Read an Excerpt From R. F. Kuang’s TAIPEI STORY

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 deep...