Rebecca F. Kuang finished her second year of college with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she took a leave from Georgetown, where she was studying international economics, and got a job in Beijing as a debate instructor. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like mastering the rules of something and then seeing if I can crack it and get really good at it,” she told me. One day, while on a coding website, she came across an ad for Scrivener, a popular word-processing application. Though she had dabbled in fan fiction, she had little experience as a writer. But Scrivener seemed so easy to use that she downloaded it and began writing a fantasy story. Kuang didn’t know much about structuring a story, so she searched Google for how-to books about plotting, world-building, and character development. Each time she finished a chapter, she e-mailed it to her father in Texas, where she’d grown up. He was an ideal reader, offering nothing but praise and a desire for more. When she sent him the final chapter, he asked, “What are you going to do now?” She consulted Google again and, about seven months after she’d begun writing, found an agent.
“The Poppy War,” which was published in 2018, as Kuang was preparing to graduate from college, tells the story of Fang Runin, or Rin, a young orphan from a poor region of the Nikan lands—a thinly veiled China—who distinguishes herself among the privileged students at an élite military school. (Kuang has described Rin as a reimagination of Mao Zedong as a teen-age girl.) Rin possesses shamanic powers that can call forth a vengeful god, but victory on the battlefield doesn’t result in the harmony she had hoped for. She’s brave but not all that reliable—another character calls her an “opium-riddled sack of shit.” “The Poppy War” mixes elements of Kuang’s family history with fictionalizations of the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai. But it’s also about democracy, nationalism, and the fallibility of popular will. The story, which continued in two subsequent books, is filled with big, messy teen-age emotions—from the longing for heroism to the insecurity of trying to measure up to your rivals—that have inspired readers to debate their favorite characters and write their own fan fiction.
Kuang, who publishes under the name R. F. Kuang, has worked in an unpredictable range of styles and genres during the past ten years. In 2021, the “Poppy War” series was a finalist for a Hugo Award, which recognizes the best science-fiction and fantasy books. In 2022, Kuang published “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution,” a playfully erudite work of speculative fiction, set in the eighteen-thirties, about the history of academia, the politics of translation, and the long arc of colonialism. She began working on it while she was a Marshall Scholar, in the midst of completing a master’s degree in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford. “Babel” won the Nebula Award for best novel and was a Times best-seller. In 2023, she returned with “Yellowface,” a gossipy work of literary fiction about a white author navigating a cynical, identity-obsessed publishing industry in the era of Twitter beefs and social-media cancellations. It, too, was a best-seller. This month, Kuang will publish her sixth novel, “Katabasis,” and, while I was reporting this piece, she finished the first draft of another one, tentatively titled “Taipei Story.”
Kuang, who recently turned twenty-nine, has also been pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale, where she’s writing a dissertation on cultural capital and Asian diasporic writing. In April, I went to visit her, in New Haven, to talk about “Katabasis.” I’d never been so curious about another writer’s routines, habits, and time-management skills.
We met at Atticus, a popular campus bookstore and coffee shop. Kuang lives in the Boston area with her husband, Bennett Eckert-Kuang, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at M.I.T. During the spring, she spent a few days a week in New Haven, teaching a writing course for undergraduates and meeting with her advisers and students.
“I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” Kuang told me. “I have different interests and different expressions and different priorities.” She speaks with a gentle, almost dazed curiosity, and poses ideas in terms of premises and theories, brightening whenever she has settled on a phrasing she likes. Her careful, coolly composed thoughts belie a mind that seeks constant stimulation. Looking back on the “Poppy War” trilogy or “Yellowface,” she explained, was like returning to “a version of myself that doesn’t exist,” and she discussed the choices she’d made in those books with a fond, if wary, distance.
The current version of Kuang might be described as a tabula-rasa novice, a highly accomplished author who would prefer to be an eager disciple. “I think there is no attraction, for me, to being the most competent or well-read person in the room, because then there’s nowhere to go,” she told me. “I find starting at zero, that epistemic humility—I find that very useful.”
Kuang is one of the most relaxed graduate students I’ve ever met, and I got the impression that this wasn’t only because of her relative financial security. Most people pursuing a Ph.D. feel panicked that they will never read enough. Kuang sees possibility instead, as though academia is meant to be constantly humbling. “I hate having my own mind for company,” she said. “I really love when someone else is the expert.”
