Language lessons: Taipei Story, by Rebecca Kuang, reviewed
Rebecca Kuang was quietly writing cult classics for years before she hit the best-seller lists with Babel, a Victorian fantasy based on colonialism and opium wars, and Yellowface, a deliciously dark story about literary plagiarism and the ego-smashing right hook that social media can administer. Then came Katabasis, skewering academia and the exploitation of naive students. The breadth of Kuang’s knowledge reflects her high-achieving CV, which takes in Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. Taipei Story explores her identity as a Chinese- American. It relates the experience of Lily, a Yale student attending an intensive summer course in Chinese language and culture in Taipei.
