R. F. Kuang is the bestselling author of Yellowface, The Poppy War, and Babel, to name a few, and today is the publication day for her newest novel: Taipei Story, out from William Morrow. Check out an excerpt below. (Photo credit: Toby Madden.)

Was I an Ugly Human Being?

I had just read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in a writing seminar that spring. It had made a great impression on me then, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it now. A tourist is an ugly human being, wrote Kincaid. An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

But Kincaid was writing about British visitors to Antigua. By you, she meant the white European tourist descended from the enslaver. Our situation was different, surely. We did not have a colonial relationship with this place, did we? We had not come to gawk at natives, or dine at country clubs, or solicit the island girls, or enjoy private beaches inaccessible to the locals. We had come here to learn—to form a deeper relationship with this place. Surely Kincaid did not mean us.

But none of us were Taiwanese. None of us had family here. Most of us were here only because Taiwan right then was friendlier to American travelers than mainland China was, or we would have gone to Beijing, and in fact this was a source of great contention with my parents—that I had chosen the program farther from my extended family because I wanted to go where all my friends were going and I didn’t want to bother with downloading a VPN. I could go see my grandparents any other summer. I wanted to become Chinese here, on my own terms. The anonymity was the point—but that meant this place had nothing to do with me, that no cradle of belonging justified my missteps.

All this passed through my head every time we did something wrong, even by accident: when we failed to queue along the lines marked on the subway platforms; when we spilled bubble tea in the subway cars, which clearly prohibited eating or drinking; when we stood on the wrong sides of the escalators, blocking commuters racing for their trains; when we dropped plastic spoons, straw wrappers, and receipts on the ground and did not pick them up; when we took too long to order because we couldn’t read the menus; when we held up the line at the tofu pudding counter because we didn’t understand that the word for “spoon” here was 湯匙, not 勺子; when we stepped out in front of bicycles and mopeds without looking, and drivers swerved cursing around us. Did the locals tolerate us? Did they despise us? Did they think about us at all?

Excerpted from the book Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang. Copyright © 2026 by R.F. Kuang. From William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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