At the next table, undergraduates chatted at a distracting volume about Marxist theory, and, as they tried to outdo one another, I was reminded of the anxieties that drive “Katabasis.” Like “Babel,” Kuang’s new book can be classified in the genre of “dark academia,” a brooding, post-Hogwarts take on the campus novel which fetishizes Gothic architecture, houndstooth blazers, and dusty tomes. Even within these conventions, “Katabasis” has an extremely specific premise. It revolves around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who venture to Hell to rescue their adviser Professor Grimes, who has recently died. He was a cruel mentor, yet they fear that they will never succeed on the job market without securing a letter of recommendation from him. The only way to make it to Hell without dying, though, is to master a series of logical paradoxes, and the rules governing this fictional underworld rely on both magic and a faint grasp of Plato and Aristotle.
“Katabasis” is an effective satire of academic life. But there are very basic questions that Alice, a brilliant thinker and a rabidly box-ticking student, faces—and they feel like some that Kuang is contemplating herself. “What burns inside you? What fuels your every action? What gives you a reason to get up in the morning?” When Alice’s adviser asks these questions, she doesn’t have any good answers.
Growing up outside of Dallas, Kuang was self-conscious about the way she spoke. “I just would not put air through my vocal cords,” she said. “I think I was just really, really scared.”
Kuang’s parents, Eric and Janette, are from China, but they met in Orange County in 1989, when Eric was a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. The couple returned to China in 1994, after Eric completed his Ph.D. Their first child, James, was born in Guangdong in 1995, and Rebecca was born the following year. “I struggled with my identity when I moved back,” Eric told me. “After five years in the U.S., after Tiananmen Square, I couldn’t find my place in China anymore.” In 2000, a year after Rebecca’s younger sister, Grace, was born, the Kuangs moved back to the U.S.
Kuang was a quiet and studious child. One day, in middle school, she went to a meeting with the debate team from a local high school, which was recruiting future competitors. “We are champions,” Kuang recalled the coach saying to her class. The coach told them that he could spot the “winning mind-set” in students; Kuang felt that he was looking right at her. She was instantly entranced. She began competing in Lincoln-Douglas debate, a one-on-one style that focusses on the ethical implications of real-world issues, and her difficulties with speaking quickly disappeared. Debate suited her personality at the time: awkward, analytical, dutiful.
The Dallas area was a hotbed of competitive debate, and, at first, the oratorical polish of Kuang’s teammates was intimidating. She spent months being coached on the art of the syllogism, a kind of logical argument in which one deduces a conclusion from a set of premises. “The idea that you could take something that seemed up to personal charisma or rhetorical choice and map it to this very rigid, argumentative structure was mind-blowing,” she said. At the highest levels, debate is a combination of politics and philosophy, and skilled debaters must master analytical reasoning and the ability to speak as fast as possible.
Kuang quickly distinguished herself, attending summer camps where top young debaters from around the country trained. After her first year of high school, she transferred to Greenhill School, a private academy outside Dallas which is a debate powerhouse. She routinely skipped class to research debate topics, a process that opened her eyes to issues like systemic racism and mass incarceration. The cloistered intensity of debate also came to define her social world. It was a period of “sustained obsession.” On her bedroom wall, she tacked up a group photograph from debate camp, and would look at it while thinking about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. These were her greatest rivals, and her closest friends.
I watched a YouTube video of Kuang at a debate tournament as a senior in high school. In such spaces, calm is the ultimate measure of swagger. “The term was ‘perceptual dominance,’ ” she told me. Her opponent was a noisy avalanche of language, but Kuang appeared cool and nonchalant. Having debated when I was in high school—though not at this level—I felt nervous as Kuang slowly rose to conduct her cross-examination. She was ruthless and precise, and she won the round by a unanimous decision. By most metrics, she was one of the most successful high-school debaters of that year.
Eckert-Kuang recalled meeting her around this time, in the Greenhill debate office, when he was a freshman and she was a senior. “Wow, this is so intimidating,” he remembers thinking. “She is the best debater in the country, and I am shorter than her.”
At Georgetown, Kuang intended to continue with debate before going to work in the Foreign Service. But she quickly realized that she no longer felt the same competitive drive. “I’d just had enough of winning,” she said. She recalled feeling depressed, having lost “the entire value system” that had structured her life. “There was this big question mark of ‘What on earth am I good for?’ ” she said.
