Blog

Nothing here is invented in the fantastical sense. Lily is a Yale student spending ten weeks at an intensive Mandarin programme at National Taiwan University, hoping fluency will bring her closer to grandparents in mainland China. The curriculum is punishing, the summer heat worse. Her roommate Anna sees through her almost immediately, clocking that Lily is frightened of being recognised for what she is, a foreigner breaking rules nobody has written down. An ill-judged trip to the hot springs with a boy she hardly knows sets her classmates gossiping. Then her grandfather dies, and the questions she had been saving become unanswerable.