Conversation with R.F. Kuang

By Chi Siegel

This interview was originally published in Issue #8 “GOLD (金)”. Get it now on BLURB.

When I first heard of The Poppy War this past May, even as a very general concept — a fantasy retelling of the Sino-Japanese war — I bought it immediately and devoured it in full just as fast, as a lover of all things fantasy.

The book, the first of a trilogy, follows the life of the orphan Runin as she aces a prestigious university entrance exam, which catapults her from an abusive home into the most prestigious university in her country of Nikan. While beset by hostility from her classmates for being a dark-skinned peasant from the south, she discovers an aptitude for ancient shamanistic arts and uncovers some terrible truths about the mutability of history. In the meantime, the next-door Federation of Mugen is gearing up for another war against the weaker military of Nikan, so Runin and her friends’ lives are put on the line as they navigate the cyclical nature of generational pain and trauma.

I caught Kuang by phone just as she was on her way to Denver Comic-Con in early June, preparing to appear on nine panels. In our interview, she discussed both her own scholarly background and some of the essential themes of her debut novel.

Chi Siegel: So, here are some questions to get us started. How do you balance academic research with fiction? What changes and what doesn’t? What is the relationship between fiction and truth? Do you think of yourself as more of an academic or a fiction author?

R.F. Kuang: I’m in a place where a lot of the stuff I research goes along well with the fiction I write about. That’s probably because all of my work comes from my research and from historical study. That’s part of the reason why I never want to be a full time writer, or why my academic career is always going to be a priority over my writing career.

Without interesting things to study and interesting things to think about, I think that my stories would go stale really fast. Also I think the best novels that I’ve ever read changed the way that I thought about the world or taught me something that I didn’t know before, and I don’t know how you get that without constantly exploring and studying new things. I’d be really scared if writing ever stopped being just a hobby.

School comes first and the stories come out of that. For instance, Book Three focuses a lot on military campaigns in the Chinese civil war, and I knew all of that already because I’ve written papers about it, so it was easy to map out the campaign and map out the strategy because I’ve been thinking about them for a long time. Also, fiction writing, or the creative profession, is really not stable, and I’m a good Chinese daughter — I’m not about to do that to my parents. So, the academic career comes first. My plan is to get my Ph.D when I’m done with my scholarship in the UK and get on track to teach eventually.

Similarly, I wrote my senior thesis about the Rape of Nanjing and the way
that it’s been commemorated, or rather the way that it has not been commemorated until recent memory, in the 1990s and onward, and those historical injustices and trauma and complexity really went into the first book.

CS: Sounds like an awesome plan. Once you get your PhD, would you plan to teach Chinese history and the eras engaged with through your writing, or do you have a different idea in mind?

RFK: I’d like to teach modern Chinese history, the 1920s and 1930s and onwards. That’s the stuff that fascinates me the most. But I also have a decade’s worth of school ahead of me, so who knows?

CS: So, my next question is about the genre of fantasy and speculative fiction more broadly. The founder of science fiction was Mary Shelley, as we’re all aware thanks to celebrations of Frankenstein’s 200th anniversary this year.

RFK: Yeah, did you see they made a movie about her? I’m excited for it.

CS: Yeah, I’m excited too! But, you know, in spite of all she did, the genre’s legacy remains overwhelmingly male and white. In the past few years, the far right, such as the “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” groups, has been trying to take over the Hugo awards to fight back against what they think is a leftist invasion — to no avail, as N.K. Jemisin won in 2016.

RFK: Yeah, that shit was crazy.

CS: So, what is it like to be a woman of color in the speculative fiction community right now? I figure since you’re about to go to nine panels at Comic-Con that’s a relevant question…

RFK: Yeah. I am really brimming with optimism right now. There is this trend where a woman of color or some other marginalized individual gets a book deal, finally, and people are treating it like this is the first time that x identity has gotten this platform. While it’s true that barriers are still being broken, and there’s still a lot of barriers to be broken — I study history, so this is a thing that bothers me — that ignores the contributions of a lot of marginalized writers since Frankenstein was published who are doing important work for the genre that we don’t really think about because we’re too caught up with what’s going on now. Decades ago, Octavia Butler was publishing genre-breaking stuff, so this isn’t the first wave of what the Sad Puppies would call “Social Justice Warriors” taking over the genre. This is the accumulation of decades of effort, and I think what’s different now is that there’s finally support from the establishment and increasing support from publishers and literary agents. You will now find agents saying publicly on Twitter, “Send me your diverse stories,” or publishers making a push for that. Tor for instance has been very explicit in their call for novellas that they want diverse stories, and that wasn’t something we necessarily saw 10–20 years ago. There were still authors being published then. Thinking of my genre’s heroes — Ken Liu, N.K. Jemisin — they were really the first in many ways.