Spending a year in China offered a way to deal with this question. Like many immigrants, Kuang had maintained a largely conceptual relationship to her native country as a child, slowly losing her grasp of Mandarin. (She regained it in college and can now read novels in Chinese.) Her parents wanted their children to appreciate their heritage, but they didn’t talk much about the family’s experiences during the nation’s twentieth-century tumult. When her father visited, he brought her to his ancestral village in Hunan, the site of a Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and showed her bullet holes left in clay walls by Japanese soldiers. “I wasn’t learning it as national history,” she told me. “I was learning it as family history.”
Now, after years of absorbing theories about diaspora and identity, Kuang jokes that she would no longer refer to her time in China as some kind of earnest “homecoming.” But hearing about what her family lived through during the Second World War and the Cultural Revolution for the first time was transformative—Chinese history struck her as the stuff of epic storytelling. She didn’t initially explain the inspiration behind the “Poppy War” chapters she sent to her father. “When I started to see all the family history,” he said, “I was very proud.”
Kuang was preparing to return to Georgetown when her agent told her that Harper Voyager was interested in “The Poppy War.” She was nineteen. Writing had filled the void left by debate, but it lacked the meanness of competition. “I still have an edge, and I’m fiercely driven,” she said. “You know, it’s part insecurity, part superiority. But it’s not directed at other people. It’s fully inward.” She and Eckert-Kuang (who was no longer shorter than her) soon began dating. “She chilled out a lot during that year in Beijing,” he told me. He accompanied her to get a tattoo on her wrist to commemorate the book deal. “Show me the glint of light on broken glass,” the tattoo reads, a quote often attributed to Chekhov. “A really fancy way of saying ‘Show, don’t tell,’ ” Kuang said.
Shortly before “The Poppy War” was published, Kuang met the renowned speculative fiction writer Ken Liu at a science-fiction and fantasy convention. Liu’s 2011 short story “The Paper Menagerie” was the first story to sweep the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, and he translated Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” from Chinese to English. Ken Liu and Kuang talked about the challenges of drawing on Chinese folklore for speculative fiction. “It was obvious that she had thought about what she was doing in a very conscious way,” he said.
One of the ironies of fantasy is that authors can imagine virtually anything, yet many remain beholden to alternative worlds filled with white people. “When fantasy writers draw inspiration from, say, Greek mythology or English mythology, people treat it as perfectly normal,” Liu said, as though “you’re talking about all humanity.” But drawing on Chinese history and aesthetics, as Kuang did for “The Poppy War,” “comes with a lot of baggage” for Western readers, who have historically had difficulty seeing such stories as “universal.”
“The Poppy War” benefitted from a multicultural turn within the fantasy and science-fiction communities. Kuang is close with the writer Tochi Onyebuchi, whose acclaimed novel “Beasts Made of Night,” from 2017, was set in a world inspired by Nigeria. Onyebuchi told me that he and Kuang have frequently discussed the bind of wanting to explore non-Western histories without being defined by them. “A lot of the otherness was being celebrated but also fetishized, to the point where audiences engaging with it wouldn’t feel the impetus to see beyond the cultural coating of a story,” he said.
Onyebuchi was describing a contemporary twist on the long-standing plight of genre writers: “People in our shoes had . . . worked so long to tell these stories based on where they had come from, or their own experiences and fascinations outside this Western pantheon. There can be this guilt that comes with wanting to be considered on your own merits.”
Kuang explained, “We have a chip on our shoulders about being sidelined or relegated to provincial literary spheres, even though we came from them and we love the work that’s there.”
A few months after the publication of “The Poppy War,” Kuang moved to England to study at Cambridge and Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. “I was still chasing prizes, and I think, to a bright-eyed twentysomething, if your whole life is about winning prizes and getting through that next door, that game itself is enough,” she said. “You just want to keep winning. But then I’d won the prize. And the question was: What are you actually going to do with all this education?”
Though Kuang had extricated herself from the zero-sum world of debate, she still felt a need for achievement and recognition. This became the central theme of “Babel,” which she began writing in earnest in 2020, during her final months in England. It is the story of Robin Swift, a young orphan from China who is given the opportunity to study translation at Oxford. Within the world of “Babel,” global trade is facilitated by magical silver bars, produced at the university, which are engraved with equivalent words in different languages. The bars are activated when translators say those words aloud.
At Oxford, Robin befriends gifted children from Haiti and India. At first, they revel in their rare opportunity. “Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace,” they are taught. But the young scholars eventually begin to reflect on the ways in which their multilingualism has been weaponized in service of colonialism. They realize that they’re conduits not for exchange but for exploitation.
