College freshman Lily Chen heads to Taipei for a summer Chinese language intensive. Having only retained the Chinese she spoke before leaving the mainland for California when she was four, she hopes to both improve her skills and get closer to the heritage that never really felt like hers. It’s a grueling and isolating experience — and when her grandfather dies in Guangzhou and she is unable to attend because she hadn’t procured a mainland visa, she achieves a whole new level of reflection about what heritage and culture really mean to the emigre.
What could be a straightforward coming-of-age story becomes something else completely in the hands of the stunningly talented Kuang who layers meticulously detailed observations with deep and evolving reflection and multi-dimensional insights. We learn about Chinese culture, politics, and history from the subjective viewpoint of our shy, thoughtful, possibly overly analytic young woman. Following her train of thought is half the fun of taking in all that she learns from the experience — all coalescing into the gestalt that is an individual.
The story spans personal experiences (some so honest as to be cringeworthy for me) as well as uncovering some fairly horrific stories from her Chinese ancestors (think Khmer Rouge) — stories nobody had ever told before. What parts of history do you integrate and what parts better left alone? I also loved the focus on linguistics — obviously an intense interest of the author. She goes into just the right amount of detail about how language affects our thinking, how difficult it is to communicate anything even slightly complex without the grammar, vocabulary, and structure available to native speakers, and how she worked to reprogram her brain to be able to speak and read more or less seamlessly.
This is billed as a novel but it felt like an incredibly well-written memoir to me. In any case, I enjoyed every minute of it!
Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on September 8th, 2026.
Books to look forward to ... 