, like she were simply drowning in the world.
The crux of the book is interesting. Can learning your family’s language actually bring you closer to home or resolve those questions of history or identity? And what will you do if it can’t?
The book itself, however, is a bit boring. Not much truly happens. Chapter after chapter is consumed by the elusive process of learning a new language and the disorientation of culture shock, without unearthing new truths or upping the pressure.
I worry this sounds as though I hate literary fiction and prefer the grim dark fantasy for which R.F. Kuang is known. That is categorically untrue. I fuck with books where, quote-unquote, nothing happens. I love a little Sally Rooney in my life.
This novel is certainly a departure from the warmongering shamans and ivory-tower-educated magicians who defined five of Kuang’s previous six novels. But beyond its compelling thesis, much of Taipei Story reads like a study-abroad diary. Pages upon pages of tofu puddings, boba drinks, soup dumplings, film festivals, and fine music concerts fill her temporary tourist life. Perhaps too many are devoted to the flashcards of words she has memorized and forgotten. After a while, it becomes repetitive and devoid of narrative, leaving Lily to wander from aesthetic cafes to bookmarked landmarks without much direction.
You get a sense of her family drama—grandparents she meant to be closer to, rigid scholastic expectations, and a tumultuous older sister—that created her need to succeed in school and keep her family stable. A falling-out with her roommate and a hot springs trip gone wrong leave her isolated from friends and drowning in her temporary home, and perhaps trapped away from character relationships that would’ve made the novel more interesting.
The novel is full of out-of-placeness, like the world is happening to Lily, but it often lacks tension. Occasionally, I wished she were brattier or more annoying—anything that would let her act against it instead of meandering toward final exams. By the final page, I had built up no particular affection or contempt for her.
The chapters after the midpoint, as Lily deals with the grief of her grandfather’s death, are the ones I’d return to if I were inclined, because they briefly give the novel the emotional pressure it otherwise withholds. At times, the book seems to speed away from its strongest conflict, especially given its slim 288 pages, only to retread older ones. I bought the book’s central thesis, but it didn’t move me.
Toward the end, Lily takes Ted Chiang’s science-fiction novella Story of Your Life, where learning the language of visiting aliens can rewire people’s brains to experience time completely differently, very seriously. She combs through linguistic research on how speaking different languages can alter our perceptions of the world but also our understanding of ourselves.
In her final exams, she talks about being ashamed of her Chinese self for being too immature and inarticulate, and how she tried to keep it from embarrassing her, only for the gap between her two selves to grow wider. A chapter from her grandfather’s perspective gives their estrangement a dual characteristic as he writes about feeling lost in America and knowing he could never settle down there.
The separation between who she is and who she could’ve been if she’d grown up in her family’s homeland is genuinely palpable and the guiding force of the novel, making it a good read for diaspora fiction enthusiasts learning how to connect with this concept of home.
FICTION
Taipei Story
By R.F. Kuang
William Morrow
Published September 8, 2026
