At just 30, Rebecca F Kuang is already about as accomplished as it’s possible to get. The Guangzhou-born, Dallas-raised author came to prominence with the trilogy, a series of epic fantasy novels inspired by 20th-century Chinese military history, which she began while still an undergraduate at Georgetown University. Since then, she’s obtained an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge, an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford, and is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Somehow, alongside all this, she’s also found time to write four other books: dark academia staples and ; the viral, unputdownable satire ; and now her latest and most personal work yet, .
A coming-of-age campus novel set in the Taiwanese capital, this new book follows Lily, a Chinese-American freshman at Yale, who crosses the ocean for an intensive summer language programme. She’s determined to improve her Mandarin and connect with her inherited culture, something she has never fully explored. She immerses herself in the city, learns more about its history, wanders its landmarks and samples its delicacies. She develops a codependent friendship with her roommate, Anna, before it splinters into a rivalry over JC, a boy in their programme. And her coursework is demanding – back in the US, the language of her parents felt like it came to her more naturally, at least more so than her peers. But here, there are misunderstandings, mistranslations and a daily reminder of how little she actually knows.
Then comes an unfathomable loss: the sudden death of her grandfather in Guangzhou. He was a man with whom Lily never felt fully confident communicating, and visa issues keep her from attending his funeral. It feels like a door has closed – the opportunity to improve her language skills and, by doing so, forge a new kind of relationship with him, now gone forever. Why had she waited so long to ask him about his life? And what will now happen to all that forgotten, untapped family history?
For Kuang, this story came out of her own struggles with grief and navigation of her own Chineseness. On a visit to London, in the cosy, low-lit parlour of The Zetter Clerkenwell, she is characteristically thoughtful, dressed in a dark green ruffled blouse and black miniskirt, with her distinctive feathery fringe and gold nose ring in place. Over a pot of tea, she discusses her relationship with the city of Taipei, a planned move to London, managing anxiety during book tours, and the expansive, ambitious novel she’ll be writing next.
Can you tell me about the origins of ?
Three years ago, I was doing an intensive language programme, very much like Lily’s, in Taipei, and I found out that my grandfather had suddenly passed away. He hadn’t been sick. He fell. It was very abrupt. I was a lot closer to my grandfather than Lily was to hers, and it hit my whole family really hard.
What I was really struggling with when I was grieving was the regret and shame at myself for not taking the opportunity, when he was still with us and when we had the time, to sit down with him and learn everything I could about his life. I’d always had these big dreams of a project where I would record him and really understand him and everything he’d been through. But I kept putting off that conversation because I was still so embarrassed at the state of my own Chinese. Even after I became proficient and was doing academic research in Chinese, I still felt like I didn’t have the nuances that I wanted to be able to have a conversation like [the one we’re having now]. I thought: “One day, maybe.” And that day never came.
So, I wanted to write into those really awful feelings of grief and loss and inadequacy and shame. I think these are feelings that people in the diaspora carry around with them all the time. But I wanted to write it as a coming-of-age story, because I wanted to explore how all of this could have felt even more extreme. Going through this when I was almost 30 was really different, because I had a good support system. We’d been through loss before. But I wanted to think about what it’d be like if that was the first loss you ever went through, and you were alone on the other side of the world, and 19, and completely clueless about how to deal with grief. It didn’t really come together as a novel for me until a year or two after my grandfather passed, because the loss was so immediate. But time passes, and you get some distance and perspective, and that’s when I was able to take my visceral reactions and shape them into a story.
The city of Taipei is so unique, and also so central to this novel. What’s your favourite thing about it, and what should people do there if they have 48 hours to explore?
There is a very set first-time-in-Taipei tourist circuit, but that doesn’t make it any less magical. I like how bikeable it is as a city. I biked everywhere that summer. I’d say, try the beef noodle soup. If you’re vegan like me, there are incredible vegan versions of that as well. Have dim sum. Go to all the night markets. There’s nowhere for street eating like Taipei. And climb every mountain you can. I didn’t have time to go south when I was in Taipei, but you can take the train to places where the hiking is even better.
is about grief but it’s also, at points, a campus comedy. What part of the story was the hardest to get right?
I think the technical challenge I posed for myself was: how do you write a book without an antagonist? A book where nobody is acting out of malice? Because when you’re going through undergraduate drama, when you’ve got teenage angst, and the petty interactions that Lily and her roommate Anna have, and their drama with JC… I remember, when you’re in the middle of it, it feels like life and death [laughs]. And it really feels like the other person is the devil. It’s tough for Lily, and it happens at the same time as her grandfather’s passing. But, from the outside, it’s like: “You’re acting very dramatic!” So, it’s a tightrope walk between [acknowledging that and] representing how devastating these conflicts feel when you are that age. I’m advantageously positioned right now to do that because I still remember very vividly what it was like to be an undergrad, but now I’m a teacher. I work with undergrads and I’ve never felt so acutely the gap of age between us [laughs]. I’m able to look back and think, “Wow, I’m really not at that point in my life anymore.”
