R.F. Kuang is, in the best sense, a literary chameleon. Each one of her novels presents a different setting and dynamic, but her oeuvre is unified by careful thought, sharp style, and an uncanny ability to make the pages want to turn. Taipei Story, her seventh book since 2018, is about Lily, a college freshman spending a summer abroad in Taiwan to learn Mandarin. She struggles with assimilation, her roommate, Anna, her internet-famous classmate, JC, her self-perception, and the death of her grandfather.
Kuang and I spoke earlier this month—she is as smart in person as she is on the page, funny, insightful, and extremely curious. An edited version of our conversation follows:
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Adam Dalva: Your book activates so much nostalgia—of course I didn’t have Lily’s exact experience, but I do remember the alienation of being a college student abroad and struggling with both my personal life and a new language. Were you thinking about the way that we look back at this sort of time and say, “Oh my God, what was I doing?”
R.F. Kuang: I was thrilled to write a protagonist who is noticeably younger than I am, because until now all of my characters have aged along with me. I began composing the Poppy War trilogy when I was a teenager, so everyone in that world was a teen. In Babel, they’re undergraduates. In Katabasis, they are PhD candidates. I just turned 30 this year, and I revisited a decade earlier to create someone on the threshold of adulthood. And she’s incredibly book-smart, yet spectacularly reckless. That contrast felt genuinely enjoyable to explore.
Language is something that is practiced and learned and something that you can be awful at, and also something that you can get better at. But the only way that you get better is by making mistakes.
It isn’t about elder arrogance. “I’m 30 now, so I can mock the youths” isn’t the point. It’s about shedding the fear of sounding stupid when you’re old enough to recognize that such concerns don’t matter, and choosing to make public mistakes—on the page, as well as in life—over clinging to a preconceived aura of total preparedness and correctness. Life isn’t an oral examination. The characters and I are messy, and we learn far more from missteps than from tidy textbook certainties.
I found it productive to anchor the narrating voice in someone who experiences the world as a puzzle with no obvious answers. The hardest part is she believes she has a handle on it. She assumes she grasps geopolitics, the US-Taiwan relationship, Chinese history, and the history of Mandarin in Taiwan. And she’s simply wrong about almost everything.
AD: All of that opens up so many avenues for shame and humiliation—and I know from your recent Substack piece that shame was one of your through-lines for this novel.
RK: I think shame and bilingualism are closely linked. Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics informed my thinking here. I’m drawn to people whose identities—especially racial or cultural—are deployed like cards to claim authority, to lend their words extra weight. I explored this from a different angle in Yellowface, a satire about people asserting cultural credentials and policing boundaries on the basis of largely flimsy pedigrees.
There’s something parallel in bilingualism: it’s a potent source of humiliation when your fluency lags behind what your appearance or social position leads others to expect. People also treat varying fluency as a form of one-upmanship. If you’re at a Chinese restaurant with fellow Chinese Americans and someone can rattle off every dish name while you can barely order tea, the signal is, “I’m more Chinese than you are. I know more.” So many stop speaking Chinese—not to reveal deficiency, but to avoid signaling inferiority.
Taipei Story seeks to strip language ability from the rites of blood or ethnicity. Language is not inherited; no one is born speaking a language. I’m interested in dismantling the theorist Rey Chow’s critique of the “myth of consanguinity” in the native-speaker debate. Language is something learned and practiced; you can be terrible at it and still improve, and the only path to improvement is through making mistakes.
I’m captivated by how the language classroom becomes a daily theater of shame and humiliation—and how those moments can be productive. The willingness to show up every day and look ridiculous in front of a roomful of peers and a teacher who’s openly laughing at you—that friction is what drives progress. David Sedaris has a wonderful French-learning essay in which he treats shame almost as a kink. It’s a feeling you come to relish because without that friction you’d make no real progress at all.
AD: I feel that deeply, as someone who struggles with learning languages in all kinds of contexts. And I was thinking about how the ultimate test of language acquisition might be casualness in a restaurant, whereas the ultimate test for mastering Descartes would be a question in an exam.
RK: That’s such a sharp observation. It resonates especially with my French—strong reading fluency, almost no speaking ability. Yet I wouldn’t dare order breakfast in a Paris café. There’s a moment near the end of the book when Lily reflects on what all this Chinese has granted her, compared to her guitar, carpentry, woodworking, or visual-art pursuits. Language is undeniably valuable, but for a heritage speaker, it can also return you to square one amid those who already speak and live with fluency.
AD: Taipei Story uses the grandfather’s death as a counterexample to what language can do. I’m reading a Proust sequence in which Marcel’s grandmother dies—the loss of a family memory repository. Yet the protagonist wonders you don’t gain that much social mileage from a grandparent’s passing. As she grieves, she starts to wonder about questions she would have asked him about his time in Cambodia. Language would have bridged that gap, but she can’t even attend the funeral. She can only reach the airport to meet her mother for a few hours.
RK: I don’t enjoy airports, but I love airport scenes, especially in Taiwanese cinema. The farewell in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet still gets to me. For those who truly inhabit multiple cultures and languages, the flight is a liminal space where you’re suspended between identities. As Lily lands in Taipei Taoyuan, the flight attendant toggles between languages and you must decide which you’re going to accept. I opened the novel at that moment of arrival. The emotional apex—the clash with her mother—unfolds in four hours within that in-between zone, and the final moment asks whether she’s really transformed as she passes through that threshold.