Like, have you read The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin?

CS: Yeah, I’m a huge NK Jemisin fan.

RFK: I just finished the trilogy. You could not have imagined books like that getting published like 50 years ago. Now the rest of us are riding on [those authors’] coattails and getting way more publishing opportunities that we thought possible. This is not to say that things are totally equal, because they aren’t, it’s just that things are changing really fast right now. Look at the nominees for the Hugos and the Nebulas this year: the number of queer people, the number of people who are not white, or not cis male is incredible. I think the majority is people from x sort of marginalized background, instead of the white males who were winning all the awards up until this decade. I think Jemisin has won the Hugo award for the last two years in a row and will probably win again. Like, wow, right?

It’s tempting to see everything as good now because there’s such an explosion of really good fiction being published and being given marketing and attention and funding and support from publishers. It’s easy to feel like we’re just drowning in good literature, but this is all very recent, and if you look at the overall numbers, for example YA novels about black people compared to the percentage of black YA authors, and the discrepancy is huge. Even if some marginalized stories are being told, marginalized authors are not necessarily being given those opportunities to tell them. There’s still a lot of work to do but I think we should all be optimistic and excited.

“My heroes…were really the first in many ways. Decades ago, Octavia Butler was publishing genre-breaking stuff.”

CS: So, how long had you been working on the first Poppy Wars book?

RFK: I started I think in September 2015, and I had a draft ready by December 2015. Then, I had a draft that I sent off to agents, and then my agent responded pretty quickly and we revised it for 2 more months, and after it got through to a publisher we did 3 more rounds of revisions.

CS: You were nineteen when you first finished it. How has your youth affected your writing and your status as author?

RFK: I was thinking about this earlier today. Starting as a teenager when I began writing The Poppy War and wrapping up the third book as a 22-year-old sort of mirrors the character path that Rin goes through. It’s cool being able to reflect on how your thought patterns change and how your priorities change and how you mature. I think that my writing has just objectively gotten better since I was 19. I studied way more craft: I’ve been to a six-week writing workshop, I’ve read a lot more, and [I’ve] critically evaluated my writing from the past. It can be cringey for me now to read the first book, just because I’m aware of so many mistakes now.

That makes me optimistic, because that allows me to get some distance from my own work. A lot of people are attached to their novels and they can’t really handle criticism or bad reviews. But for me, yeah, [the criticism] is probably true. I was 19 and I didn’t know that much about craft. That’s coupled with the knowledge that I’m growing so fast, I’m always learning, and I’m always improving. I want The Poppy War to be the worst book that I’ve ever written, otherwise I would be writing worse than I did when I was 19.

So, on the second issue of how you get treated as a writer when others know that you’re a certain age, most people don’t seem to have a problem with it, but you get the occasional grouchy reader — “Why should I take the word of a 19 year old on anything?” — and like, fair… I would not take a 19 year old that seriously about anything, and I think that’s a matter of taste. I don’t think that it’s affected my public persona that much. I think that my publicist wanted to make it a big deal at first, but that’s the least interesting thing about me.

CS: I saw in an interview that you compared how it felt to write your first book to when Lyra in the His Dark Materials series is using an aletheiometer — could you talk about the difference you feel that formal training and workshopping has made for your writing and compare the process of the first book versus the second book?

RFK: I think that’s a perfect experience, and I know so many writers for whom that’s their story too. The first book feels like you’re doing it by instinct and you’re just unconsciously copying what you saw in other good literature, and in the second book you start to wonder, “How did you do that?”

Also the fact that I just did not know that all of these craft tools existed and that all these tips existed made it easier to write this first book, because I couldn’t be self conscious about it. But I think a really common writing journey is that you become a better editor before you become a better writer, so you become intensely self-critical, and in Book Two and Book Three it takes a while for your skill to catch up to to the point where you know how to fix errors that you’re already seeing, which is why writing Book Two sucks, and why everyone has Book Two Syndrome. You learn how to spot mistakes really fast and you don’t know necessarily how to fix them, and so you need to spend more time crafting your practice. Book Two becomes the unloved middle child.

