Taipei Story is a book that is going to stay with me for a long time.

On the surface, it’s a very straightforward and simple story. Lily grows up in America to Chinese parents and spend her summer at a language institute in Taipei when she learns about the death of her grandfather. And yet within this premise, RFK says so much about language and translation, loneliness, grief, self discovery, family, trauma, colonization, and what it means to grow up in a place and culture so different from the one of your parents and grandparents. I could really relate to Lily’s realization that no matter how much she tries, she will never be able to fully reclaim the language and the culture that her family left behind - and the alternating existential dread and acceptance Lily feels when she considers that fact.

This book is very different from RFK’s other work - it is much quieter and focuses on Lily’s interiority. If RFK’s previous work was too didactic, *Taipei story takes a more subtle approach. Lily’s realizations and transformation doesn’t happen in moments of great drama or high stakes. Instead they occur in the small moments: while Lily is reading the street signs in Taipei, chatting with American tourists, or sitting alone in a concert hall. I loved being in Lily’s head. So much of her narration felt so familiar to 19 year old KatieV. I had to laugh at how well RFK nailed the tone of someone who is still very much a child but thinks they are more worldly and enlightened than they really are.

And RFK did a great job of setting up little moments early in the book that lead to narrative payoff at the end of the story. Taipei Story is a short book and RFK uses every word with purpose. I think this is some of RFK’s strongest prose she’s written to date.

The barometer for a truly good book: I cried at the end of Taipei Story and I’m tearing up just thinking about it now. Lily’s journey really spoke to me and I think most people will find a piece of themselves in Lily.

Do you ever read a book that feels like it was written for you specifically? Yeah that’s how I felt about this book. (This review is gonna be a bit long and get a bit personal)

Gift economies and the practice of creating community has been on the forefront of my mind over the last year and a half. I was so fortunate to spend the last year in a grad program that had its cornerstone in participatory methods and really centered community. We were there to learn not just academically but also to learn from one another in a uniquely global setting (with course mates representing 62 countries!). As I head back for graduation in few weeks, this book feels especially timely. I’m so excited to be back with the community that gave me so much and loved me so freely and I want them to know how much that love and friendship really meant to me. As RWK says, their gifts made me want to keep giving, both directly and indirectly.

So many parts of this book recalled my specific experiences. When RWK talks about the sound of happy voices in the berry patch, I thought of the time my friend I were on a walk and discovered wild cherries in our local park. We picked and ate so many cherries and then spent the whole rest of the afternoon giggling and running around and just feeing so much joy. It truly was a gift that nature gave us and the berries were the sweetest I have ever tasted. And later that summer, a group of friends and I went blackberry picking in the fields behind our campus. The berry stained hands of my friends in the light of the late afternoon sun is forever etched in my memory. We made jam together and made sure to leave the extra jars in the study space for anyone to partake. And the study space always had plenty of communal food - on any given day you could find snacks or home baked treats left out for anyone to enjoy.

Even academically the messages in this book reflected my learning. RWK mentions Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics - One of my course mates created a reading group where each week we read one chapter of Doughnut Economics and one person would volunteer to lead a lunchtime discussion about the main takeaways. Not only was it a great way to learn the material, but it also was such a gift that so many of my peers volunteered their time to create a space for reflection and discussion.

The passages in the Serviceberry that talked about manufactured scarcity reflected specific conversations I had with professors, down to the examples of water and rainfall that RWK provides. And in my classes about political ecology, we discussed the problems with conservation programs that seek to quantify ecosystem services. RWK captured that whole class in a single paragraph: “there is no room in these equations for the…ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong. Where is the value of a butterfly whose species has prospered for millennia and lives nowhere else on the planet? There’s no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories.”

This book is powerful because of how concise it is. In a world that tries to tell you that changing systems is complex and difficult, RWK reminds you that building community is actually quite simple. Whether this is new information, or a familiar refrain, this book is a reminder that we can create the world we want to live in. We can create communities that prioritize reciprocity and care. We can center abundance.

All flourishing is mutual 💚

I really struggled with this book.

On the one hand, Bates takes a very intersectional look at the impact of emerging technologies, making it a point to highlight the unique, acute impacts for women of color and trans women. Her conclusions are also deeply tied to the ills of capitalism and how tech billionaires put their own profit above everything else. At one point she mentions how Microsoft says they are so transparent and progressive for enlisting hackathon participants to find bias in their AI models - but this just puts the burden of safeguarding onto (often) marginalized groups when it would cost Microsoft only pennies to invest in proper safeguarding from the beginning.

My main issue is that Bates's analysis is really limited to how AI and emerging technologies can cause people to embrace more sexist behaviors and attitudes. She doesn't really consider the other indirect gendered impacts of emerging tech. It is a glaring omission that Bates does not talk about the secondary impacts of AI at all in this book. She does not consider the gendered impacts of: 1. energy poverty driven by data center energy usage 2. climate impact from increasing demand for energy to power AI 3. water pollution from data centers 4. mass layoffs fueled by CEOs trying to enrich themselves by replacing people with AI 4. the fact that AI is made by stealing people's original work.

It also felt like Bates was unwilling to come down hard against AI usage. It really seems like the political moment that we are in that people are afraid that if they don't embrace AI they are going to "fall behind". And some of Bates's "solutions" feel really ineffective. I generally agree with her statement that we need to focus on addressing sexism in our broader society to prevent sexism from being hardwired into our technology - and that regulating tech is not enough when tech evolves so much faster than our policy making can keep up with. But then she softens this statement by only presenting solutions that have to do with the regulation and design of AI. At one point she says we can have chat bots police other chatbots and train them to be more feminist in their approaches! Im sorry but that is a ludicrous solution! That's literally fighting fire with fire. And I think (likely because Bates is not a tech researcher) that there wasn't clear differentiation between Gen AI and machine learning, they kinda blurred together in this book.

Maybe I'm the unrealistic one for wanting generative AI to get out of my life. But I struggle to see how we can regulate a better AI when the negative impacts are so glaring and so acutely harmful.