Constructing an Identity

When I reached my gate [..], I discovered there were a lot of Chinese American students boarding the United flight from Boston to Taipei [..]. They looked Chinese, but not Chinese Chinese. You could tell from the summer tans, the ruddy cheeks, the sun-browned hair. Chinese Americans always looked like Chinese people put through a broiler.

Lily Chen, born and brought up in America, child of two immigrant parents from mainland China, now a student at Yale, the quintessential Asian-American high achiever, has come to Taiwan for a summer of intensive Chinese language classes, where she finds that she is one among many such students here to ‘reconnect with their culture’. She’s had years of Sunday Chinese classes in America, and then more intense language classes in college, but

I always panicked at the sight of full paragraphs in Chinese. Alone, characters were eventually legible to me. Together, they formed this impenetrable Great Wall of meaning; the strokes ran together, and even if I approached the characters one by one, I couldn’t decode them quickly enough to link their meanings.

Anyone who has tried to learn a new language, and especially one that has a completely different script from one’s main language, will instantly empathize.

This could have been a pleasant foreigner-in-new-country novel with amusing anecdotes and blunders, but Kuang is too perceptive to write anything so simple. Lily’s roommate is Anna, with whom she had taken Chinese-language classes at Yale.

It would have been strange to come to Taipei with any other friends from my freshman year — the friends who knew my English self, my real self. Anna had only ever known me in Chinese. That meant I could construct an identity here, in front of her, and it wouldn’t feel like pretending.

There is a lot to unpack and ponder there, despite the simple straightforward prose.

Among Lily and Anna’s cohort is ‘JC’, John Cahang-Song, famous among the many famous students at Yale. His mother is a professor of linguistics, and with the help of au pairs, the parents raised their children to speak five languages. Many TikTok videos showed JC and his sister conducting a discussion while effortlessly segueing from one language to another. But here he is, working on his Chinese!

This comforted me. It put us on equal footing. So even the TikTok famous could not munch on grass in the pasture*.

* an idiom explained earlier in the novel, indicating leisurely relaxation.

R.F. Kuang wrote her first, astonishing fantasy trilogy while she was still in college. I enjoyed it, but thought it was better suited to readers of her own age group than mine. Her Yellowface tackled a loaded subject with wit, humour and finesse. This novel is, I think, one of her best — intelligent and thoughtful, but also amusing and charming. Her writing has always displayed her deep interest in and knowledge of linguistics, and this one is no different. It is full of interesting tidbits:

I gathered that the Beijing accent was like the Queen’s English. It was a little grating, but it signaled that you had class. [..] The Taiwanese accent, by comparison, was famously friendly.

Language and culture are deeply intertwined, of course, and the author examines both through the lens of Lily, with a level of complexity that is rare in such novels:

We did not have a colonial relationship with this place, did we? We had not come to gawk at the natives, or dine at country clubs, or enjoy private beaches inaccessible to the locals. We had come here to learn — to form a deeper relationship with this place.

But none of us were Taiwanese. None of us had family here. Most of us were here only because Taiwan right then was friendlier to American travelers than mainland China.

Meanwhile, there are routine problems: stress headaches from trying to decipher street signs, mental exhaustion, the discovery that the clothes they had brought were all wrong for a hot, humid climate. There are occasional phone calls and texts from Lily’s parents and sisters, a relaxed family who do not seem to feel the need to constantly check on her activities. There is the enormous variety of food available to be explored. There are the classes: intense and demanding, especially the one-on-ones. The teachers have high expectations.

“I sound like an idiot,” I said.

“In fact,” said Teacher Sun, “you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it.”

Lily is observant, and there is much to note about cultural differences, especially from the perspective of a college-age young woman.

Was I pretty in Asia? [..] In America you could be pretty with tanned skin and curves. In Taipei, there was one beauty standard [..] plastered on the label of [..] every face mask and moisturizer and skin-whitening cream. The standard was prepubescent celestial fairy: pale porcelain skin and shiny black hair, no boobs, toothy grins only if your teeth were platinum white.

The novel gets a little dull towards the middle, and Lily’s passivity began to pall for the reader. There is some sexual tensions within the cohort that were not terribly interesting, and a rather disheartening (but probably realistic) sexual relationship and subsequent fallout. The novel picks up again when Lily’s grandfather in Guangzhou dies, and she realizes that there were many questions about his life that she had never asked, and that no one is interested in discussing with her now.

I must say that after the last novel I read, Monica Datta’s Nebraska, it was pleasant to read a less demanding one that progressed sequentially in time, that took place mostly in one location, and that let the reader focus on the content and the characters. Taipei Story is quietly introspective about culture, language, home, and family, and about what is lost and gained growing up in a different culture.

Anyone who has migrated between continents and cultures, or has children growing up in a different culture from their own is likely to enjoy this book.

---