R.F. Kuang Hopes Change Will Come To A ‘Grim’ Publishing Industry

Rebecca F. Kuang, better known to literary fans as R.F. Kuang, is 28 years old and already a best-selling novelist with five books to her name. In our Zoom call, she sits in front of a white wall, with two windows on either side of her. There’s a tiny plant on one of the sills and a generous amount of natural light. It’s her one writing non-negotiable, she later tells me.
“I actually don’t have an office in our home,” said Kuang, who splits her time between Boston and Connecticut. Instead, her standing desk is installed facing a series of windows so she’s constantly drenched in sunlight. “I’m kind of in a fishbowl. It’s just windows all around me.”
It might seem strange that the author of an award-winning grimdark fantasy trilogy chooses to write in a spot filled with luminescence. But it’s the calmness and tranquility of the early mornings, when the rest of the world is still, that helps the “Poppy War” author do her best work. Plus, people watching is an active part of her writing process.
“I can see people and their dogs peeing on my roses,” she jokes. While a puppy relieving itself on her front lawn might be a source of an instant inspiration, Kuang says her writing is usually “a mishmash of original creative work and drawing from the people around me.”
While Kuang tends not to be very autobiographical in her fiction, she does use personal experiences and feelings as seeds for stories: “I try to go into every social encounter or every experience with an attitude of observation and note taking.” For Kuang, gathering this so-called “human data” often involves watching others and how they interact and express themselves.
This intricate detail of humanity makes the characters in her novels feel all the more real. From the complex heroine Fang Runin in the award-winning “Poppy War” series and the introverted academic Robin Swift in “Babel” to the sardonic June Hayward in “Yellowface,” Kuang has shown again and again that she can bring to her work a mastery of the nuances of humankind.
Her satirical novel “Yellowface” is told from the viewpoint of June, a young, white struggling author. After her friend, a successful Asian author, dies unexpectedly, June steals her friend’s manuscript and pretends to be an author of Asian descent in order to further her own career. Earlier this month, Lionsgate TV announced its plans to adapt the novel for television with Karyn Kusama set to direct, Variety reported.
It might sound far-fetched, but this kind of racial masquerading has happened in publishing on a number of occasions. There was Michael Derrick Hudson, a middle-aged white poet from Indiana who wrote under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou. And then there was African American author Herman Glenn Carroll from Detroit, who pretended to be a Cuban immigrant named Hache Carrillo in order to get his books published. There have been tons more instances of this happening across lines of race, sexuality and gender, including one case that offered an eerie parallel to “Yellowface” itself.
“It was 2021 and we were all chronically online all the time, because that was our only way of staying connected with one another,” Kuang says of the novel’s inception. “I was being a social observer of the way we talk to one another and about controversies and about race and identity on Twitter. I grew so frustrated and kind of sickened by it that I needed to write ‘Yellowface’ to purge myself.”
From conversations about whitewashing in her own novels to an editor saying one of her manuscripts could be “triggering” to readers, Kuang has dealt with her own frustrations in the book world. In 2019, a survey on diversity in the publishing industry, which considered everyone from the executive level at publishing houses down to literary agents and interns, found that 76% of people in the industry identified as white. Only 7% identified as Asian, including Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and South Asian identities. And a 2020 analysis in The New York Times examined the output of several major publishing houses and found that of the fiction books they published in 2018, only 11% were written by people of color.
Despite these bleak numbers, Kuang isn’t giving up hope that things might change in the near future. She’s using her voice to bring Asian and Asian American histories to life on the page, and she’s advocating for others to do the same.
“Institutions are made up of people, and people can collectively decide to do anything. I recently read David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas,’ which I certainly needed at the time. It was kind of a balm for the soul,” she explains. “There’s this wonderful passage near the end, where somebody says pessimistically, ‘You’re nothing but a drop in the ocean.’ And the response is, ‘What is an ocean except for a collection of drops?’ So I think even the most momentous change is possible, but it takes a lot to get on board.”
As much as “Yellowface” is a satire of the publishing industry, Kuang notes that it’s also a satire of how we as a society talk about complex issues online. Many of those conversations, she says, are “hypocritical and reductive and messy and ill-intentioned.”
Even in the wake of the novel’s success, Kuang says little has changed within the industry itself. “It’s grim. But I never thought that writing ‘Yellowface’ was going to change things top-down,” she says. “I think the positive benefit of ‘Yellowface’ is that it’s given writers, especially newer writers, a kind of toolbox to understand conversations about them and encounters they have.”
