Lily is a Chinese-American student who just finished her freshman year at Yale. She plans to spend the summer at an intensive language program in Taipei, where she hopes she’ll be able to better communicate in the language of her heritage. While she knows some Chinese, she really wants to become fluent.
Students from all over the world attend this and similar programs. But there are several of her fellow students from Yale in attendance as well, and she’s even rooming with someone she knows. They quickly immerse themselves in Chinese culture, food, and tourist attractions, and revel in the idea of speaking only Chinese while on campus for classes.
But Lily quickly realizes the divide between understanding a language and being able to communicate fully in it. It’s so much more than knowing how to order food or learning idioms. The difficulty of her classes, coupled with tensions with her roommate, leave her feeling alone and adrift.
She learns that her maternal grandfather, who lives in mainland China, has died. She remembers seeing her grandparents when she was younger, but their relationship slowly devolved into periodic phone calls where very little of substance was discussed. As she grieves this loss, she wonders about her grandparents’ lives, asking questions that no one can really answer.
The idea of trying to find your cultural identity when you feel alone is a powerful one. Unfortunately, I felt like the book dwelled far too much on facts about Chinese language, culture, and history, and not enough on Lily’s story. And I didn’t feel that she evolved much throughout the book. Bummer.
