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Do you care about what happens on the other side of the world? If people in China are dying from famine, does it affect you? Would you even know? Rebecca F. Kuang, Kuang rhymes with song, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and found herself frustrated with the West’s lack of interest in Chinese history. China suffered under imperialist exploitation, and then underwent a brutal communist revolution that saw it rise to be one of the world’s major superpowers. The West’s disinterest in teaching about that is startling. From a perspective not often spotlighted in the United States, Kuang’s novels grapple with the reality of European imperialism in China, the subsequent figures who shaped its history, and the way western countries use people of Asian descent for their own gain. Today R.F. Kuang turns 28, and we’ll examine how her history and heritage inform her literature, and how she does this through the guise of fantasy and fiction.
History
Born May 29, 1996, Kuang is originally from Guangzhou, China, and immigrated to the United States with her parents in 2000, at the age of 4. She grew up in Dallas Texas, and reading was her addiction, to the point her mom thought it was interfering with her studies. Kuang would have to sneak books to school and stay up to read at 2 a.m. just to have a chance with her books. After graduating high school, she attended Georgetown University because she was attracted to its debate club, another of her interests, and majored in History.
Although she grew up in America, her Chinese heritage had a profound impact on her life. Throughout Kuang’s life, her parents didn’t speak about their life in China. Her mom even coached Kuang not to speak or write about the oppressive regime of the Communist Party, for fear that someone would be listening. Her father’s family suffered under the Japanese occupation of Hunan. Kuang has visited her father’s home village and seen the bullet holes in the walls left by Japanese soldiers during WWII. This intergenerational trauma, and events similarly forgotten or ignored in the west like the Rape of Nanjing, the forgotten holocaust, inspired Kuang to begin writing The Poppy War during a gap year she worked as a debating coach in China.
Once described by Kuang as “What if Mao Zedong was a teenage girl,” the Poppy War draws clear inspiration from 20th-century China, and specifically the Second Sino-Japanese war. The countries of The Poppy War have clear parallels to real world countries, and Rin, the main character, explores how Mao’s path led him from ignorant backwater roots, to become a monster ruling an entire country. The Poppy War was published May 1, 2018, and Kuang graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service a month later in June. Also in 2018, she earned a Master of Philosophy in Chinese studies from Cambridge.
The Poppy War was quickly followed up by two more sequels. The Dragon Republic was released in 2019, and follows Rin as she struggles with opium addiction, her country crumbles into civil war, and she plots to assassinate the Empress. The last book of the trilogy, The Burning God, released in 2020, to rave reviews, and had a satisfying, though not happy, ending.
Since The Poppy War Trilogy, Kuang has pursued a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale and released two more books. 2021’s Babel explores British imperialism in China, and the use of native Chinese speakers to serve as translators for them through Robin Swift, a Chinese native brought to Britain and raised to serve it. In contrast to her usual historical fantasy, 2023’s Yellowface is straight fiction, and explores cultural appropriation in the present day, with a specific eye on the publishing industry.
It’s difficult to disentangle Kuang’s history from her work because they are intertwined to the point of almost being the same string. Her family’s history inspired her to write The Poppy War. Her successful literature has encouraged her to pursue deeper Chinese Studies, and her studies at Oxford and experience in the publishing industry have in turn found their way back into her work in the form of Babel and Yellowface. The two feed back into each other, and this is especially evident in Katabasis, her upcoming 6th novel about PhD students traveling to hell to get recommendation letters from the souls of their advisors. It will be interesting to see how Kuang’s literature evolves with her life.
The Poppy War Trilogy: How do you Become a Monster?
As mentioned above, the Poppy War Trilogy is “what if Mao Zedong was a teenage girl,” and plays with this premise by setting the story in the mind of our Mao analog, Rin. By situating us in her mind, we are able to watch her flaws become her downfall, as she makes poor choice after poor choice for the sake of expedience, and the belief that she knows best drives her to monstrous actions.