But to address the question of lost time, I’m working with a fantasy of connection. Many people—diaspora or not—have moments with grandparents tinged by guilt and sorrow. There’s a longing that, if I could return, live with them, and speak the language, we would share an authentic bond and they would reveal their truths and honor them properly.
Lily believes the only barrier to this dream is attaining fluency in Chinese, which she doesn’t fully manage in time. Yet sometimes elders aren’t eager to recount their stories. They may think, “That’s not really your concern.” She asks her mother, “Why didn’t anybody tell me? This is such a major traumatic part of our family history; why wasn’t I brought in on it?” And her mother replies, “Well, it’s a bit sad, so why would I want to discuss it with you?” The most charitable reading is that they endured those hardships to give Lily a safer life; Cambodia’s history would never cross her mind. For Lily, though, this feels like rejection. It hinges on assumptions about what belongs in her family’s story and what she ought to know.
AD: This connects with a central tension in Taipei Story: expectation versus reality, and, as with travel, the question of tourism. When I visited Taipei at nineteen, I did a lot of what Lily does in her first week. I thought of Garth Greenwell’s line in Cleanness about edges being worn smooth by too much looking, and how Lily’s experiences gradually deepen in unexpected ways that aren’t mere tourist markers.
I’m working with a fantasy of connection. I think a lot of us, whether or not you’re a part of a diaspora community, experience interactions with grandparents that are tinged with guilt and grief.
RK: When I taught a course called Reading and Writing the Modern Essay at Yale, I let students choose their fifth unit after four standard modules. I opted to teach travel writing. I began with a provocative New Yorker piece by Agnes Callard arguing that our travel expectations are already saturated with clichés and postcards—that we know the Parthenon from a souvenir and not as an actual experiencing of it. If everything’s been seen, if you’re following a checklist, what remains to be done?
That complexity sits at the center of Lily and Anna’s world: a strange hierarchy based on language, but grounded in race and heritage rather than actual fluency. They often ignore white classmates’ guidance about where to go, while their own identity as heritage speakers makes others rely on them for recommendations. Lily constantly bolts to Google things in a bathroom stall because she feels she ought to know the answers, yet she doesn’t.
This wrinkle—being a heritage traveler—reappears when Lily grapples with a Jamaica Kincaid essay she’s been assigned, a fragment of A Small Place that hardly matches Lily’s situation—and she wonders whether ethics extend to her as an American tourist. It’s a quintessential undergraduate, introspective crisis: does every encounter come colored by an expectation and a long history of soft-power through language programs and study abroad? It’s a microcosm of a vast geopolitical history just beneath the surface.
AD: I was struck by how you handle gossip in this novel, and how it informs our understanding of identity. When you’re on a plane heading somewhere new, you can reinvent yourself—but gossip can trap someone. JC, a character who initially looks like a potential love interest, becomes something quite dark.
RK: I had immense fun writing the dynamic between Lily and JC. The aim, in part, was to craft a book without a true villain. You could call him nefarious, but there isn’t really any malice at work. It’s more miscommunication and immaturity than intent to hurt. And I don’t think JC does anything cruel; he acts in ways that feel callow, not calculated to wound Lily. The spread of gossip through Lily’s program isn’t driven by a wish to harm her either. Lily’s revelations at the end reveal that the situation wasn’t as terrible as she imagined. The gossip hits harder because she feels the crowd’s gaze on her, and she’s not entirely wrong. Yet it isn’t a Wharton-like social ostracization; she’s cast herself as a pariah and decides she must withdraw from everyone for the last weeks of her Taipei stay. It’s less about malevolent perceptions and more about how adolescents assign outsized significance to everything.
AD: We both teach, and I have vivid memories of professors who, to me, remain vivid, while in reality they may not remember me at all. This sense of disproportionate impact is something I’ve seen as a teacher. There could be a quiet student in a corner who leaves a lasting impression years later, even if I don’t recall them clearly.
RK: I’m about to start my first tenure-track role this fall, though I’ve been teaching as a grad student for a while. In my earliest cohorts, within a few weeks I knew everyone’s name, their stories, and I believed I’d remember these students for life. Then a later spring hit, and I realized I couldn’t even recall all their names anymore. I can picture some faces, but the precise memories are gone. That doesn’t lessen my commitment as an instructor, but there’s only so much one person can hold against many. Language instructors, especially for heritage learners, form attachments that feel almost essential. It’s a lens for looking at transference and attachment. I found Merve Emre’s essay “Are You My Mother?” particularly illuminating in this regard. There’s a sense of parental projection when it comes to Lily. For many heritage speakers, the people they spoke the language with most were family members, which complicates the classroom dynamic.
When I spent time in Taiwan, I kept encountering the refrain, “You’re not my mom. You’re not my aunt.” Yet there was some submerged, unconscious feeling that they could become that figure in you. Lily has shared so much with her one-on-one teacher: she’s cried in the classroom, she’s exposed her vulnerabilities, and she’s really allowed herself to be raw and hurting. I wanted to capture a moment near the term’s end when the teacher is scrolling through Lily’s folder and realizes, “Oh, you’re a folder to me.” And you must accept that as a student, or you’ll come off as odd.
