RF Kuang’s otherworldly ambitions

Rebecca F. Kuang completed her feeling of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she went on vacation from Georgetown where she studied international economics and worked as a debate coach in Beijing. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like to master the rules of something and see if I can crack it and really be good at it,” she told me. One day, on a coding website, she came across an ad for a popular word processing app. Despite her dabbling in fan fiction, she has little experience as a writer. But Scrivener seems so easy to use that she downloaded it and started writing a fantasy story. Kuang didn’t know much about building stories, so she searched Google’s approach to drawing, world building, and character development. Every time a chapter is finished, she emails it to her father who grew up in Texas. He is an ideal reader who offers only praise and desire for more. When she sent him the last chapter, he asked, “What are you going to do now?” She consulted Google again, and about seven months after she started writing, she found an agent.

The Poppy War, published in 2018, is preparing to graduate from college and tells the story of Fang Runin or Rin, a young orphan from a poor area of Nikan, a thin China who distinguishes himself among privileged students at the Ellet Military School. (Kuang describes Rin as Mao Zedong was a teenage girl.) Rin possesses shamanic powers that can call for revenge, but victory on the battlefield did not lead to the harmony she hoped for. She is brave, but not so reliable – another character calls her “opium littering sack.” “The Poppy War” combines elements of the Kuang family history with the fictionalization of the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai. But it is also a fallacy about democracy, nationalism and popular will. The story continues in the two subsequent books, full of big, messy teenage emotions, from a desire for heroism to trying to measure competitors’ insecurities – inspiring readers to debate their favorite characters and write their own fan novels.

Published under the name of RF Kuang, Kuang has worked in unpredictable styles and genres over the past decade. In 2021, the “Poppy War” series is a finalist for the Hugo Awards, which recognizes the best science fiction and fantasy books. In 2022, Kuang published “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: The Mysterious History of the Oxford Translation Revolution”, a playful guessing novel about the history of academia, translation politics, and long-term colonialism in the 18-30s. She was a Marshall scholar who began her research while starting her master’s degree in Chinese contemporary studies at Oxford University. “Babel” won the Nebula Best Novel Award, era Bestseller. In 2023, she returns with “Yellow Face,” a gossip of literary novels about a white writer’s cynical identity with an obsessed publishing industry in the era of Twitter beef and social media cancellation. It is also a bestseller. This month, Kuang will publish her sixth novel, Katabasis, and when I report on this article, she completed the first draft of another book, temporarily entitled “Taipei Story.”

Kuang, 29, has also been pursuing his Ph.D. There she wrote papers on cultural capital and Asian prose in Yale University’s East Asian Languages and Literature. In April, I visited her in New Haven and talked about “katabasis”. I was never curious about the daily habits, habits and time management skills of another writer.

We met at the popular campus bookstore and coffee shop Atticus. Kuang lives in the Boston area with her husband Bennett Eckert-Kuang. In the spring, her philosophy students at MIT spent several days a week in New Haven, teaching classes for college students and meeting with consultants and students.

“I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” Kong told me. “I have different interests, different expressions and different priorities.” She speaks with gentle, almost lethargic curiosity and proposes ideas on premises and theory, which becomes brighter whenever she settles in the words she likes. She is cautious, cool thinking that people’s mind seeks constant stimulation. She explains that looking back at the “Poppy Wars” trilogy or “Yellow Face” is like going back to “My own version does not exist,” she discusses the choices she made in those books and takes a liking (even if alert, distance).

The current version of Kuang can be described as a newbie in Tabula-rasa, who is an excellent author who would rather be a desire disciple. “I don’t think I’m attractive to being the most capable or reader in the room because there was nowhere to go,” she told me. “I found that cognitive humility from scratch – I found it very useful.”

Kuang is one of the easiest graduate students I have ever met, and I was impressed that it was not only because of her relative financial security. Most people who pursue a PhD are panicked that they will never study. Kuang saw the possibility, as if the academic community was going to be constantly humble. “I hate my companionship,” she said. “I really like it when others are experts.”

At the next table, undergraduates chat in distracted Marxist theory, and as they try to transcend each other, I remember the anxiety that drives “katabasis”. Like “Babel,” Kuang’s new book could be classified as the “dark academic world” genre, a heavy, post-Waterman, fetishized campus novels, seducing Gothic architecture, Houndstooth lazers, and Dusty Tomes. Even in these conventions, “katabasis” has a very specific premise. It revolves around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who ventured to hell to rescue their consultant Professor Grimes, who recently passed away. He is a cruel mentor, but they fear they will never succeed in the job market without getting his letter of recommendation. The only way to immortal hell, however, is to master a series of logical paradoxes, and the rules for managing this fictional underworld rely on both magic and a slight mastery of Plato and Aristotle.

“katabasis” is an effective irony of academic life. But there is a very basic question of a great thinker and a crazy box challenging student Alice’s face, who feels like some people are thinking about themselves. “What burns inside you? What burns every move you do? What makes you reason to get up in the morning?” When Alice’s consultant asked these questions, she didn’t have any good answers.

Kuang grew up outside of Dallas and was self-aware of the way she spoke. “I just don’t stuff the air into my vocal cords,” she said. “I think I’m really scared.”

Kuang’s parents Eric and Janette were from China, but they met in 1989 at Orange County, when Eric was a graduate student at the University of California at Irving. After Eric received his Ph.D., the couple returned to China in 1994. Their first child, James, was born in Guangdong in 1995, and Rebecca was born the following year. “When I went back, I struggled with my identity.” “Five years later in the United States, after Tiananmen Square, I could no longer find my place in China.” In 2000 when Rebecca’s sister Grace was born, kuangs moved back to the United States

Kuang is a quiet and good kid. One day, in middle school, she attended a meeting of a debate team at a local high school that was recruiting future competitors. “We are the champions,” Kuang recalls the coach telling her class. The coach told them that he could find a “winning mentality” among students. Kuang felt he was looking at her. She was recruited immediately. She began to participate in the debates by Lincoln-Douglas, a one-on-one style that focused on the moral implications of real-world problems, and the difficulties of her speech quickly disappeared. The debate was suitable for her personality at that time: embarrassment, analysis, and conscientious.

The Dallas area is a hotbed of competitive debates, and at first, Kong’s teammates’ speech polish was daunting. She spent months studying the art of syllogism, a logical argument in which people draw conclusions from a set of premises. “It’s shocking that you can take some ideas that seem to be charismatic or rhetorical choices and map it to this very rigid, controversial structure,” she said. At the highest level, debate is a combination of politics and philosophy, and skilled debaters must master the ability to analyse reasoning and be able to speak as quickly as possible.

Kuang quickly stood out and participated in summer camps for young debaters from all over the country. After her first year of high school, she transferred to Greenhill School, a private college outside Dallas, a debate powerhouse. She often skips the subject of class research debate, a process that opens her eyes to issues such as systemic racism and mass incarceration. The secret intensity of the debate also defines her social world. This is a period of “continuous obsession”. On her bedroom wall, she took a group photo from the debate camp and looked at it while thinking about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. These are her greatest competitors and her closest friends.

I watched Kuang’s YouTube video during a debate tournament in high school. In such a space, calmness is the ultimate measure of swagger. “The word is ‘perceived dominance’.” Her opponent is a noisy language avalanche, but Kuang appears cool and cold. When I debated in high school (although not at this level, I would be nervous because Kuang slowly rose to cross-examination. She was ruthless and precise, and she won with a unanimous decision. By most metrics, she was one of the most successful high school debaters of the year.