Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang with Rebecca F. Kuang

Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club

In this episode of Weirdos Book Club, hosts Sara Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd interview bestselling author Rebecca F. Kuang about her new novel,

Key takeaways

Rebecca F. Kuang uses 'RF Kuang' for fantasy/sci-fi and 'Rebecca F. Kuang' for literary fiction to satisfy UK marketing preferences.
The novel Taipei Story is deeply rooted in the author's real-life experience studying Mandarin and the death of her grandfather.
The protagonist, Lily, uses academic perfectionism as a psychological coping mechanism to navigate a volatile home life.
The 'heritage speaker' experience often carries a sense of guilt or inadequacy regarding one's native tongue.
Learning Mandarin is described as a pattern-based endeavor rather than a rule-based one, focusing on intuitive usage over abstract grammar.

Main topics

Taipei Story book discussion
Author branding and names
Mandarin language acquisition

Notable quotes

If I can't write a novel that truthfully represents his life, I can write something that leans into the gap and the silence.

Conclusion

A poignant look at how literature serves as a tool for processing pers

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:04) I'm Sarah Pascoe. And I'm Cariad Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk Speaker 3 (0:09) too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why Speaker 4 (0:12) we created the Weirdos Book Club. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. Each week we're joined by amazing comedian guests and writer guests to discuss some wonderfully and crucially weird books, writing, reading and just generally being a weirdo. You Speaker 3 (0:26) don't even need to have read the books to join in. It'll be a really interesting, wide-ranging conversation and maybe you'll want to read the book afterwards. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. Speaker 4 (0:37) This week's book guest is Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kwong. Speaker 3 (0:41) What's Speaker 4 (0:41) it Speaker 3 (0:41) about? A 19-year-old Chinese-American goes to Taiwan for a three-month Mandarin language course. What Speaker 4 (0:47) qualifies it for the Weirdos Book Club? Well, it's very weird to share a bed and bathroom with your best friend from uni for 12 stinky weeks. In Speaker 3 (0:54) this episode, we discuss... Teenagers. Speaker 4 (0:56) Language. Speaker 3 (0:57) Idioms. Hot boys. toilet paper. And Speaker 4 (1:00) joining us this week is Rebecca herself. Rebecca is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author. She has written Catabasis, Babel, The Poppy War, and the global phenomenon that was Yellowface. She is an incredibly intelligent, brilliant person. She's currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian languages and literature at Yale. And this is her brand new book, Taipei Storybook. Speaker 4 (1:25) Welcome to the podcast, Rebecca F. Kwong. We're very excited. We're so excited to have you here. And we want to just straight away, let's hit the hot topic. On your book, when it says you write in two different names, so we have writing as RF Kwong, which people might know you for like the Babel series, Poppy War, Caterpaces, and Yellowface you wrote as Rebecca F. Kwong. Yeah. Is there like, is that just a kind of like sci-fi needing two initials thing? Speaker 2 (1:53) That is a marketing Speaker 4 (1:54) question. I Speaker 2 (1:56) really never think about production or packaging when I'm writing my stories. And the team comes back and they have all these ideas. And in the case of Yellowface, the UK team actually came to us and said... Over here, when you publish under your initials, it seems like you're hiding something. So we want to publish this book because it's literary fiction under Rebecca F. Kwong. Speaker 3 (2:19) J.K. Rowling has a lot to answer for. That's the only person I can think of. I think we need to go back to Speaker 2 (2:23) J.R Speaker 3 (2:24) .R. Tolkien. I Speaker 2 (2:25) think he caused the Speaker 3 (2:26) problems. What was he hiding? I Speaker 2 (2:27) think his full name is just really long. Yeah, yeah. So he was just J.R.R. Speaker 4 (2:33) Tolkien. Speaker 2 (2:33) John Ronald Ronald. Speaker 4 (2:35) Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he could have just Speaker 3 (2:36) been Speaker 4 (2:36) having red yellow face as well. That was one of Speaker 2 (2:39) the Speaker 3 (2:39) first books we did on our podcast actually. Yeah, it was yellow face. We loved it. And such a massive success. Speaker 2 (2:45) Yeah, Speaker 4 (2:45) it Speaker 2 (2:45) was pretty Speaker 4 (2:45) crazy. Speaker 2 (2:45) Everywhere in the world. Yeah. Speaker 3 (2:47) Is it crazy? Speaker 2 (2:48) I think none of us were expecting it to take off the way that it did when we were pitching the book and even talking about it in-house. We were all like, oh, this is a really niche story that's only going to appeal to people who have some publishing experience or are interested in these topics. And I think everybody was kind of astounded when it hit the way it did. Speaker 3 (3:06) Yeah, but as you say, because I think when I first heard about it, because it was so, well... an expose in some ways of what publishing can be like or a little bit gossipy even just like elements of like authors being at a festival or something like that