CS: Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about Second Book Syndrome from authors before. You also mentioned how you were connecting the maturation of Rin to your journey in writing these books. As someone who recently graduated from a renowned university — congratulations, by the way! — was the experience of writing Rin’s student days cathartic? Do you in some ways see yourself in Rin’s position with that sort of academic pressure cooker environment?

RFK: Thank you. And, yeah. I’m super strict on myself where school is involved. Because school is all I ever want to do, I need really good grades. It was easy to map my emotional turmoil in college to what Rin was feeling. I don’t know that I ever got that intense. The part about her studying for the Imperial Test, the “Keju” [in the book], actually comes from my dad’s student days, because he was from a tiny village in Hunan province, and he took the gaokao, and he scored like either first in the village area or the province, and he went to Beida, and after Beida he went to Cornell. He was a first-gen college student. Everyone in his family up until then were all farmers. So that’s exactly [Rin’s mindset] — this test is your entire life, you either make it or break it. School is hard for me, and I enjoy studying and work. It never felt like a life or death issue like it was for my father and Rin.

CS: My grandparents are from Guangdong and I feel like somewhere along the line they passed on to me that story of the person who tied their ponytail to the ceiling in order to study all night without falling asleep over their books.

RFK: Yeah, it’s a really common Chinese story.

CS: Also, in another interview, you mentioned that your Opium
War obsession started a long time ago. When did that start and what first drew you to the subject?

RFK: I don’t know. I was reading all this stuff by my freshman year of college, and it’s hard to separate when the academic interest started. I was just really into the stories that my family was telling me about their experiences in Chinese history. That really covers everything: every bad thing imaginable
that happened to China in the 20th century. It’s hard to remember a point
when I didn’t care about the Opium Wars, the Cultural Revolution, and the Second Sino-Japanese war.

CS: It’s interesting that as a person with an academic background you chose specifically a creative novelization as your vehicle for engaging with these subjects that you were learning about and writing about in an academic way.

RFK: The relationship between fact and fiction and myth and fabulation is such a huge topic. I wrote about it in Uncanny Magazine. There are too many reasons why I did this. Firstly, I love fantasy; it’s really fucking fun to read, and that’s what I wanted to write because it’s cool. The second reason is that writing it as a nonfiction family autobiography would be immensely painful — not for me, but for the people whom I’d be interviewing, and I would have to be asking questions about details that would make them think about it over and over again, and I didn’t want to put my family through that. When you have to fill in the gap through radical empathy, then let’s just go all the way and make everything metaphor and a fictional parallel as opposed to what they were specifically going through. That’s sort of a protective shield between your family members and the memory of trauma and the narrative, and I think that’s helpful.

“Even if some marginalized stories are being told, marginalized authors are not being given the opportunities to tell them”

CS: What do you think of the way in which the Nanjing Massacre has been politicized, both in Japan for fascist purposes and in China as part of its nationalistic “150 years of humiliation” narrative?

RFK: Oh my god, I wrote my whole thesis about this. I don’t know where to start. The simplistic version of this answer is that its been politicized heavily, but that this is not a black and white issue where one side is clearly at blame. I can’t say that all of Japan has disrespected the legacy of Nanjing, because the history and politics are so complex. But it is true that on the Japanese side, there are many people in government and in academia who flat out deny that the Nanjing massacre happened, or admit that it happened but that the casualty rate was lower than 300,000, or argue that if it did happen, Chinese soldiers committed it and not Japanese soldiers, or argued that everybody who was killed was an enemy combatant and therefore those deaths were legitimate on the battlefield — none of which is fair or accurate or does service to the atrocities. So, that’s fucked up. Also, there is this genuine need for acknowledgement that should parallel the way that Germany has atoned for and recognized the Holocaust after WWII, in that it’s become part of mainstream public education and part of the national memory as something that everybody must acknowledge so that it never happens again. This sort of national public education has not taken place in Japan. There was some controversy over some textbooks in the ’80s in which they wrote about the Rape of Nanjing, the Japanese invasion, and the illegal occupation.

