RF Kuang’s New Novel Takes On the Angst of a Diaspora Kid on a Study-Abroad Trip to Taipei

In RF Kuang’s latest book Taipei Story, the genre of the campus novel outgrows its name. The novel follows Chinese-American college freshman Lily Chen, who leaves the pale, male, and Yale environs of New Haven, Connecticut, for an intensive Mandarin-language program in Taipei for the summer. While her own family has never stepped foot in Taiwan, Lily holds onto the belief that perfecting her Mandarin will finally reconcile the shortcomings of being a diaspora kid.

And when it came to choosing a place to study the language, traveling to Taiwan conveniently didn’t require her to apply for a visa. But on this quixotic mission to achieve total fluency, she finds that the gulf between her and her complicated family history won’t simply mend itself through diligent study. Her presumptions quickly unravel as she seeks answers in the gaps between economy seats on the flight from Boston to Taipei; in the uncertain, stilting words of Chinese heritage speakers; and in arthouse cinemas and concert halls she’s drawn to for the promise of blending in.

From the seasonally inappropriate hot springs of Beitou to the glossy, souvenir-flogging halls of Taipei Taoyuan International Airport, the plot of this coming-of-age story doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable realities of traveling abroad. Compounded by the sudden passing of Lily’s grandfather—which renders her initial motivation to study Mandarin moot—these follies only deepen beneath a veil of complicated mourning.

Yet, they are also softened and forgiven

And yet, they are also softened and forgiven with a grace that comes uniquely from allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in foreign places. Condé Nast Traveler recently spoke with Kuang about how home, identity, and being split between two places inspired Taipei Story, which is available in bookstores now. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Walk us through your research itinerary for Taipei Story.

The first place I looked was personal experience. When I started jotting down notes for what would become this book, I didn’t know what it was going to be. I was just trying to make legible a tough time in my life when my Gong Gong passed away and I was in Taiwan. I was also in an intensive language program where I was wandering aimlessly around Taipei, meditating on [concepts of] home and cultural alienation.

I wasn’t walking around with a research agenda. I was just following crowds into places to see what they were seeing. If a long line of people was swarming, I would just join it. I would end up at screenings of movies I’d never heard of, or bookstores that I didn’t know existed because I felt so blank, confused, and empty. I wanted somebody else to show me the answer to, “what is your city?” and if I became a ghost in its wake, was there a way I could totally erase myself?

A lot of the descriptions in the novel

A lot of the descriptions in the novel where Lily ends up going to a place by accident, like the National Concert Hall, are places I also encountered by accident. Then, I started thinking about turning all those notes into an exaggerated, fictionalized version of what this experience would be—like if I were even younger and more dim-witted about how the world works. I read a lot of the major modern Taiwanese authors [like Kaori Li, Bai Xianyong, Chen Yingzhen, Wu Ming-yi, and Yang Shaung-zi—all mentioned in the author’s note and available in English translation] and wondered how they were thinking about home, identity, and being split between their mainland cultural heritage, and what it meant to be Taiwanese.

How does this novel interface with—the sometimes impossible—expectations of homecoming? I’m fascinated with fantasies of homecoming and the narratives we buy into about how certain cultural experiences can return you to the fold. A lot of Chinese heritage speakers end up getting these flattened experiences in the US that feel like touch points, but are actually silly ways to reconnect—distilled cultural simulations such as Lunar New Year, red envelope parties, and film screenings.

I say this not to mock diasporic kids; it makes total sense. You get so little, so you take whatever you can have, even if it’s not region-specific or what your parents experienced. In Lily’s case, I’m fascinated by the promises of heritage speaker-study abroad programs (editor’s note: these are linguistic immersion programs designed for students who grew up in households speaking a second language) because they hold so much promise and meaning for many people attending them.

With Taiwan in particular, if you think about

With Taiwan in particular, if you think about it just on the logical level, every step of this premise that you could, as a Chinese-American, go to Taiwan, to study Mandarin, to feel closer to your family on the mainland—is crazy. Lily’s family has never been to Taiwan. She’s the only person who’s ever stepped foot there until her mom has a layover. When she finally gets there, she starts learning all the ways in which she is so wrong and how her experiences of Chineseness and the trajectory of her family history has absolutely nothing to do with Taiwan.

In the end, she is a little more aware of this complexity and moves towards a more genuine, honest encounter of a strange place. She’s like, I’m a foreigner, this is a weird summer, and maybe that’s okay. In what ways does foreignness, or a lack of fluency, act as aly think [feeling out of place] is generative because I’ve felt like an outsider culturally for most of my life

My family immigrated [to the US from Guangzhou when Kuang was four-years-old], and I never felt like I quite belonged in the world of Dallas, Texas. I was a pretty happy kid, but when you’re on the periphery, observing how people behave, I think you just get more perceptive. When I go back to China, that’s also not home, which is not a unique perspective. I think almost every immigrant kid feels this way.