The pandemic forced Kuang back to the United States in the spring of 2020, and she finished writing “Babel,” as well as her second master’s thesis, in Florida, where Eckert-Kuang’s mother had moved after he’d graduated from high school. Each morning, the couple would pack up their laptops, walk around the block, and reënter the house, pretending that they had just travelled through a space-time continuum to a coffee shop in a different dimension.
“Whenever I’m getting close to finishing one project, I start daydreaming about something else, so that I can pretty quickly transition,” Kuang told me. “I’m very uncomfortable when I’m not working. If there’s nothing, then I start to panic.” She wrote the first draft of “Yellowface” in the three months before beginning her Ph.D. at Yale, in 2021. If “Babel” was erudite and weighty, then “Yellowface” was—as she described it—a “palate cleanser.” The product of hours spent on Twitter, the novel is like a garish social-media thought experiment left to metastasize. It centers on a young white woman named June Hayward, who is the only witness to the freak death of her friend and rival, Athena Liu. Athena is a darling of the publishing industry who, in the view of her competitors, has made a career out of exploiting “Chinese tragedy.” Consequently, June doesn’t feel too bad about stealing the only copy of Athena’s last manuscript, a work of historical fiction involving Chinese laborers during the First World War, and passing it off as her own.
June—who rebrands herself as Juniper Song, in the hope that she’ll pass as ethnically ambiguous—becomes a best-selling writer. She is an avaricious, self-pitying protagonist, yet the novel’s cynicism blankets the entire literary world, echoing some of Kuang’s own experiences of promoting the “Poppy War” trilogy, when she was positioned as an “ethnic” author.
The director Karyn Kusama is currently working on an adaptation of “Yellowface” for television. She was drawn, she said, to the way Kuang explored the “feelings and syndromes that I see among all kinds of people, but particularly among creative circles, in which there’s so much comparison and judgment and dismissal and ranking and categorization.”
Kusama said that Kuang has been very clear that she hopes the adaptation will neither lionize nor demonize the characters of June and Athena. When “Yellowface” was published, Kuang said in an interview that the character of Athena was “a way to wrestle with my deepest insecurities.” Athena’s somewhat cloying reflection on what it means to adapt family history for fiction—“I am ethically troubled by the fact that I can only tell this story because my parents and grandparents lived through it. . . . And sometimes it does feel like I’m exploiting their pain for my profit”—isn’t all that far from what Kuang told me about the epiphanies of her gap year in China. Perhaps, Kuang went on, Athena had become “trapped by her own success” as a “cultural broker.” What would she have been allowed to write, had she lived?
Kuang and her husband keep a shared Google Doc in which they rate every New Haven pizzeria they visit, assessing their offerings on crust, sauce, grease, cheese, and “holistic impressions.” One night, when she was wrapping up her teaching commitments for the semester, she and I ate the highest-rated cheese pizza within a ten-minute walk of her apartment, at a noisy, cavernous brewery. A medium pie was the size of a child’s desk and—were I a pizza rater—fatally lacking in grease. She showed me some of the ceremonial selfies that she and Eckert-Kuang had taken after they’d input their ratings.
When Kuang began the Ph.D. program, she relished having an “escape to the classroom,” she told me. “When I was younger, campuses were these idyllic, safe, contained worlds,” she continued. “They have their own value system and sort of gaming structure, where you know all the things that you have to do well in order to feel good, and you just do those things.” But the appeal was beginning to fade, and she was looking forward to living off campus, full time, to work on her dissertation. “I think most grad students feel this way toward the end of their Ph.D.s, as you transition roles between being a student to being somebody who teaches, going from passively receiving knowledge to trying to construct it and send it out into the world,” she said. “The campus just feels way too small.”
That week, Kuang had been discussing the craft lessons of the writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, which led her to think about “volunteer sentences,” Klinkenborg’s term for the banal placeholders that fill in for the actual thought a writer intends to express. The “Poppy War” trilogy had been propelled by plot, but lately she was attracted to the precision of literary fiction. She tends to reassess her older work quite harshly. The rhythms of “Yellowface” came from social media, a world she now tries to avoid engaging with. “I hate the style of the sentences in that book,” she told me.
“Katabasis” was a few months away from publication, but she was already finishing up “Taipei Story,” which she described as being heavily influenced by the work of Elif Batuman and Patricia Lockwood. It draws on her experiences of studying Mandarin in Taipei a few years ago while dealing with the death of her grandfather. “I think writing a novel is also a project in becoming a completely different personality, so that at the end of it you’ve adopted a completely different set of values and attitudes about the world that are trapped in the becoming of the novel,” she said.
