WORD Christchurch is no stranger to sold out audiences, but the air at The Piano was abuzz with an exceptional eagerness last week. This was brought on by none other than RF Kuang, who needs no introduction, but Rachael King kindly gave us one anyway. Rebecca F Kuang is a bestselling author of several, mostly fantasy, novels, and a Marshall scholar who studied at Cambridge and Oxford and is now pursuing her PhD at Yale. Using her studies to deeply enrich her works, she has won a staggering number of awards for her novels.
Kuang is here touring post-Auckland Writers’ Festival, so the conversation commenced with the expected comparison between our North and South Islands — don't worry, we won on the views front. Scenery did take a turn for the worse, as King asked about the Hellscape of Katabasis, Kuang’s latest publication. Katabasis follows two young doctoral students rescuing their professor from Hell, mainly to receive letters of recommendation. Which, given the state of the current graduate market, isn’t entirely out of the question. The atmosphere of Katabasis is very striking, featuring a dark academia aesthetic, leading King to ask if Kuang felt drawn to the style. Kuang quipped that whilst she wasn’t the biggest fan of their quintessential tweed outfits, she identified with dark academia’s nostalgia for print culture. As Kuang pursues a professorship, she notices the change amongst her students. Instead of mulling over a physical text they have read, they have an incessant screen-based stimulus, not to mention pressure from a job market increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. It's something that weighs on Kuang, her students taking classes for career prospects over interest, all in preparation for an increasingly dehumanised workspace. She remarks worriedly, “It is bad for souls and all knowledge to be processed through a lens of commerce”. Dark academia provides a refuge from this, “a life unfettered by commerce”, leading her to ground Katabasis in this style.
It’s a sign of the times — amidst cuts to arts funding, devaluing knowledge for knowledge’s sake seems to occur on a societal level. King asks if Kuang sees an endgame to this, and jokes if she has a sweeping solution to share. Understandably Kuang doesn’t have a simple answer, but can offer a defence. The arts make us both compassionate and attentive, she says, which are crucial for democracy. Kuang explains this operates in two main modes, firstly through close reading. Close reading is a skill at odds with the attention economy we live in, and provides you with the quiet authority to develop your own opinion. This opportunity to quietly digest what you see in front of you is becoming ripped away by social media. Another arts skill Kuang finds essential for maintaining democracy is creative writing. It takes empathy to write from others’ perspectives, and requires a certain detachment of ego. The current landscape of technology, with its radicalising algorithms, is eroding these skills. It is these arts skills that keep us alive and protecting one another, and is something we must fight for.
King then mentions the moment our protagonist, Alice, is given a tattoo that gives her the ability to retain everything she experiences. As useful as that may sound, she asks Kuang if she feels that is a gift or disability:
“It’s a common fantasy among students, but forgetting is essential to make it through your day. Having no limit to your memory bank can be debilitating.”
Kuang is right of course, our brain fills in far more of what we perceive than we realise. Therefore, unlike Alice, we don’t completely fall apart from the stimuli in a supermarket aisle. Whilst having the ability to forget can be beneficial, it also has terrible consequences. Kuang’s other novel, Babel, explores “the violence of organised forgetting”. In particular, it delves into British colonisation, and its slow erasure of cultures and language. Babel follows a group of talented students from several colonised countries who attend Oxford to study translation. These students begin to uncover the ulterior motives beneath this seemingly invaluable opportunity, and all that they have been driven to forget.
Whilst academia and its dark sides seem to be Kuang’s current modus operandi, a slight tangent can be seen in her novel Yellowface. A thriller-horror-satire, Yellowface follows June, who steals a manuscript based on the Chinese Labour Corps. This is written by her successful author friend, after she dies in a freak accident. King asked if Yellowface felt like the zeitgeist upon its publication in 2023. “I have complex feelings about Yellowface”, Kuang responds. Yellowface explores a publishing industry “obsessed with identity politics”, and "sanctimonious cultural gatekeeping” meaning that one could only write about their own background — which Kuang feels “reduces us to [writing] autobiographies”. Yellowface feels dated in all these ways, she says, but the social media pile-ons still feel very current. Most of us are still vulnerable to clickbait scandals, but when the dust settles, no meaningful analysis has been done.
We’ve shifted to a more divided political landscape in many ways, and shared values seem to be falling out rapidly. King asks Kuang if this is something she experiences more frequently. Kuang laments the lack of a shared democratic forum these days, with traditional media and journalism under threat. Unfortunately, the social media algorithms rapidly replacing these media forms serve to add fuel to the flames. “We’ve splintered into echo chambers that aren’t representative”, Kuang remarks. She also mentions that automated ‘bots’ are a big problem in comments sections, as debates are no longer person to person. Instead, users are clashing with a bot that either only serves to argue back or to radicalise your opinions.
King then moves to a subject we’ve all been waiting for — Kuang’s latest novel. Titled Taipei Story, it is a subject close to Kuang’s heart. The story is based on Kuang’s time in Taipei, enrolled in an intensive Chinese programme and her desire to interview her grandfather, who had seen so much of Chinese history. Time was ticking though, and because Kuang was “ashamed” and “less confident” of who she was in Chinese, she deferred and deferred the interview, until one day her grandfather passed away. “I felt so stupid and inadequate, and was grieving all the while… I felt like a failure so I made that the story.” Taipei Story explores denying the diaspora fantasy of homecoming. It asks, what if homecoming is impossible? What if it is excluded from you? Whilst Taipei Story is all about the vulnerability of trying and failing, it is humorous too. After all, learning a language is always a humiliating act — you’ll be much better off learning to laugh at yourself.
Despite her myriad accomplishments, Kuang isn’t immune to these feelings. Listening to her speak, it feels very fitting she chooses themes of vulnerability, as it is a quality she shares in both her works and her life. Kuang seems to greet it not only with acceptance but also with humour, which is a characteristic many of us would do well to emulate.
Photos of the RF Kuang WORD Christchurch event
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Cate, Tūranga
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