As you’ve been talking to more people about the book, what conversations have come up that have surprised you?
I’ve found it really rewarding to talk about how grief affects language, and how problems of translation and communication when you’re learning a new language overlap in interesting ways with how you navigate language when you’ve suffered loss. Because, in both cases, I think the default is to hide in silence. When you’re learning a new language and it’s awkward and embarrassing and you feel like you’re humiliating yourself every time you open your mouth, it’s so much safer to remain quiet until you’re perfectly certain what you want to say. And when people are grieving as well, I think we have this culture where people default to silence, because they’re so scared of causing offence.
Before I’d known significant personal loss, I had friends [who’d lost family members]. I was like, “I really want to be there for them, but I don’t want to piss them off.” I’d be afraid to text them casual things about pop culture or songs or movies, because I was like, “Is this really disrespectful?” I thought the best way to meet the seriousness of the moment was just this sombre silence. It wasn’t until I went through it that I realised that’s the worst thing, because it feels like everybody’s abandoned you. You’re desperate for people to make awkward jokes and you’re desperate to laugh at it. It’s a gift if somebody says something offensive, just because it’s broken through that.
And it’s also a large part of political discourse now, and existing online – like saying the exact correct thing at every moment rather than embracing messiness and laughing, as opposed to pointing fingers all the time, and just offering everybody the grace to make mistakes, because you recognise that mistakes are the only ways that you take any risk discursively and put yourself out there. Lily is so judgemental and nervous about putting a foot wrong. Then, when everything falls apart around her, she has the looseness and openness to have genuine encounters with other people and with the language, because she’s like, “It doesn’t matter. I am going to fail in a million different ways and I will own all of these failures of communication.”
You’ve worked across so many genres. Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’d like to do?
I want to go back to historical fantasy, but via David Mitchell. He’s one of my favourite authors. is very inspirational to me – it’s six different timelines, genres, points of view, and it all adds up to this grand tapestry about hope and resistance. I remember reading it for the first time in college and just being dazzled by the sheer scope and inventiveness. I think it’s a little similar to Anthony Doerr’s , in that it’s braided narratives across centuries. I did my undergraduate training as a historian, and I think I’ve always been so intimidated by the idea of trying to capture a century, and now I’m like, I just have to push myself to try. So now I’m working on a fantasy novel that starts in the late 19th century and ends in the late 20th century, and it’s across countries and continents and political movements and art forms. It’s terrifying to work on, but I think that is the best space to be in, working on something that feels just a little bit out of your grasp.
That sounds very exciting. I also wanted to ask you what you’re reading right now.
I just started John Crowley’s . I’m in love with the prose already. And I just finished Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It’s fucking hilarious. It’s like Anne of Green Gables for adults. My younger sister and I read a lot of tart, funny books that are comedies of manners. Growing up, as two little Chinese girls in Dallas, for whatever reason, our favourite genre was archly funny novels about Victorian heroines judging each other. Oh, and I’m reading the , because I saw , and I was like, I have to know more about Agamemnon. What would drive a man to do that and what are the consequences? I find it even richer and more deranged and larger-than-life than itself.
Will you get a chance to see at the Bridge Theatre or at the National Theatre while you’re in London?
I don’t think we’ll have time on this trip, but I’m moving to London in the fall of 2029, so I’m really excited to be in a city with a proper theatre scene. My husband is starting as a lecturer at UCL, so we’ll be pinging back and forth between London and Boston for the next few years. I have a skewed perspective of London, because I mostly come here for book stuff, but we’ve been exploring Bloomsbury, and I recently went to Hampstead Heath for the first time and to Kew Gardens. London is so big and depending on what area I’m in, it’s like a whole new world opens up. I’m also excited to try all the vegan restaurants.
And finally, what’s the secret to surviving a very long book tour?
I don’t know [laughs]. You tell me. I actually had really bad anxiety before my last book tour, for . I was like, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be in public.” I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at public speaking, but it’s not the part of the job that I enjoy. We write books because we like to be alone.
So, I learned a lot of coping mechanisms, because it got so bad that I had to go see a therapist about it. I was getting panic attacks, I was vomiting all the time. We were like, let’s think about ways to make this survivable. For me, that’s been visual art. I carry a sketchbook around and I just tune everything out and draw a lot. I go on runs whenever I get to a new city. I also think I finally learned to be kinder to myself about not getting all the rest of my work done when I’m touring. I used to be like, touring means evening activities, so I should also be working on my dissertation and finishing the novel draft. Now I’m like, actually, touring is a full-time job and I should treat it as such. So, I’m taking all of that into this. There will be a day when there are no more tour stops. I used to think that way about exams. One day, it’ll be done. And that’s how I’m thinking about this tour [laughs].
Taipei Story By Rebecca F Kuang
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Taipei Story (The Borough Press) is out 8 September. Rebecca F Kuang has curated and will participate in a panel on The Future of Education at the Southbank Centre’s Letters To The Future weekend (18-20 September), part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th year. Tickets are available via the Southbank Centre website.