Kuang says the most encouraging thing that’s happened since the release of her fifth novel is that people come up to her at book signings and author chats and are able to commiserate over things that have happened to them.
“That kind of solidarity and group acknowledgment of the traps we have to navigate, and the way that people talk about us and our identities that’s bringing all of that to the surface, and helping authors be more transparent about that with one another, has been really nice,” she says.
Born in Guangzhou in southern China, Kuang immigrated with her family to Dallas when she was 4 years old. It was there, as a fifth grader, that she wrote her first book, loosely speaking: a 10-page novel about the Revolutionary War titled “Liberty or Death.” Although she didn’t know it at the time, it foreshadowed the epic historic-based fantasies she’d write in the future.
Her first novel, “The Poppy War,” has influences from mid-20th century China, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Song dynasty. Many of the elements in the novel are not based in fact, and there’s one chapter in particular that is so heartbreaking, fans wonder how she came up with it at all. But this is an example of fiction meeting historic fact: The truth of that chapter is rooted in the bloody and very real Nanjing Massacre of 1937.
Meanwhile, Kuang’s fourth novel, “Babel,” takes place in 1830s England, and features an intricately built setting based on historic knowledge of the world as it was back then ― including unabashed references to the racism and mistreatment of Asians in Europe.
Kuang’s background in academia is what allows her to add such complexity and historic nuance to her stories. She majored in history at Georgetown University as an undergrad and was accepted to Magdalene College, Cambridge, as a recipient of the 2018 Marshall Scholarship, earning a master’s degree of philosophy in Chinese studies. She went on to receive a master’s of science in contemporary Chinese studies at University College Oxford, and is pursuing her Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale.
It’s her passion for history in all its forms that has helped Kuang become such a formidable writer.
“The classes I teach and the research I do and the courses I take help me add some nuance and complexity to anything I’m thinking of writing about,” she says. “I think every story idea I’ve ever had started with a classroom discussion.”
One of her upcoming novels is set in Taipei, Taiwan, and revolves around language, identity and diaspora. Kuang explains that the idea for this novel came from the class she taught on Asian American history. “That kick-started a lot of questions for me about what that transpacific journey looks like, how it alters our relationships with our families, and how we figure ourselves in the world.”
Inspiration in the form of “what ifs” can be sort of magical if you think long enough. At least, that’s what Kuang believes. Each story she tells, fantastical or otherwise, started from real facts or issues and spiraled outward into a whirlwind of speculation, which eventually became book-shaped and now sits on shelves across the world.
But even someone like Kuang ― who is so disciplined with time management that she never takes a meeting before noon in order to maximize her morning creativity ― can fall victim to writer’s block. When that happens, she turns to other literary figures for inspiration.
“Every time I’m feeling uninspired or unhappy with my craft or stuck on a technical problem, I just read really good prose, and that always loosens the gears, because it’s amazing seeing what somebody else can do with words,” she explains. “I always pick a muse for each new project.”
“Sylvia Plath is a big one for me,” she adds. “She has this enormous body of wonderful poetry and ‘The Bell Jar,’ which I’ve reread I don’t know how many times. We also have so many of her letters and diary entries and essays that she published, so I just have this huge well of Sylvia to draw from whenever I don’t feel like writing.”
Kuang says Plath has also inspired her to start writing letters of her own. When she wants to express how she’s feeling or delve into an experience she’s had, she turns to long-form letter writing to articulate herself in a more considered format. “I think it’s been good for my writing and also good for my friendships,” she says, noting that she encourages her friends to send each other letters rather than texting.
Becoming a full-time novelist isn’t in Kuang’s immediate plans; she intends to balance her career in academia while moonlighting as a novelist as long as she can. She has two upcoming novels where she plans to interweave her education in race, translation, diaspora and identity into stories that people around the world can read. As long as her novels continue to provoke thoughtful questions and conversations and inspire others to follow their dreams, she says that’s all that matters.
“When I started writing, there were only two Asian American authors who had fantasy novels coming out from major publishers, and they were Fonda Lee and Ken Liu,” Kuang recalls. “Knowing that Ken and Fonda existed made a world of difference to me. It showed me that it was possible, and that people actually cared about my stories. So I hope to just be one of many people in a growing constellation of examples that it is possible.”