When I’m in China, I am looking

When I’m in China, I am looking at my family, and I observe cultural codes that they’re following, and I have to figure out how these rules work because I didn’t grow up understanding them innately. Being reflective about all of this makes you a good writer. In Lily’s case I don’t think she perceives her bumbling and ignorance as virtues. For her, it’s a barrier between her and the rest of the world.

Because she’s so afraid of getting things wrong, she never asks for help and never willing to embarrass herself. The ethical argument that the book is making is that embarrassment is really good for you. To admit, “I don’t know what’s going on,” and also “somebody helped me,” is an attitude I wish we all embraced more, not just when we’re traveling, but in our entire lives.

I find it a strength, and Lily finds it a weakness, and by the end of the book, she’s at least accepted that she’s gonna mess up, and she might as well own it. From the Poppy War trilogy to your last novel Katabasis, you often take on the perspective of being a student. Why return to the eyes of an undergraduate for this story? This book was very different because it’s the first book of mine where the protagonists weren’t growing up with me.

When I was working on the Poppy War

When I was working on the Poppy War trilogy, I was a teenager, and they’re teenagers, then they’re undergrads, grad students, and in their late-20s. I was writing very reflexively to try to understand the world from my vantage point in life, but I had a couple of life changes in the past few years that made me more interested in going back. With the maturity of turning 30, I have more comfort in making fun of the person I used to be.

When I was writing Taipei Story, it was like, I could write a memoir of what I experienced, or I could make things even more ridiculous, even more embarrassing, and reach back to the person I was when I was 18 going to Beijing for the first time and overwhelmed with everything I didn’t know. The key to writing from the point-of-view of adolescence is not from this position of condescension that the youths are so silly, but to be kind to your younger self and recognize that all of your insecurities, all the things that you were failing at, everything that you got wrong, are deeply hilarious and also a really shared experience.

There’s a lot of humanity in cringe. By setting a story in modern-day Taipei, the narrative acknowledges Taiwanese-Chinese geopolitics, and beyond that, the country’s past with Japanese colonialism, the Chinese Civil War. How did you want to depict Taipei as a city with those layered histories? I wanted to be really cautious here, because I’m not Taiwanese. I’m not an expert in Taiwanese history or literature.

As I pointed out in the author’s note,

As I pointed out in the author’s note, this is not a voice from the inside but the very filtered perception of an American teenager who’s learning about all of this for the first time. I did want to poke gentle fun at the way that people generally take Western ideological frameworks that are very binary and project them onto local histories with no attention to what locals are actually saying.

There’s the first chapter where her little cohort of friends are running around the city, and there’s a pecking order based on assumptions about race. People would ask her where should we go? What should we eat? And she’d always pretend to know the answers and go Google them in the bathroom. They do the same thing when they’re at Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall trying to understand, is he a good guy or a bad guy?

Is he like George Washington? Should we be taking selfies with him? I wanted to give the experience of somebody who feels like they ought to be an expert by virtue of the ethnicity that they were born into, but who’s actually totally detached from genuine knowledge of the place or history. How did grief form your characterization of Taipei? [When Lily’s grandfather passed] it was a snapping moment for her.

Up until that point, she is trying

Up until that point, she is trying to slot all of her experiences into this predetermined narrative that this is getting her closer to the person she could have been if her family had never left China. After her grandfather passes, she is thrown into this weird grief and confusion, and she gives up on that goal altogether. She recognizes the futility of trying to go back and becoming a version of herself that never existed.

Paradoxically, this frees her up to take in the things she closed her mind off to before. Now, she’s okay with being a tourist. She goes on these Klook experiences [to Pinglin Tea Museum and Yehliu Geopark]. She’s on a bus with American families from Philly doing all the canned, predetermined activities just thinking, “oh, this is fun,” and learning a lot. Despite all the complex grief that is in this novel, it’s also very funny.

Is Taipei a place that is particularly funny to you or has its own language of humor that you wanted to capture here? I think every place has surprising, inexplicable quirks if you know how to pay attention to them. One in particular I’m obsessed with is Taiwan English. I was inspired by a blog post by Tao Lin, an author who also wrote a novel called Taipei. It was just a series of pictures that he took walking around of ridiculous translations, and some of them are accurate on a very literal, character-by-character level, and some of them, I can’t believe you would get this result if you ran it through any translation app.

It’s not just in Taiwan either

But it’s not just in Taiwan either. You see it on the mainland. For instance, my mom was wearing a shirt, that just said, “GO FUCK” in repeating block letters. She bought it at a clothes market with her sister when she was in China, and she was only paying attention to the fabric, and she was like, “Oh, it’s so lovely. Does this color look good on me?” and didn’t register the text at all.

I said, “Mom, do you know what that says?” She turned it inside out and wore it that way for the rest of the day.

Source: www.cntraveler.com