Just a year shy of 30, Rebecca F. Kuang, better known as R. F. Kuang, has collected three degrees, published five books, and gotten married. While for most this would constitute a lifetime’s work, for Kuang, the author behind the blockbuster novel Yellowface, it’s merely the natural pace of her mind.
Writing, she says, is “like breathing—it’s not a choice you make.”
Next week, she returns with Katabasis, her latest book, about two graduate students who descend into the underworld to retrieve the soul of their late professor, hoping that he might write them letters of recommendation.
The academic world is familiar terrain for Kuang, who has degrees from Georgetown, Cambridge, Oxford, and, soon, Yale. “I find that I can’t really write about a place unless I’ve lived there and inhabited it,” she says.
Initially inspired by T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, “The Waste Land,” Katabasis is also grounded in Kuang’s time as a Ph.D. student in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale. It “started as this cute idea to write a magical satire,” she says, but it quickly turned into something darker and more personal.
Born in Guangzhou, Kuang moved to Dallas when she was four. At 19, she returned to China, taking a year off college at Georgetown to live in Beijing. There, she started writing what would become her first novel, The Poppy War, a historical military fantasy inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the family history she became aware of during her year abroad. Published in 2018, it became the first of a three-book contract with HarperCollins, followed by The Dragon Republic, in 2019, and The Burning God, in 2020.
After Georgetown, Kuang moved to England, where she earned master’s degrees in Chinese studies from Cambridge and Oxford. The latter inspired her fourth novel, Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, another work of historical fantasy. Set at Oxford in the 1800s, it doubles as a critique of elite institutions and the role they played in the history of colonialism. “Academia is like a fairy-tale land with its own rules,” she says, “and half of the rules are nonsense.”
Yellowface—the story of a young white author who steals the manuscript of her dead Asian friend and publishes it as her own—followed soon after, released in the spring of 2023. Debuting at No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover fiction, it’s remained a popular book-club pick since.
Despite her prolific nature—Kuang describes her work as a “compulsion”—she experienced writer’s block before starting Katabasis. Having spent hours online while writing Yellowface, to understand the many facets of cancel culture, she began to feel the negative effects of social media. “I found that I could not finish books anymore,” she admits. “I was being cognitively destroyed.” To remedy this, she turned to running, “because I never feel like running either,” and it helped force her to do something she didn’t want to do. “I want to sleep in, but I know that once I’ve dragged myself out the door and laced up my shoes and found that rhythm, then I’ll be locked in.”
As her book tour for Katabasis gets underway, Kuang has already finished a draft of her seventh book, tentatively titled Taipei Story and inspired by her time learning Mandarin in Taipei while mourning the death of her grandfather a few years ago. As for her ongoing relationship with academia—Kuang hopes to pursue teaching once she completes her Ph.D.—she feels a creeping dread about its future. “I am witnessing the attacks on higher education and seeing the hiring freezes across the board at American universities,” she says. “It seems like the worst thing you could do is to rob a whole generation of young people of the opportunity to be curious.”
Hannah Gross is a junior at New York University