A couple of months later, I went to Boston to visit Kuang and her husband. It was the first long stretch in which they had no teaching obligations, meaning that they could move anywhere. “I’m very curious about what being a New Yorker does to your writing,” she said, while we waited for breakfast sandwiches at a local café. “I’ve never been part of a literary ecosystem. There are magazines that I admire a lot—n+1, The Paris Review. And I think often, Wow, it seems like a lot of these people know each other, and it would be very cool to know these people.” Yet the notion of going to their parties, or of witnessing their interpersonal dramas up close, made her anxious, almost as if she didn’t want to be let down. Ultimately, she preferred to engage from a distance with “the best versions of their positions.”
“We are speculative-fiction writers who love ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ ” Onyebuchi told me, of himself and Kuang. They share an interest in bridging the ambitious world-building of fantasy with the sentence-level work of so-called serious literature. “Yeah, sure, the Hugo is nice,” he added. “But what about a Booker? I can see it for her.”
Kuang took me for a walk along her favorite jogging path. I asked if “Katabasis” was born out of some cynical revelation about academic life. When Alice, the protagonist, realizes that Hell is essentially just another campus, she is excited. “With each new matriculation you had the chance to reinvent yourself, to deserve your place there. And now Alice felt, though she knew this was dangerous, an instinctive want to fit into this place,” Kuang writes. “If Hell was just another institution, then it couldn’t be so bad.” Alice hopes that rescuing Professor Grimes from the underworld will give her a competitive edge, but Peter, her rival, insists on coming with her. They constantly undermine each other; the one thing they seem to agree on is a disdain for the trustees, assistant deans, and other bureaucrats that stand in the way of knowledge. Slowly, the characters realize that academia “is an arbitrary game of egos and narcissists and bullying perceived as strength.” And Alice (adrenaline-obsessed and prone to starving herself) and Peter (overbearingly brilliant, geeky, and afflicted with chronic illness) discover that they have more in common with each other than they do with Grimes.
“I think I’m more scared to show this one to other people than I had been with other books,” Kuang said. “This one involves a lot of Bennett.” Kuang and Eckert-Kuang began their Ph.D. programs, in 2021, with optimism and excitement. But he lost weight throughout the fall semester and experienced intense abdominal pains. One night, he started writhing in agony. It was a “frog-in-the-water situation,” Eckert-Kuang said—he could no longer gauge how bad he felt. At an urgent-care clinic the next day, he was told to head to an E.R. immediately.
Kuang described her first year at Yale as one of endless “driving and crying.” Eckert-Kuang was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, which has become more manageable over time. “It was all so hard, because he was going to the hospital constantly,” she said. “Many days I walked to class and, like, just sort of fantasized about—not propelling myself in front of a bus—but, if I accidentally got hit by a bus, I just thought, like, Oh, that would be really great, because then I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this anymore.”
The plot of “Katabasis” enacts a fantasy that Kuang had at the time, to “escape entirely into a world of ideas,” she said. Alice, Kuang explained, has “this idealized version of the academy as a place where you can leave your body behind and it’s just minds interacting with each other.”
Kuang said that seeing Eckert-Kuang suffer had done something to her brain chemistry, and that she continued to fantasize about the ability to “escape” from one’s body. “So much of what the Peter character is going through is very close to his experience,” she said. Unlike her previous novels, she shared drafts with him while she was writing it. “I was very taken with the bits where it describes him as gangly and awkward, because I’m pretty aware this is how I am,” Eckert-Kuang told me. “I think of those facets of me as the most goofy, socially inept parts, and they’re described so lovingly.”
As Kuang and I walked, she talked about Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue in which he explores the view that the human body stands in the way of true knowledge; consequently, a philosopher should not fear dying, for the transition to death actually frees the soul to pursue truth. “In the first half of the book, both Alice and Peter are very compelled by this, because I was compelled by this,” she said. (Kuang refers to this idea in both “Katabasis” and “Babel.”) “During that time, I was, like, It would be so, so great if our bodies did not exist and we could just think.”
