Rebecca F Kuang: ‘I like to write to my friends in the style of Joan Didion’
Rebecca F Kuang, 27, is an American writer. She and her family emigrated to the US from Guangzhou, China, when she was four; she grew up in Dallas, Texas. Her first novel, The Poppy War, a grimdark fantasy with a plot drawn from elements of the second Sino-Japanese war, was published in 2018. Two sequels followed. A fourth novel, the bestselling Babel, set in 1830s England, came out in 2022. Kuang followed this with a controversial departure: Yellowface. A contemporary melodrama in which a white author steals the manuscript of a dead, far more successful Asian-American novelist and passes it off as her own, it wickedly satirises identity politics in the world of publishing. It comes out in paperback this month. Kuang has postgraduate degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and is currently a doctorate student at Yale.
Is it true that your agent cautioned against publishing Yellowface when you first told her about the idea?Yes, that’s true. She was a bit stunned, caught off guard. “I’m really worried it’s going to offend people,” she said. But I was convinced both by its strength as a story, and by what I was trying to say, so I asked her to get second reads from other people at her agency – and to her credit, she did. She really stuck her neck out.
Were you nervous as publication approached? It’s risky to bite the hand that feeds you.I might have been nervous if this had been my first book, but I’d been through the whole publishing cycle four times already. I’d got used to the idea that no matter what you say, some people will really resonate with it and love your work, and some people will think you’re absolute trash. There’s no perfect story that appeases everybody, and if there was, it would be so trite and boring and toothless, it wouldn’t be worth producing. I knew some reactions to this book would be polarised.
Yellowface has lots to say about identity politics, especially the notion that only certain people are allowed to write certain stories. What do you feel about this idea personally? Where does it leave the imagination?I think people should write about whatever they like. The role of the novelist is to imagine. If everyone only wrote from their own perspectives, we’d only ever write memoirs, autobiographies or autofiction. That would be very limiting. Many men have written about women very badly, but that’s an issue of craft, not biological qualification.
What about social media? Your narrator, June, is terrorised by publishing Twitter.Our relationship with social media is so extremist. I’d like not to have an Instagram account, but I like to see my friends wearing pretty dresses, and to stay connected with them. What has been really helpful for me is a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism. He encourages a digital purge, then a very selective bringing back into your life of the social media tools you think work for you. It broke my addiction entirely. I severely limit my Instagram time now.
And cancel culture? Does it exist? I find a lot of this so disingenuous.
The shape of an internet takedown would go something like this: somebody would err, and often there would be pretty genuine complaints about their conduct. But there’s also a really big spectrum of what counts [as bad behaviour]. It could be something quite egregious and harmful, and it could also be something as silly as misrecognising a breakfast cereal. We conflate all of these scales of harm. Anyway, someone would air this complaint, and then there would be a back and forth with that complaint, and then, very quickly, it would spread to the corners of the internet, and those with no stake in it at all would spread disinformation. Nobody would ever seem interested in the truth, or in reparations, or in genuinely understanding what happened. It’s so self-serving and frivolous.
Are you from a bookish family?My dad came to the US to study electoral engineering in grad school, and part of the way he taught himself English was by reading the classics. When I was a child, there were always classics around the house. He encouraged me to read way above my age and, to be honest, my understanding. We read
George Orwell’s Animal Farmtogether. I just thought it was about some animals that were really mean to each other.
Did you always want to be a writer? It’s hard for me to say because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t able to write. My mum [a translator] encouraged me to keep a diary, and every time we went on a family holiday or something happened at school, she’d say: “OK, write two pages about it.” I always had a notebook with me.
Which writers are an influence on you?Susanna Clarke’s JonathanStrange & Mr Norrell is a lingering influence. So is AS Byatt’s Possession. Sylvia Plath is a recent obsession. I reread The Bell Jar and then this brilliant biography of her by Heather Clark, which got me interested in her journals and letters. Joan Didion is an obsession. I like to write my friends letters in the style of Joan Didion.
What book do you have by your bedside right now?My bedroom’s far away, but I’ll tell you what’s by my desk: Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness. It’s a really special book. She was younger when she died than I am now; she was killed in a car crash a few days after she graduated from Yale, and her parents worked with some professors to put this collection of her essays and short fiction together. I’ve been asked to write an introduction to the 10thanniversary edition. I think a lot about female genius, and careers that end too early, and the potential we never get to see.
You’re still only 27, and you’ve already published five books. Are you very driven?I do set high goals for myself, but really I just think I’m a compulsive workaholic. It’s very hard for me even to sit still in a movie. I’m very bad at going on holiday. I can’t just sit by the ocean and relax. I need to be doing something.
Is the plan in the future to combine an academic career with a writing life? That’s definitely my hope. Teaching is a vocation for me. I’m passionate about being in the classroom. I feel like it’s a kind of magic, an important kind of work that’s distinct from writing novels. But the job market is really discouraging. I don’t know if there will be posts available when I’m on the market in two or three years’ time.
What are you working on now?My next book is set in the 80s. It’s a fantasy novel, but it’s very different from The Poppy War trilogy. It’s Neil Gaiman meets… Lewis Carroll. There’ll be a big emphasis on nonsense and riddles and mysteries. It’s an entirely new genre. I like to feel like I’m moving forward. I get bored very easily.
Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang is published in paperback by the Borough Press (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Many men have written about women very badly, but that’s an issue of craft, not biological qualification