Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang

Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026--San Antonio

Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang is about the experience of an American student of Chinese descent at Yale who is in Taiwan for an intensive summer program to try to become fluent in Mandarin--a larguage she did not learn as a child but has studied at Yale.  It covers the frustrations of the difficulty of the program, of a relationship with a handsome boy (who has also come from Yale) that goes bad with his telling a lie about what happened to all the other students in the summer program, a relationship with a friend from Yale who is sharing a local apartment that has also gone bad because the friend has a crush on the handsome boy and wanted to date him herself, the difficulty and frustrations of learning she is facing compared to how easily she has been able previously to go through educational classes making the highest grades, the slow progress of improving in speaking the language during the course, how the sudden death of her grandfather means she will not be able to use her new language skills to try to learn about their family history which her mother has always been reluctant to discuss, and her realization as she returns home that she will never be able to use the language skills she has developed in a professional way and that she is at the peak of those skills which will slowly degrade as time passes and she continues to live in an English-speaking USA.  There are lots of discussions of foods being eaten, tourist sites being visited, cultural events being experienced, what is being discussed in classes, etc.  It's all interesting, but there was nothing that made me excited about reading the story.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.