When Rin has her first period in The Poppy War, her first thought is how it will slow down her progress in school, and she immediately gets a chemical hysterectomy to stop it. She doesn’t know what a period is, that it will happen once a month, or what effects the possible side effects the hysterectomy could have in the future, and makes an uninformed decision for the sake of not slowing down and continuing her chosen path.
Rin later destroys an entire island to kill all of her enemies at once and prevent an invasion. But when she learns in the second novel that thousands of her own countrymen were being held prisoner on the island, and she killed all of them, she barely acknowledges it, brushing it aside in favor of current issues. It was more expedient to blow up the island than fight the soldiers directly. She didn’t care about the people she was attacking, so she didn’t consider they might have had prisoners. And because those dead prisoners were collateral on the way to her goal, she can dismiss their deaths as worth the sacrifice.
It’s difficult to point to any one decision Rin makes as the point she becomes a monster, but that’s also the point. It is our actions that make us monsters. Rin wasn’t necessarily a monster for blowing up that island. In the heat of war, many actions will be taken, and most of them will be questionable. What makes her a monster is that she didn’t care about the people she killed, either her own people or those she wanted to kill. To her the decision was a means to an end, and if she got her result, it doesn’t matter how.
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: How do you Stop Being a Monster?
What kind of strength does it take to be better? If The Poppy War Trilogy shows us how you can descend into being a monster, Babel shows us a monster realizing what he’s doing, and trying to stop. Robin Swift is not a backwater revolutionary fighting for a better life. He’s a Chinese boy taken from Canton and raised in the luxuries of London. He studies not to escape his circumstances, but to maintain them. If he wants to stay in Britain, he must prove he deserves it. And he does, learning to harness the magic in the meaning lost in translation.
Babel shows us the European imperialism in China, and their exploitation of it not only through trade and deliberate opium addiction, but through language and strategic integration of select individuals to further their own ends. In a world where language has material value beyond communication, even our words are not safe from European conquest and plundering. Chinese is a valuable language in Britain because it is underutilized in their translation magic, and that makes Robin indispensable as their only native Chinese speaker. But even after Robin realizes how fragile the network of British magic is, how much they rely on him and those like him, he also realizes the people of Britain are unable to see him as anything but a foreigner. They took him from Caton, brought him across the world, defined his life with languages, expect him to serve them and maintain the backbone of their empire, and yet they cannot even see him as an equal. Robin is being exploited, and he realizes this fully when he’s brought back to Canton to negotiate the opium trade on the side of the British.
Robin is a monster because he directly benefits from and supports a system that could not exist without the oppression and exploitation of others. Further, Kuang doesn’t make this realization a snap turn to revolutionary action. It’s hard for Robin to acknowledge this. He doesn’t want to give up the life he’s built for himself, of the limited privileges he enjoys. It’s so easy to ignore the harm caused by the system because it’s across the world. Britain might be a cage, but it’s all he’s ever known. His decision to lead a translator’s strike, and then destroy Britain’s web of translation magic, is made on accident. In a fit of rage, he kills a professor, an irrevocable act that will see him killed if he doesn’t leave the cage.
But the story also explores how oppressors can forget they are oppressors. One of Robin’s friends just wants things to go back to normal, and sells him and their other friends out, because they are native British and view their actions as treason rather than rebellion against a system of oppression. They can’t comprehend that their friends, all foreigners, will be killed for rebelling against Britain. It serves as a chilling reminder that just as the oppressed can become accustomed to oppression, you can become so comfortable that you become blind to the crimes and prejudices that made your life possible. Robin’s story tells us that becoming a monster is easy. It’s having the moral backbone to find a way to stop that’s difficult.
Yellowface: You say you’d do Anything. What do you mean by that?
Yellowface picks up the element of performative support and cultural naivete in Babel and thrusts it into the modern day publishing industry, dissecting its inner working so we can see how it ticks behind closed doors. Athena Liu, a Chinese-American author, suddenly dies and June Hayward finds her unfinished manuscript about the Chinese Labor Corps who supported Britain in the first world war. When June edits the manuscript into shape and passes it off as her own, it shoots her into publishing stardom, but she quickly becomes buried by reviewers questioning her right to tell the story.