All of these are fair criticisms of Japan. But [in China], there’s also politically motivated, flagrant nationalist propaganda arguing that all of Japan [today] is militaristic and fascist, which is completely not true: the Japan of today is not similar to the military empire of Japan during WWII. A lot of important people have written about how fueling this anti-Japanese sentiment is a way to distract from domestic problems at home, such as how the economy lags as there’s increasing societal unrest in China and as people become disillusioned with the CCP. The oldest trick in the book when people are getting upset at you is to point to another enemy for them to be mad at to foster national unity, and that is what is happening with China’s foreign policy, which is dangerous and unnecessarily antagonistic toward Japan.

It’s really complicated; those are just some of the issues at page. This is a situation where nobody really has the high moral ground, but China is claiming the moral high ground.

“[Fantasy] is a sort of protective shield between…the memory of trauma and the narrative.”

CS: Now, could you talk a bit about your Poppy War characters’ — Rin and Altan in particular — relationship with pain, and how you’ve connected that to larger sociopolitical issues through this book?

RFK: There’s a lot going on there. Altan and Rin are different manifestations of how war and trauma are cyclical. Altan in particular, because his response to what was done to him is to burn the rest of the world down and Rin’s response to what happened to her and Altan and the rest of their entire race is to burn a country down. They’re also characterized as animals — savage, base, and animalistic, and not as intelligent as normal people — and this happens before Rin even discovers who she really is, just because she’s dark-skinned and from the South and not that rich. That dehumanizing treatment over time makes it so that they in turn dehumanize the enemy. As Rin fights a boy soldier, she can’t think of him as human.

There have been reviews, one or two, that have called this book racist, because it treats Japan as stereotypical monsters that should all be killed. That’s kind of the point though; that is how warfare works: we get so good at dehumanizing each other because of repeated traumas, and the cycle of warfare just continues. [Rin and Altan’s] stories are really sad, because they have not found peace. At the same time, you can understand their own personal fucked-up-ness: Altan’s not going to say, “We should negotiate
and live in peaceful harmony with the Federation” when all that shit happened to him. That’s why peace is so difficult: it’s hard and not necessarily fair or just.

CS: One final question — If you were Rin, would you have made the same decision at the end?

RFK: Someone else has asked me that. I thought that it was a really interesting question, because I talked to a lot of Chinese people, some who’ve read the book and some who haven’t but who know what happened at the end, and say that they would have. I think that’s indicative of how cross-generational this rage is toward what happened during the war and what remains unacknowledged.

People have called The Poppy War a Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy. I think that when I wrote it, I might have done it, because when you’re steeped in that history for that long, and all you can see is the injustice, it’s really easy to just rage. Years later, when I’m looking back at the book, I think I definitely wouldn’t, but it’s really important in terms of understanding modern Sino-Japanese relations and understanding the modern Chinese psyche to know why so many people would “pull the
trigger,” so to speak. Because even if you didn’t live through it but all you’ve grown up with are family members telling the stories of what happened, that trauma gets passed on, and without proper acknowledgement, it’s really difficult to move on. It’s not parallel to the Holocaust. I don’t know a lot of people who would want to do the same thing to Germany in its current form today because of what happened in the 1940s. But I can think of plenty of Chinese people who would [do the same thing as Rin to Japan], and in many ways because of the difference in the way that the Nanjing massacre and the Holocaust have been treated [after the fact]. It’s shocking and weird to think about.

“When you’re steeped in that history for so long, and all you can see is the injustice, it’s really easy to just rage.”

CS: So, you’ll be on the Marshall Scholarship at Cambridge this Fall.

RFK: Yeah, I’m really excited.

CS: What will you be studying at Cambridge?

RFK: I’m first doing my M.Phil in Modern Chinese Studies at Cambridge. I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to write my thesis on, but it’ll be probably related to the Second Sino-Japanese War in some way. I don’t want to do the Rape of Nanjing again because I already did my undergraduate thesis on that, and also because other people have written better stuff
about it and I’m not sure that I would find sources on it that other people ha-
ven’t analyzed to death already.

The Marshall Scholarship is for two years, and the program at Cambridge is for one year, so I said I’d be doing Japanese study for the second year at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, and right now that’s probably the most likely plan, because I don’t think you can really understand modern China well unless you understand modern Japan really well.

Original interview by Chi Siegel. Print design by Chi Siegel. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.

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