Full disclosure — I am a Rebecca Kuang fan. I picked up the first volume of “Poppy War” somewhere in my early teens, admittedly with really low expectations, and was blown away by Kuang’s characteristic bait-and-switch when what I expected to be a rather mediocre YA magical school fantasy turned into an intricate story of rage and cyclical history.
Since then, I have followed Kuang’s career closely, picking up every book she was gracious enough to write. I got “Taipei Story” on its release day, eager to see what she had to say about the diaspora experience and immersion in a language that should be your own but isn’t. But while “Taipei” was a good read, I will admit I found myself disappointed.
I will start with the good. Kuang is amazing at writing academia. Throughout her work, from “Poppy War” through “Babel” and “Katabasis”, it is a pleasure to read her characters overcome exams, grind out essays and overall triumph intellectually in a gruelling, hostile atmosphere that sometimes, but not always, turns rewarding. This is where “Taipei” is the strongest. In the words of another writer, Lily’s detailed accounts of Mandarin study would get boring fast, but here we read with baited breath as she walks us through the minutiae of syntax and flashcard memorisation.
Unfortunately Lily herself, the novel’s protagonist, is just not as strong. Like most of Kuang’s main characters, she reads as a stand-in for the author herself — both are Chinese-American, studious, attending Yale. The story too is autobiographical — in acknowledgements Kuang thanks her own teachers on whom she based the other characters. This, in and of itself, is not a problem. Kuang’s previous protagonists were also self-insert-y, but managed to make themselves stand out not just with circumstances the (mostly fantasy genre) stories placed them in, but also with profound, deep-running character flaws that always made the reader question their sympathies to them. Lily, crucially, does not have such flaws. She is imperfect, definitely, with dubious priorities and a haunting childhood history of ignoring her Chinese-speaking family members but none of these are at the end of the day all that profound. Who amongst us was always loving, always perfect?
There is a rather mean conclusion to be made that as Kuang grew and presumably became more secure in herself, her self-insert protagonists in turn grew less interesting. I feel awkward making it, but here is where I admit — this was also the thing I did not like about “Katabasis”. Alice, the studious, Mandarin-speaking protagonist of that book, was set up to be flawed and dubiously sympathetic — in the opening chapter we are told she killed her PhD supervisor — but by the end of the book it is revealed she was in fact completely in the right, the killing was an accident, and, spoiler, she gets her happy ending. All of Kuang’s previous books were tragedies — and I fear they were better for it.
I won’t go and spoil “Taipei Story” fully, but in some ways there is not that much to be spoiled. The central conflict — whether Lily will learn Mandarin by the end of the summer well enough to become secure in her Chinese identity and history — resolves just as one might expect it to resolve. There is no narrative climax, little sense of closure. Yes, the character grows, but even that feels lukewarm, a bit unsatisfying. What should be the central appeal of the book — the mental struggle of a dual identity, trying to regain your own language and connect with your loved ones and history — is written competently without being brilliant. The reading suffers in comparison to how others approached the topic, most obviously and recently Ocean Vuong, whose “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” set a bar for the topic simply too high to suffer anything below brilliant.
I will still read Kuang’s next book, probably even buy it on release. But I would lie if I said I did not expect more.
