Genre: Young Adult, Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, Travel, Asian Literature

Synopsis:

When I landed as a teen in Taipei for a summer of Mandarin immersion, I was completely unprepared for what lay ahead. Chien Tan wasn’t just a language and cultural program. It was the notorious LOVEBOAT, though until then, I’d never heard of it. A thousand Chinese-American kids of immigrants, who’d spent the past ten years studying hard to get into college and living by their traditional family rules—now dropped off in a foreign land with zero supervision. 

There was a lot of sneaking out into humid nights to go dancing. Eating the best street food on the planet. Dating and breaking up and making up. 

Even falling in love. 

Somehow in the midst of all that craziness, we still managed to absorb some language and culture, too. I made lifelong friendships who turned into a network around the United States (my future husband, as it would turn out, attended Loveboat in an earlier summer). In that summer that can never be replicated, I connected with parts of myself I hadn’t allowed myself to embrace before. 

I wrote LOVEBOAT, TAIPEI to capture some of that journey. 

This novel is a romp—a story of repressed teens gone wild, and of discovering one’s identity in all its facets. Between these pages live and breathe a cast of over thirty Asian Americans. Though they share a cultural heritage and are from similarly high-achieving families, they are individuals—some funny, some quiet, some timid, some outrageous. But they are all diverse, all talented and all flawed in their own ways: 

Eighteen-year-old Ever Wong is working towards becoming a doctor, but nurses a secret passion to dance. 

Rick Woo is the Yale-bound, child prodigy bane of her existence. 

Boy-crazy Sophie Ha turns out to have more to her than meets the eye. 

And under sexy Xavier Yeh’s shell is buried a shameful secret he’ll never admit. 

Writing their stories as they navigate their cultures and search for their place in the world was one of the most difficult, rewarding experiences of my life. I hope that I’ve done them justice and that you find a small measure of yourself in their stories, too.