'' TAIPEI STORY " : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

“Taipei Story,” R.F. Kuang’s seventh book in eight years, is about an American student in Taiwan.

TAIPEI STORY : BY R.F. KUANG. ' Notes from a lonely summer.' : Midway through R.F. Kuang's  2022 historical fantasy epic, '' Babel,'' on the eve of the first Opium War, the hero Robin Swift returns to Canton, China, the city of his birth and his mother's death - on a mission for the British Empire.

A student at Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, Robin is tasked with interpreting for an English opium trader in his condescending negotiations with the Chinese.

Burning with shame for his complicity in the white man's unbridled racism and greed, Robin storms out into downtown Canton in search of the shantytown where he grew up, and finds in its place a world he does not recognize :

A row of neatly built shops, offices, a dingy opium den where men sprawl in a stupor, moths agog, numb.

''Yes this was where home should have been,'' he thinks, but all he sees is the decay of modernity.

Kuang's latest book, '' Taipei Story,'' inverts this tragic, climactic scene of homecoming into an entire novel set in the present day, in which the Chinese-born college student Lily Chen returns not to her native Guangzhou [ a.k.a Canton] but to Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, which is more hospitable to her American passport and doesn't require downloading a VPN.

She's there not to translate her first language but to learn it; like the hordes of her fellow students making the same study-abroad pilgrimage, she is not a tool of empire but a byproduct of it.

Raised in Boston since childhood, Lily is spending the summer after her freshman year at Yale in an intensive Mandarin language program at National Taiwan University in what she semi-ironically calls '' a-coming-of-age journey to reconnect with my culture.''

But what is her culture, exactly, and what is Taiwan's ? Where does this small, humid island fit within modern Chinese history and identity and with the geopolitical order of Asia and the West?

Most pertinent : Can being here bring Lily any closer to knowing the people she loves - here in a land where none of them have ever been?

!WOW! thanks Lauren Christensen.