R.F. Kuang or Rebecca F. Kuang has something for everybody. Her fantasy isn’t really my cup of tea, but THIS however pries open my heart valves and nestles deep inside. 

Third culture kids live with this perpetual loneliness, a side effect of being an outsider of their parents culture. Never fully accepted. Never enough.

When an author comes along and puts these feelings into words, sentences and scenarios, it feels like understanding, and that feels like home. One it’s difficult to find out there in the world. It’s a rare thing when you find your type of people that understand what it really feels like. It creates a unique bond. And I bonded with this book.

In Kuang’s latest we travel alongside Lily Chen, an American-Chinese Yale student going to Taipei for an intensive Mandarin language program.

I don’t think anybody who hasn’t lived this experience can understand how the diaspora identity you are raised with doesn’t translate to native when you arrive in the country of your parents. The natives can spot you in a second and reject you faster than you can utter a word with a wrong accent. It’s heartbreaking, but difficult to put into words because there’s no real term or place for it. It’s not universally understood and it’s still a new phenomenon. The closest I’ve ever heard it explained is through the portuguese “Saudade”. A deep emotional melancholy or a longing for something that’s no longer there. Except in the third culture kids case, it may have never even been there. We might not have even been to these places or met our native family before. 

I don’t expect everyone to understand it, or even enjoy this. This one feels like it’s for a specific type of audience, and I am smack in the middle of that demographic. If you have no interest in the mundane emotions of a young adult going abroad and struggling to connect with herself let alone the rest of it – culture, family, friends, romantic entaglements, and school, then maybe skip this one.

But for me, it was everything. ❤