Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A Chinese American college student heads to Taiwan for a summer abroad. Lily Chen’s Chinese has always been an embarrassment—good enough that she can order in restaurants, but not fluent enough for talking to her grandparents in a meaningful way. In a bid to feel more confident, Lily has signed up for a summer of intensive language study in Taiwan, where she’ll finally learn to speak, fit in, and be Chinese enough. Things do not go according to plan, of course, because—as Lily is about to find out—identity is much more complicated than a list of vocabulary words. Once again, Kuang uses a deeply flawed protagonist to examine a larger issue, in this case the uncertainty of the Chinese diaspora as it searches for a motherland that can’t be found. Lily’s brash narration takes up this case easily enough, laying out how different the Chinese American experience is from one community to another and how impossible identity is to pin down—Kuang is arguing that there’s no single Chinese American way of being, no archetypal Chinese American story. Lily’s experiences and emotional journey are deeply real and often uncomfortable; her narrative flits between rumination on the nuances of language and what’s lost in translation, worries about how others perceive her, and where to go for lunch. Her long-held issues with her identity aren’t going to be transformed in just one summer, but they’re very real and relatable. As ever, Kuang raises uncomfortable questions about history, ethnicity, and identity and leaves it for readers to determine whether Lily has come to the right conclusions and how much growing up she still has left to do. A visceral exploration of language as a bridge and a barrier. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.