NEW YORK \u2013 Bestselling author R.F. Kuang has grown up on the page.<\/p>\n
HarperCollins bought her debut novel, \u201cThe Poppy War,\u201d on her 20th birthday. Just before her 27th, with four bestsellers under her belt, she published \u201cYellowface,\u201d a scathing satire of the publishing industry. Her last novel, \u201cKatabasis,\u201d followed two PhD students as Kuang herself pursued a PhD at Yale.<\/p>\n
Now 30, it would seem logical that Kuang\u2019s next book would tackle this new decade. But the death of her grandfather and a new chapter as a professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts prompted Kuang to instead look back.<\/p>\n
\u201cTaipei Story\u201d (out now from William Morrow) follows Lily Chen, a Chinese American college student studying at a rigorous summer language intensive in Taipei. She\u2019s already struggling with her grueling coursework, roommate tension, campus gossip and cultural connection when her grandfather dies. It\u2019s deeply personal material to Kuang. It\u2019s also the first time there\u2019s been this large of an age gap between her and her protagonist.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoing back and writing a coming-of-age is my experiment in having an extremely flawed, blinkered, immature main character who has so many wrong assumptions \u2013 assumptions that I once held about language and identity and her relationship with her family,\u201d Kuang tells USA Today.<\/p>\n
Mining grief<\/p>\n
for \u2018Taipei Story\u2019<\/p>\n
Kuang was much closer to her grandfather than the strained relationship in the book. But like Lily, she was studying Chinese at the time in an effort to reconnect with her extended family. The outline took shape during a \u201cstrange, sad summer in Taipei,\u201d mourning and wandering tourist attractions feeling \u201cso alienated\u201d from everything.<\/p>\n
Months later, she made sense of that grief in fiction. What if she had experienced this when she was younger? She asked how would someone who is \u201cmore unsure about her relationship with her family, her relationship with Chineseness and where she belongs in the world\u201d cope with the loss?<\/p>\n
Lily\u2019s \u201cgood student\u201d mentality is her coping mechanism to avoid emotional turmoil at home, whether that be her sister\u2019s mental health crises, her grandfather\u2019s death or social exile on campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou also have to face your demons head-on, and for a while when I was grieving, I was also like, \u2018If I can just have enough mental discipline not to think about it and do my life, I\u2019m going to be OK,\u2019 \u201d Kuang says. \u201cI just felt worse and worse until I also had to face it head-on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ever the language scholar, she also couldn\u2019t stop thinking about how weird people can be when they talk about grief.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody is reduced to these really perfectly phrased sentiments of care: I\u2019m thinking of you; I\u2019m so sorry for your loss; Please let me know if there\u2019s anything we can do for you in this time. Words that mean nothing,\u201d Kuang says. \u201cWhen I was grieving, I was like, I wish somebody would say something offensive to me. I wish somebody would crack a joke because then it lets you see the absurdity and ridiculousness of it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why even though \u201cTaipei Story\u201d is Kuang\u2019s most raw writing yet, it\u2019s ultimately a satire. Even when she\u2019s bleeding onto the page, she says she grounds it with \u201cabsurdist, silly, humorous undertone,\u201d poking fun at study abroad students and tourists.<\/p>\n
Satirizing the study abroad experience<\/p>\n
I had a teacher who started the first day of 10th grade telling us the word \u201csophomore\u201d meant \u201cwise fool.\u201d Lily heads to her language immersion program as a rising sophomore \u2013 ignorant, immature and a little arrogant. On one particularly frustrating afternoon, Lily laments to her teacher that she\u2019s just not getting it. She sounds like an idiot. Her teacher responds, \u201cYou have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking back on her own career, Kuang sometimes feels like her weaknesses are forever crystallized in print. After all, she grew up in front of her readers. It\u2019s cathartic to let her protagonist make mistakes, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I went through that emotional shift (of becoming a professor), I also got a lot more comfortable being wrong on the page. I think in a lot of my earlier work, there is this desperate need to prove I\u2019ve learned about these issues, \u2018I figured it out\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019m right about this and here\u2019s why,\u2019 \u201d Kuang says. \u201cBut as a reader, I enjoy when there\u2019s complexity and ambiguity on a page when the characters are flat out wrong or they have exaggerated or ridiculous interpretations of the world and the author is not trying to prove \u2018Oh, but trust me, I know what\u2019s going on\u2019 but rather allow the characters to exist in their mess and to put their blind spots and their vulnerabilities all out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baked into poignant emotional observations are cringeworthy comments from the students, their mythologies about Taiwan, arrogance, immaturity and privilege. Lily has her own ignorant views on the China-Taiwan relationship. Kuang is content to let her protagonist be young and naive and says as much in an author\u2019s note, with disclaimers about mistranslations (purposeful) and modern Taiwanese history and identity (reading recommendations for more nuanced learning).<\/p>\n
\u201cI do also find that satire is most effective when you\u2019re not preaching from a place of superiority to everybody else and sort of establishing that I know better and the rest of you are idiots. Satire is most effective when it\u2019s turned inward and really scrutinizing communities that you are a part of and behaviors that you\u2019ve taken part in,\u201d Kuang says. \u201cSo when I do my satire of Lily\u2019s blinkered interpretations of the world, I\u2019m reaching back to when I was a teenager and learning all of this for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n
One political undertone sparked controversy in the months leading up to the book\u2019s on-sale date. After early copies went out this spring, Kuang faced backlash on social media for including an Israeli character. Featured in two pages, the unnamed character is a \u201cbig deal\u201d pianist invited to the National Concert Hall. Lily is moved by his performance. The mention of Israel led to calls for boycotts and Goodreads review bombing, criticizing Kuang for a \u201csympathetic\u201d portrayal of an Israeli amid the war in Gaza.<\/p>\n
Kuang is aware of the controversy, and though she typically doesn\u2019t want to tell readers how to interpret her work, she says \u201cthat is just not how the scene functions\u201d in the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe depictions of the book are based on notes that I took when I was there. I was trying to give a realistic depiction of uncomfortable situations. There are many deeply uncomfortable and tough details in the book that Lily doesn\u2019t really know what to do with. I think that\u2019s what good art should do,\u201d Kuang says. \u201cThe scene raises a lot of uncomfortable questions about nationalist interpolations and the geopolitics that underwrite even something that seems so simple in concerts and which musicians get invited, how they are received, how different people move through the world. The book is asking or inviting the readers in to notice what is going on for themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I\u2019ve gotten older as a writer, I\u2019m also more comfortable moving away from a more didactic, desperate need to prove I know what\u2019s going on \u2026 and rather lean into trusting my readers more and inviting them to be like, \u2018This is a portrayal of something that I have noticed. What do you think about it?\u2019 The risk of that is somebody runs away with the total opposite conclusion of what you\u2019re putting on the page, but all you can do as an artist is do your best and trust readers to come to a scene with attention and care.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2013 Bestselling author R.F. Kuang has grown up on the page. HarperCollins bought her debut novel,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":854002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":["post-854001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}