Taipei Story: A Bittersweet Summer of Loss and Translation

Set amid the intense study, gossip and first loves of a Taipei summer school, Rebecca F Kuang’s new novel Taipei Story wrangles with diasporic identity, language and grief

Rebecca F Kuang is nothing if not prolific: at the age of 30, she has already published a fantasy trilogy, three other novels (Yellowface, Babel and Katabasis) and has one more on the way. This last, Taipei Story, is a more realist novel than her previous offerings. It follows Lily Chen, an undergraduate student of Chinese who embarks on a ten-week intensive Chinese language summer school in Taipei. As a Chinese American, she is looking to language acquisition as a way to connect with her grandparents and relearn herself in another language and culture, one that is ostensibly her own. While she’s out there studying, the sudden death of her grandfather forces Lily to reckon with herself at last. 

Kuang herself studied at a similar kind of language school in Taipei, and her own grandfather died recently, though as she explains over the phone, “I’m sitting in that frustrating place that a lot of people who write contemporary literary fiction find themselves in, having to explain, like, these are the bits of myself that are in there, these are the bits that are fictionalised.” As well as being one of her most personal works to date, the novel reflects that heady experience of being a young cocky undergraduate, while Lily’s experience of grief and search for belonging is drawn with deep grace and empathy. Below, Kuang discusses writing from life, writing through desire and the importance of language in the formation of identity.

.

Jemima Skala: Why did fiction feel like the right place to explore your experience of being in intensive language school and grieving your grandfather at the same time?

Rebecca F Kuang: There was a period when I just couldn’t write at all. Grief does that to you, it drains the world of everything and I kept thinking, what’s the point? I turned to storytelling really to understand my family and try to honour and respect their histories. I felt so much anger and guilt at myself because I’d always wanted, when my Chinese was sophisticated and I was fluent enough, to sit down with my grandfather and interview him about this incredibly rich, difficult, fascinating life that he’d lived. I had so many opportunities to do it and I kept putting it off because I thought, I’m embarrassing myself in Chinese. He passed away so suddenly and I lost my chance, and I thought, well, I don’t want to write anymore.

Time passed and my family started to heal and I realised that if I can’t write something that honours his lived experience, I can write something that reaches into that gap and wrestles with that guilt and silence and with that unanswerable question: What do you do when you can only pose your questions to empty space?

JS: If writing isn’t therapy, how does fiction or writing help to process things?

RFK: Writing doesn’t do for you what therapy does but successful therapy is shifting your narratives about yourself and finding coherent stories, because we don’t exist outside of the stories. In my case writing does two things for me: The first is that when I’m in the grips of something really awful, there’s always this little splinter of myself that separates and sort of hangs on the outside, like this cool, detached, curious eyeball wondering what’s going on. Like – oh you can’t breathe right now. You’re crying really hard, there’s so much snot coming out of your nose right now. That part is interested in all the sensory data and it’s trying to take it all down, to bank it for further use. It’s like I’m mining my own extreme reactions so that I can write about how a character going through something similar might embody those same reactions. It doesn’t make things any harder and it doesn’t make the pain go away but at least I’m getting more legible to myself.

“I can write something that reaches into that gap and wrestles with that guilt and silence and wrestles with that unanswerable question of, what do you do when you can only pose your questions to empty space?” – Rebecca F Kuang

The second thing is that I write to explore a set of questions that I don’t know how to answer for myself, so it’s like creating all these little pocket universes where you have characters living out various ideologies and scenarios. It’s like running lots of iterations of choices that you could have made but probably won’t and I think that’s immensely entertaining. That’s where with writing from life, it’s never a one-to-one transcription of my reactions and my experiences but rather all the question marks of the things I didn’t feel and the things I didn’t say.

JS: Lily clearly sees the Chinese language as something to help her understand the past rather than a tool to use for the future.

RFK: Language is a symbol of all of her shame, distance, guilt and disconnect. That is really common in diaspora communities, not just Chinese American ones. Immigrant kids who aren’t good at the language that their parents speak, but there’s this assumption, and it’s flawed for so many obvious reasons, that language sits in the blood, that it’s an inherent part of ethnicity. If you don’t have that, then there’s a chunk missing from you and you’re inherently less than. Chinese American kids feel this deep embarrassment all the time.

You don’t acquire language through osmosis or simple immersion. Language is a product of effort and constant communication and work and living. It’s also not a product of how you’re born or even what you hear around you. Lily is coming to Chinese thinking, if I can just acquire this then it will solve all my anxieties about my own family being broken. She realises that her Chinese still sucks and all of these problems still exist. It’s not this magical portal back to this fantasy of homecoming and belonging. Language is just language. You still have to do the really hard work of reaching out to people and embarrassing yourself and trying out all the wrong words.

“I write to explore a set of questions that I don’t know how to answer for myself” – Rebecca F Kuang

JS: Lily’s also very affected by her sister Jasmine’s mental health struggles.

RFK: Without going into too much detail about my siblings or my own childhood, I’ll say that everything in Lily’s family and her relationship with her sisters is coming from a place of truth and dynamics that I went through, not just in my family but in my community. When you have grown up with a sibling who is suffering so much in that way, a common consequence is that you become the invisible child, the child upon whom all the expectations are shifted, so Lily has to be happy and academically successful. She has to be the one that is OK because if she’s not, then she thinks her family will collapse. A lot of the book is about her going to pieces realising that the things she’s always done to just be OK and functional are not enough. She has to actually ask herself what it would really mean to be in the world and what is the point of learning all these languages.

 JS: One strain in this book that’s more prominent than your others is that of Lily’s sexual impulse and desire. Can you talk that through some more?

RFK: She has a very typical undergraduate disconnect between idealised desire and the messy friction of reality. It’s not that Lily doesn’t have sexual desires; she has lots of fantasies about animated men or fictional men and has this idea of this transcendent, romantic sexual experience that she might have one day but she’s never wanted it from any flesh and blood human person that she’s encountered. That touches on having lived a very online and isolated existence, which is part of the conversation that we’re having now about Gen Z, though a lot of that discourse over-generalises.

Something that is really typical for a lot of young women, is where things quickly accelerate from a friendship experience to suddenly sexual acts being expected of you. That was happening to me every single week in college. I always felt like an idiot when, like, suddenly a penis was in front of me. From the other perspective, it’s like, did you not realise this is what was going on the entire time? With that particular scene, I was trying to write a scene without a clear villain.

Taipei Story is published by The Borough Press and is out now. Rebecca F Kuang has curated and will participate in a panel on The Future of Education at the Southbank Centre’s Letters To The Future weekend from 18–20 September, part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th year.