The novel is a satire of the publishing industry’s superficial diversity. June tries to avoid the controversy of publishing a book about forgotten Chinese history as a white woman by modifying her name to sound Asian, and making sure her portrait photos present her as racially ambiguous. And the publishing industry goes along with it because the story June stole was good, and they wanted to sell it. But as her ruse comes undone, June is buried under reviewers questioning her right to tell this story. Any conversation about the book itself becomes lost under a mountain of tweets, and Yellowface plays its second hand. Just as the publishing industry will do anything to sell a book, even promote false diversity if they think it will help, readers will sometimes do anything to try and promote true diversity, even at the expense of genuinely good work.
Kuang wants to explore how unhelpful this framework is. “We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathize with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters… Otherwise all we could ever publish are memoirs and autobiographies and nobody wants that.” If we place hard limits on who can tell what story, then we also place limits on who we can empathize with. While the intention is usually to try and highlight the work of marginalized authors, in practice it serves as another way of gatekeeping. Marginalized authors become pigeonholed into writing about marginalized experiences. While who is writing can play an important part, more important is how they are writing, why they are writing it, and what they’re trying to say.
This isn’t to say June is in the right for stealing Athena’s manuscript, she’s not, or that her deliberate use of yellowface to try and pass herself off as Asian isn’t abhorrent, it is. But instead, it showcases how June is not the only monster here. The publishing industry goes along with her ruse. And the backlash the book faces for June’s actions drown out the history the book was meant to spotlight. June is a monster. But for two groups willing to do anything for the right book, the book itself never seems to be their real concern. R.F. Kuang’s scathing satire of the publishing industry asks us to actually listen to the books we’re talking about, instead of talking over them, and to consider the effects of our actions, instead of just our reasons for taking them.
R.F. Kuang's Writing Advice: Editors Aren’t Trying to Alter Your Voice
It’s very easy to get attached to your story. After all, it’s your baby. You nurtured the idea from a thought and spent dozens of hours meticulously outlining and writing it out. By the end, you’ve put your heart and soul into the manuscript. You’ve polished it to perfection, and finally feel confident enough to show it to someone else. But they have some concerns.
After yourself, your editor will be your harshest critic. It’s their job to look at your story and break the news to you that the romantic subplot falls completely flat. Or your character arc isn’t sending the message you think. It can be hurtful to hear that something you poured everything into isn’t good enough. To new writers your editor can feel like your enemy. A reader browsing through your story, just looking for reasons to rip it to shreds. But the truth is very enlightening. The story isn’t just your baby. It’s your team’s baby.
R.F. Kuang has written 5 books in 6 years and is working on a 6th book. You don’t become that prolific without a good team that can keep up with you. And a good editor will tell you if a book needs to be rewritten from the ground up. A good team will tell you if a story beak just isn’t working. So work with your editor. They aren’t trying to mess up your story or make more work for you. They understand how important your story is, and they want to help you make it the best it can be.
R.F. Kuang Today
As R.F. Kuang moves through her life, she puts to paper the experiences she has. She’s currently working on her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University and has announced her 6th novel, Katabasis, about PhD students venturing into the underworld to get recommendation letters from their dead advisors, a clear satire of how difficult that can be. Although she’s busy as ever, Kuang also makes time for speaking events and interviews to speak about her work and perspective on issues. Whatever she turns her attention to, it’s clear she plans to shed light on it.
Discussion Questions:
1. The reception to R.F. Kuang’s work in The Poppy War and her reimagining of Chinese history and folk tales makes apparent the extreme lack of education about Chinese history and culture in America. Why do you think that is?
2. In Babel, one of the driving factors for Britain’s decision to incite war in China and extract more silver is the British general public’s complacency with the practice, and expectation their endless luxuries will continue. What have we allowed to happen to create the luxuries we take for granted?
3. Yellowface reveals the dark underbelly Kuang saw in the publishing industry, and how diversity can be token and surface level without actually making a commitment to it. Where else can you see this practice in everyday life?
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