Andreea’s Reviews > Taipei Story > Status Update

"We ordered by marking up a laminated menu with felt-tip erasable markers. We could get any kind of broth, any variety of proteins we wanted, for less than five US dollars each. We picked four hot pot sets: the tomato broth, the wild mushroom broth, the pumpkin broth, and the seafood special." Howwww is this relevant to this specific story? Why didn't she just write a travel book if that's what she wanted?

Didn't Kuang teach in a similar program as the one she describes there? Also the amount of em dashes in this book is so overwhelming, I don't think I've ever been quite this aware of an em dash

“I was starting to get advertisements in my inbox—it seemed that my presence in Taipei had put me on some mailing list that targeted bilingual undergraduates. The qualifications were suspiciously lax. You didn’t have to have special training in teaching English. You didn’t even have to have a bachelor’s degree—undergraduates could apply to teach at the summer programs”

"They killed people to make up their execution quotas. Sometimes they killed people for no reason at all; just the fun of it, because the blade was already moving, and it might as well find something to cut." Kuang keeps burying fantastic sentences in otherwise trite writing. This whole paragraph is a dream to read, but the book it's in doesn't deserve it

Less than half of book to go and only now what was promised comes into play. Curiouser and curiouser!

"We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves." This is a funny line but it doesn't do anything for the paragraph it's in and doesn't fit into the text it's in neither. I would send four laughing emojis to a friend if they sent me a screenshot of this as a tweet though. This is how most of the book is going so far, it's all quite boring and empty!

This is v odd, I DNF Kuang's last novel because I didn't click with the plot and style, but it at least sounded like it was written by the same Kuang who wrote Babel while trying something different, but this novel doesn't sound anything like her, it's as if she wasn't in the room when this was written, what is this????

"You all seem very attentive, very diligent.”
We beamed. We were, at the end of the day, good immigrant daughters.