Taipei Story

Lily Chen, a Chinese American sophomore at Yale, flies from Boston to Taipei for a 10-week intensive Mandarin program at National Taiwan University. Lily grew up speaking Chinese at home but lost most of her fluency over time and views the summer as a chance to reconnect with her language and heritage. At the airport, she notices many other Chinese American students on the same flight, all bound for similar programs, and feels both competitive and deflated to realize she is not unique in her quest.

In Taipei, Lily reunites with Anna, a classmate from Yale's Chinese language section and her designated roommate. Their rental on Yongkang Street is far smaller than advertised: one bed, a tiny couch, and a bathroom where the showerhead sits over the toilet. Lily and Anna have only ever known each other in Chinese, and they notice how the language transforms them. Anna becomes high-pitched and babyish; Lily turns, in Anna's words, "docile and uncertain."

Before classes begin, Lily explores the city with fellow Yale students, including Skipper Leys, a student in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), a US military training program, preparing for air force intelligence; and John Cahan-Song, known as JC, whose mother is a linguistics professor famous for a bestselling memoir about raising multilingual children. A pecking order forms, with Lily and Anna at the top because their Chinese is strongest. Lily questions whether her Chinese heritage exempts her from being an exploitative tourist when she has no family in Taiwan and chose the program partly for convenience.

Classes immerse Lily in four courses, the most consequential being private sessions with Teacher Sun, who identifies Lily's paradox as a heritage speaker: She has an intuitive ear for tones and grammar but is lazy and inconsistent because some things come too easily. Teacher Sun warns her she must treat Chinese with the same discipline she would apply to a truly foreign language.

Lily begins having daily lunches with JC and develops a quiet attraction. Anna confesses her own crush on JC and asks Lily to investigate whether he reciprocates, but Lily does nothing. Tensions between the roommates accumulate over domestic grievances, and when Anna secretly reads Lily's text messages with JC, she is unapologetic. She buys conciliatory bubble teas, but the breach of trust lingers.

JC discovers he has misread the dates on a hot springs reservation in Beitou, a resort town north of Taipei. The trip must happen today. Lily agrees to skip class and go without Anna. At the hotel, JC initiates a sexual encounter in the room's private hot tub. Lily feels no desire but goes along out of social inertia, declining his repeated requests for oral sex. Both are relieved when the encounter ends, and they ride home the next morning in near-silence.

A rumor then spreads that Lily performed oral sex on JC, a distortion JC apparently shared with Skipper, who spread it further. When Lily confronts him, JC dismisses her anger as slut-shaming and says the romantic "vibes" are not there.

Lily receives a text from her mother: Her maternal grandfather, Gonggong, has passed away after a fall in Guangzhou. Her mother is sobbing on the phone, something Lily has witnessed only once before. Lily cannot attend the funeral because she lacks a valid visa for mainland China, a bureaucratic failure she blames on her own procrastination. She takes stock of what she has lost: Her relationship with Gonggong consisted of stilted video calls in which she repeated scripted greetings in halting Chinese. She had always planned to become fluent first and then have real conversations with him. She assumed he would always be there.

Anna delivers a rehearsed speech asking Lily to find alternative housing because their cohabitation has become hostile. When Lily reveals her grandfather has just died, the eviction stalls, but Anna leaves anyway. Lily meets her mother at Taoyuan Airport during a layover en route to the funeral. They eat soup dumplings because tofu pudding is not yet being served, and Lily feels devastated by this small failure. She inadvertently quotes a Confucian saying about not wandering far while one's parents are alive, and her mother's eyes redden with pain. They spend their remaining time on the viewing platform, watching planes in silence.

Lily spirals into grief. Teacher Xu, the program director, warns that unexcused absences put her at risk of failing. In her literature class, Meijuan, a medical student from Myanmar, shares the story of her father's death from Covid, and the raw specificity makes Lily feel the poverty of her own grief. Teacher Sun corrects Lily's word choice for death: She has been using the blunt term reserved for animals rather than the dignified phrase meaning "to depart from the world."

Seeking answers, Lily calls her mother and discovers that Gonggong grew up in Cambodia as part of an overseas Chinese merchant family. His parents sent him back to China at 14 to join the Nationalist youth corps and study law. After the Communist takeover, he never saw his family again: They were killed during the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge, the Communist regime that massacred up to 3 million people in the 1970s. A woman Lily has known her whole life as "California Grandma" was Gonggong's sister, the sole survivor, who lost her husband and twin sons. Lily's mother was sent as a teenager to live with California Grandma in Los Angeles, effectively given away by Gonggong to replace his sister's dead children. When Lily presses for more, her mother insists the history "doesn't have anything to do with" Lily.

Lily also recalls a pivotal childhood memory: the night her older sister, Jasmine, went missing after threatening suicide. While Lily and her younger sister, Flora, huddled on the stairs, Gonggong told them Jasmine was a good girl going through a hard time and held them until she was brought home safely. The memory crystallizes what Lily has lost: a steady, loving presence she never fully knew.

To survive her remaining weeks, Lily seeks out public spaces, especially the National Concert Hall, where she attends performances nightly. At a Liszt recital, lightheaded from skipping meals, she feels her consciousness leave her body, riding the music into a space beyond language. A typhoon forces Lily and Anna back into the apartment, and the enforced proximity softens their rift. They eat instant ramen by candlelight and laugh. Anna reveals JC is now dating Margrit, a German classmate who broke off her engagement. The tension between them dissolves.

In her final week, Lily delivers her thousand-character final presentation on how language shapes identity. She tells the audience she was always ashamed of her Chinese self for being too inarticulate and wanted to wait until that self caught up before using it with her grandfather, but she was not fast enough. Teacher Sun asks: If Lily could have one last conversation with Gonggong, what would she ask? The novel then presents Lily's unanswerable questions as an interlude, followed by a third-person vignette narrating the arc of Gonggong's life, from his departure from Cambodia through war, famine, and loss, ending with his recognition that though his Americanized granddaughters are happy, "they were not his."

On her last day, Lily takes the exit exam and discovers she can now comprehend the passage that defeated her on the entrance test: a humorous letter about a storm, not a thief. At her gate, she spots the Harvard girl and MIT boy from her outbound flight, discussing how to maintain their Chinese. Lily reflects that for many students, Taiwan may become only an anecdote. She hopes they had a good summer.