Taipei Story
Cut along the dashed lines and pass the cards around the table.
What is the first small thing you remember noticing as you started reading, a smell, a street, a dish, a bit of weather, that made you feel like you had landed somewhere?
Where were you reading most of this book, and did you ever get up mid-chapter to text someone in your family or go looking for a snack?
The book sits with the feeling of being a visitor in a place that is supposed to be yours. Have you ever felt that in a hometown, a relative's house, or a country you were told you came from, and what did it feel like in your body?
There is a specific loneliness in not having the right words in the right language. When has a language gap (or a generation gap) left you standing outside a conversation you wanted to be inside of?
What moment in the book comforted you rather than unsettled you, a meal, a kindness from a stranger, a quiet hour, and why did it land?
Families hand down history in fragments, half a sentence at dinner, a photo nobody explains. What fragment did your family hand you that you are still carrying around unfinished?
By the end you have watched someone try to make peace with a history she did not choose. Without giving anything away, what did the book leave you feeling about whether that kind of peace is even possible, and did you want something different for her?
If you could sit down with the narrator on her last night in Taipei and say one kind thing, no advice, just kindness, what would you say to her?