That evening, I had dinner with Kuang and Eckert-Kuang at their apartment. In the living room, they displayed a few debate mementos. I asked who was better. “It’s a Jordan-LeBron thing,” Eckert-Kuang joked. “We’ll never know.” A metallic sign for Coco’s, the imaginary café they worked at during the pandemic, hung in the kitchen. They share the lingua franca of people who’ve known each other since they were teen-agers. “Turns out if you make out with someone at debate camp, you have to marry them,” Eckert-Kuang said. On their honeymoon, last summer, they went to Rome and visited the Colosseum. Eckert-Kuang remembered Kuang facing a kind of “mid-midlife crisis” about what the future held. “She was, like, ‘We’re out of life milestones. You date people, you get married, you have a kid,’ ” though they did not foresee starting a family anytime soon, if ever. “She seemed to think, I have no structure to my life. We hang out until we die? And my attitude is more ‘We hang out until we die! This sounds good to me!’ ”
As Kuang stirred a pot of pasta, I asked Eckert-Kuang about his dissertation. He paused, with a look familiar to any academic: Do you really want to know, or are you just asking out of politeness? Kuang poured me a glass of wine. I listened as Eckert-Kuang enthusiastically began talking about Kant, adjusting his glasses and grinning to punctuate ideas he found particularly stimulating. Kuang sipped from a mug that listed three check-box options: “Single,” “Taken,” and “Mentally Dating Immanuel Kant.”
“We end up hosting a lot of his department parties,” Kuang told me. “It’s really fun to be surrounded by people in a field of which you have zero knowledge. While I was writing ‘Katabasis,’ I would go around and ask people, like, ‘Can you teach me logic?’ And they were so excited.” Eckert-Kuang recalled that many of his classmates had a “merely cognitive sense that she was a famous person,” with little awareness of what her books were about or how popular they were. “I think that gave her a sense of freedom from the being-a-famous-person shtick.”
Eckert-Kuang had spent the day working on his job file, though open professorships wouldn’t be announced until later in the summer. Otherwise, he was getting over a concussion—the result of hitting his head against a door frame—and his biggest source of stress was whether he’d recover in time to watch “2001: A Space Odyssey” at a local theatre the following week. They were looking forward to finally having a wide-open year together at home. “You write two more books,” he said to her, “and I’ll just hang out.”
In “Katabasis,” when Professor Grimes asks Alice what she truly wants, her replies are initially generic: a job, her own professional fiefdom, her name on an office door. It’s no spoiler to reveal that Grimes is not worth the journey to the underworld. Yet there’s something entrancing about his question. Alice views Grimes as someone of a higher order, which is why she suffers through the casual cruelty of his mentorship. “You’ve got to love cracking things open to see what they’re made of,” he tells her. “You must be fueled by the truth, and the truth alone. It must devour you.”
“Academia was decidedly not about gold stars,” Alice concludes, and it is not a place for validation. “No,” she continues, “the point was the high of discovery.” This is about as close to autobiographical disclosure from Kuang as anything she has written: “How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether—when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas. She was very proud of the days she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need.”
One morning, before the end of the spring semester, Kuang and I met for breakfast at a café near Yale. It was one of the last weeks that her class would meet before she left for book events in Europe. I was still trying to wrap my head around her prodigious work rate, what it was that continued to motivate her. “I just don’t think I’m very good yet,” she said. “I actually am afraid of being totally happy with my work, because, if you are perfectly satisfied with your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go. You might as well be dead.”
Then she asked me if I’d ever heard about the space-time worm. I had not. Kuang got very excited and began talking about worm theory, which is a school of thought among philosophers which posits that we exist in four dimensions. In addition to existing in three spatial dimensions, we also stretch through time, like a worm, linking us to the past. In this view, we are essentially the same person forever. The application of this argument is arcane—it pertains to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and whether, say, a photograph of Bill Clinton as a child can accurately be referred to as a photograph of the President.
This idea of continuity intrigued, and annoyed, Kuang. “I think since I wrote ‘The Poppy War’ I’ve had this enormous fear of arrested development. I think it is really dangerous for professional success to come to you too early, because then you start thinking, Oh, what I did when I was a child is sufficient. The only way around this is to be deeply critical of everything I’ve done before and try to start over as a person, as a writer, and chase a standard that I feel like I have not reached yet. I am much harder on myself with every project, but in the interest of not being this teen-age fluke that wrote, like, a pretty mediocre fantasy novel that happened to do fairly well.”
A few days later, Kuang posted a photograph on Instagram of herself sitting in her living room, announcing that the first draft of “Taipei Story” was complete. “Katabasis” wasn’t even out yet, and it was as though she was already moving on. “It’s like slices of the space-time worm have a branch path and then persist without changing next to you,” Kuang had told me. “And it’s, like, Why won’t you just die, you childish space-time worm?” She laughed. “Anyways, I should get to class.” ♦
