Rebecca F. Kuang returns!
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What is linguistic relativity and why does it matter for *Taipei Story*?
Rebecca, welcome to Water Stoves.
Thanks for having me.
We had a lovely chat back in Yellowface days. Um, but I'm really pleased to have a chance to speak face to face today about your new book, Taipei Story. Um, before we actually get into the book itself, you did an amazing explanation of something which is really quite crucial to this book, which is linguistic relativity. And honestly, it was one of the best things I've ever seen on the Instagram because you were so clear and concise and it was so fascinating. Without wanting to ask you to repeat the trick, I wondered if you could sort of really briefly explain to people what linguistic relativity is and I suppose why it's important to this story here.
Sure. So linguistic relativity um encompasses a bunch of theories that try to explain why The world feels different when we're speaking in a different language, or why we feel like our personalities are different, or that we encounter things differently. And really strong versions that argue for linguistic determinism argue that uh your entire perception of the world, the way you think about colors, for instance, or sounds or directions, uh are Hugely influenced by language. So if there are languages that are gendered versus languages that aren't, you might just irrevocably think of the world differently than somebody who doesn't speak that language. And basically nobody thinks that strong linguistic determinism is true anymore.
It turns out that there are a lot more things that are commensurate across languages, or that even if you didn't have this capability, You weren't used to thinking about it in your language. You can pick it up later on. Still, there's lots of good reasons for why languages might affect our experiences of the world. And one of them is the idea of conceptual metaphors. And that's basically arguing that different languages have different metaphors. Well, metaphors are ways of thinking about one thing in terms of another thing. So Metaphors are gonna embed and encode a lot of cultural norms, associations, um, values, uh ideologies. Um, and when you switch to another language, those metaphors might be entirely different.
So some examples in English are we think of time as money. Time is something that is finite, that you can spend and has unit values. So we say things like, I'm running out of time. This isn't worth my time.
How does Lily’s quest to improve her Chinese shape her identity in the novel?
I'm not spending my time on this. So that I think really reinforces a cultural mindset of productivity and also being afraid of wasting your time because you feel like you always have to be working. Another thing we do a lot of English a lot of in English is talk about ideas as living organisms that can germinate. So this idea Spread, this idea was born, this idea really flourished, ideas are like bacteria. Um and and we think of uh time and space in really specifically oriented ways. We think of the future as before us and the past as behind us. And the argument I'm making about conceptual metaphors is that these are contingent, they're not uh necessary to the concepts, they reflect culture. cultures and associations and ideas that we think are natural but aren't necessarily and might be totally upended when we switch to speaking another language.
So that is one explanation why you might feel like you're a different person when you're speaking Spanish versus say English.
You haven't seen me speak Spanish, it's not pretty. Um we will discover, I suppose, how that plays into this novel. Um, but before we get there, when I spoke to you last, I remember you saying that the period in your life, sort of 19 to 24, that five-year period, is such an important part of your life when you're sort of discovering your identity and expressing it and really sort of discovering who you are as a person. And that is exactly where we find Lily Chen, your protection. Protagonist at the beginning of this book. Can you tell, you know, prospective readers, I guess, who is Lily Chen at the beginning of this book? Where does she find herself?
Well, when I said that the ages between nineteen and twenty four are periods of massive change and upheaval, I was mostly saying that because that was the only reference point I had.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is linguistic relativity and why does it matter for *Taipei Story*?
0:00–2:32
2
How does Lily’s quest to improve her Chinese shape her identity in the novel?
2:32–5:48
3
Why does Lily feel trapped by rigid cultural assumptions and how does the story unravel them?
5:48–9:46
4
What role does the cramped Taipei flat play in Lily’s personal growth?
9:46–12:35
5
How does the novel explore grief, especially the sudden loss of Lily’s grandfather?
12:35–16:01
6
Why is the tension between diaspora expectations and family silence critical to Lily’s journey?
16:01–19:23
7
How do music and non‑linguistic communication help Lily break through her language crisis?
19:23–23:10
8
What message does Rebecca hope readers take away about making mistakes and connecting authentically?
23:10–25:37