brendan halpin

I adored Babel and Yellowface, and I too once spent some time in Taipei (in 1990, when it was apparently a vastly different place than it is now), so I was excited to read Taipei Story. Unfortunately, the brilliant, vicious, incisive author of those two books didn’t show up for this one, which is utterly conventional and bland.

Lily goes to Taipei to better her Chinese and…pretty much nothing happens. Spoiler, I guess—her Chinese improves after she completes an intensive language program while living in Taipei. Sorry to have ruined the plot for you.

I kid, I kid. There are two other things that happen in this 250-page book. But Kuang is a talented enough author, with razor-sharp insights that remind me of Joyce Carol Oates, to carry readers through an essentially plotless novel.

But rather than the humor and bite we’ve come to expect from Kuang, what we get here is a passive and dull protagonist whose profound insight in the book is “sometimes it’s okay to do things by yourself.” Sorry again for the spoiler. Here’s what I realized this morning: there is literally nothing in this book that could possibly offend anyone. I’m just stunned that the same author who wrote a novel witht the subtitle “on the necessity of violence” has written something so completely safe and bland.

There are some interesting things happening at the margins—why bring up Lily’s complete lack of interest in sex (at one point in the novel she tries to masturbate and gives up) if that’s not going to go anywhere? Her only relationship of consequence is with a woman, and I kept thinking any moment we were going to get Lily’s queer awakening along with some insights into how that works for a first generation American whose parents are from a very traditional culture. Nope! She’s just a gal who can’t get off. Move along, nothing to see here!

Why bring up the far more interesting and dramatic story of Lily’s sister if Lily doesn’t really seem to have been affected by it? Lily seems kind of put out that her ancestors had interesting lives she didn’t know about—I was put out that we got her story rather than theirs.

The lone saving grace of this literary coming of age novel is that it avoids the tired cliche of being about a man who is struggling to write.

Anything even remotely interesting about this book has been done elsewhere, and better. There’s so little going on here that I must confess I was baffled as to why Kuang chose to write this book. The acknowledgements at the end hint that this might be some kind of roman a clef about Kuang’s own experience in this language program in Taipei. If that’s true, I wish she’d written this as memoir, because she is a far more interesting person than Lily. The other thought I had is that as a Yalie, Kuang might not be satisfied with writing brilliant novels that sell well and may be seeking the approval of the literary establishment. Which I’m sure she’ll get here—the Iowa Writers Workshop industrial complex disdains plot in general and will probably lap this up. Or maybe, and I hope this is the case, writing this novel was just a way to parlay a trip to Taipei into a fat tax deduction. In which case, well played and good for R.F. Kuang. Just not so good for readers.