Each one of her novels presents a different setting and dynamic, but her oeuvre is unified by careful thought, sharp style, and an uncanny ability to make the pages want to turn. Taipei Story, her seventh book since 2018, is about Lily, a college freshman spending a summer abroad in Taiwan to learn Mandarin. She struggles with assimilation, her roommate, Anna, her internet-famous classmate, JC, her self-perception, and the death of her grandfather.
Kuang and I spoke earlier this month—she is as smart in person as she is on the page, funny, insightful, and extremely curious. An edited version of our conversation follows: Adam Dalva: Your book activates so much nostalgia—of course I didn’t have Lily’s exact experience, but I do remember the alienation of being a college student abroad and struggling with both my personal life and a new language. Were you thinking about the way that we look back at this sort of time and say, “Oh my God, what was I doing?” R.F.
Kuang: I was very excited to write a protagonist who was so much younger than me, because up until this point all of my characters have been aging as I age. I started writing the Poppy War trilogy when I was a teenager, and everyone’s a teenager. In Babel, they’re undergrads.
In Katabasis, they are PhD students. I just turned 30 this year, and I went back a decade and wrote somebody on the cusp of adulthood. And she’s so book smart, but so amazingly stupid.
Language is something that is practiced and learned and something that you can be awful at, and also something that you can get better at. But the only way that you get better is by making mistakes. It’s not from a position of elder arrogance.
When I was a younger writer, I was so nervous about my reader misinterpreting my work or drawing the wrong conclusions about what I believed or my level of expertise, and I tried to show my work on the page. Now I would rather be visibly struggling to learn new material and wrestle with difficult concepts than to be so rigidly attached to an identity of being totally prepared and correct at every turn. I’m messy and the character is messy and we learn a lot more from our mistakes than from received textbook beliefs.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
