R.F. Kuang’s new novel Taipei Story spent months at the center of a BookTok pile-on over a scene that barely exists. The book follows Lily Chen, a Chinese-American student studying abroad in Taipei hoping to reconnect with her cultural roots and perfect her Mandarin, only to find that bridging the gap between her Chinese heritage and American upbringing is harder than she expected. It’s an inner-monologue novel that toggles constantly between Lily’s mundane problems, boy trouble, mosquito bites, unbearable heat, and her running musings on colonialism and geopolitics. She notices the “ghosts of Japan everywhere,” remnants of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and wrestles with how Taiwan doesn’t fit the tidy “colonialism was bad” framework she learned in history class, since the island never experienced a clean “decolonial transition” and remains caught between Chinese and American influence. Kuang writes through Lily: “Taiwan had only ever been passed from occupier to occupier — indeed, to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, the Han Chinese themselves were occupiers. So who was I to say any occupier was better than the last?”
It’s against that backdrop, roughly three-quarters of the way through the book, that an unnamed Israeli pianist briefly appears. The reader gets almost nothing about him: it was “his first time in Taiwan,” and he was “a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.” Later, Lily notes that “the audience was not always as well behaved as they had been for the Israeli pianist. That had been a special occasion, it turned out. I rarely saw foreigners in the concert hall after that. Never again did I see a full house.” That’s the entirety of his presence in the book, a passing detail in a novel where the narrator has a running habit of identifying background characters by nationality throughout, “an Italian undergraduate,” “a German girl,” a “Hong Kong director.”
When an excerpt containing that scene leaked online in May, months before the book’s actual publication, it was enough to set off a real campaign. Social media critics accused Kuang, who has previously donated special editions of her books to Gaza humanitarian relief organizations, of “normalizing Israel” simply by depicting an Israeli character without hostility. The topic trended on BookTok, with some users organizing calls to cancel Taipei Story preorders and flood the book’s Goodreads page with one-star ratings, a tactic that explicitly violates Goodreads’ own guidelines against review-bombing. Kuang didn’t respond to any of it publicly for months.
Whatever you think of an author with Kuang’s politics, she’s been an outspoken supporter of BDS, withdrew from a UAE literary festival last year over the boycott movement, and has fundraised for Gaza relief, or of the people trying to torch her book over a two-page cameo from an unnamed pianist, it’s genuinely hard to take either side seriously here. Including a single, neutrally described Israeli character isn’t an endorsement of a government’s policy, and treating a “dour-faced man” who doesn’t even get a name as evidence of ideological wrongdoing says a lot more about the people organizing the boycott than it does about the actual book.
Kuang finally addressed the controversy last week, first in an interview with USA Today and then at a book tour stop at Sixth & I, a historic synagogue in Washington, D.C. Video of the appearance circulated on TikTok, and the Forward independently confirmed with her publisher that it accurately captured her remarks. “I want to read charitably the person who’d seen the words ‘Israeli pianist’ and immediately been so afraid that this book was condoning these practices,” Kuang said, without specifying what “these practices” referred to. “But the fact of the matter is that’s just not what that scene does. That’s not how it was intended, and that’s not how it reads.” She framed the scene as deliberately open-ended rather than a statement: “I instead wanted to invite the reader to ask questions about what’s going on in this scene, what is this character noticing based on what we know about where she comes from, in the position of an arrogant American study abroad student. This scene raises a lot of questions about who gets to move through the world, who is received in what ways, what are geopolitics that undergird something as innocent as a concert.”
That ambiguity has produced a grab-bag of fan theories online. Some readers have suggested the scene functions as “an allegory for the issue of watching Israeli occupation unfold.” Others read it instead as commentary on the outsized prestige foreign artists receive compared to Taiwanese ones, and by extension on which conflicts around the world command global attention and which don’t. Others just see it as one more instance of the narrator’s habit of tagging every side character by nationality, nothing more loaded than the German girl or the Hong Kong director getting the same treatment. Kuang isn’t confirming any single reading. She told USA Today she’s been deliberately moving away from more “didactic” storytelling in favor of leaving interpretation to the reader, adding: “The risk of that is somebody runs away with the total opposite conclusion of what you’re putting on the page.”
That risk is exactly what played out here, at scale, months before most of the people organizing the boycott had even read the finished novel. A neutrally written, unnamed background character became a referendum on an author’s politics, in a controversy that ends up saying a lot less about Taipei Story than about how little text it now takes to trigger a coordinated preorder cancellation and review-bombing campaign.
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