that obviously the people in publishing were like have you read this yet Speaker 4 (3:25) yeah so and Speaker 3 (3:26) that's how you sort of Speaker 4 (3:27) create the buzz right from the beginning definitely I mean it was an incredible book and this is incredible as well I absolutely loved this so much I think what I want to say about your name first is I feel like I'm struggling not call you Rebecca because I feel like in my head you're RF. Speaker 2 (3:43) No, it's only ever RF on the book. It's Becky in real life. Speaker 4 (3:47) Oh, nice. But this is such a beautiful, beautiful book. And it is very personal and educational. I've learned so much. What was it that made you... want to write something so personal, especially after the last one being so fantasy-based. Speaker 2 (4:01) Yeah, I mean, the last one was very personal as well. I think we've been talking about this book as my most personal and most autobiographical, but actually that's not true. All of my books start with some personal difficulty or set of obsessions or questions that I had, and then I find a way to work through them and exaggerate them and stretch them with characters who are not me. And with Catavasis, I was working through depression and mental illness and chronic illness that my husband had been diagnosed with. So I think that comes from a really real place as well, both of these books. Even though one is like secondary world fantasy and one is contemporary literary fiction, they both feel as emotionally true for me. But in the case of Taipei Story, I think it is more recognizably personal because I was... in Taipei a few years ago doing an intensive language program studying Chinese when my own grandfather passed away. And it hit my whole family really hard. And I remember in the months after his death, I felt a lot of not just grief, but also anger and shame and guilt at myself because I had started studying Chinese and was in Taipei improving my Chinese all so that I could reconnect with my extended family. And I wanted to hear their stories. And I had this big project, this hope of one day sitting down with him and asking him all these questions about his life and really understanding what he'd been through. But because I was... still anxious and embarrassed at how I sounded when I spoke Chinese. I just kept putting that off and I kept deferring my chance and then we just ran out of time. So for a while, I actually wanted to quit writing because the whole reason I got into writing fiction was to understand my family and honor their histories. And I was so angry at myself for messing this up and for being unable to look past my own anxieties and insecurities that I didn't just make the mistakes and reach out and have those talks. And then after a while, I decided, well, if I can't write a novel that truthfully represents his life, I can write something that leans into the gap and the silence and takes all those feelings, that shame and humiliation and guilt and create a narrative about that instead, which is why we have Lily, who has the worst summer she's ever experienced, where she goes to Taipei with all... these hopes and expectations for reconnection and authenticity and discovery and then bit by bit everything um is is peeled away until she she really has like a mental breakdown um but it's only after she's totally emptied out and all of her expectations have been dashed and her sense of identity is completely crushed that she can start building a meaningful connection towards this place and also the language she's studying it's Speaker 3 (7:07) so interesting what you say there about the gaps because i think that must be true for lots of authors it's the unbearable mysteries of the things that you don't know that compels you to create a narrative that can tie things together the brain can't bear the space not being able to imagine them means that you do want to dwell really deeply yeah and and and even though you know this is it could be this version it could be this version that must be something where storytelling sort of comes from Speaker 3 (7:37) So Lily, when we meet her, she's so hard on herself. Yeah, I was going to say she's the most harsh perfectionist. She's an incredible student. She has worked very hard. Speaker 4 (7:46) She's extremely successful academically. Speaker 3 (7:49) And in terms Speaker 4 (7:49) of her peers, she Speaker 3 (7:49) seems to be the hardest working, putting the most effort in. And yet she's still... She also Speaker 4 (7:54) speaks Chinese in a way that Chinese people say, wow, your Chinese is good. But she's like, it's not enough because I can't discover. I can't discuss policy Speaker 3 (8:02) yet. Speaker 4 (8:02) I can't talk about a certain kind Speaker 3 (8:04) of grain farming. I don't know the word for silo. Like some of the stuff is so specific in terms of the lectures that she's doing in this language course. Speaker 2 (8:11) There is something funny about the expectations of being a heritage speaker versus learning a language for the first time. Like when I speak with an awful French accent, that's fine. It's impressive that I know the words at all. Actually, it's not really. I sound terrible. But there's no assumption that I should be fluent in French anyways. But because Lily's parents speak Mandarin and she looks the way she does, she feels like she's already at a deficit. She is already humiliated because her Chinese got so bad in the first place, which I think is a shame that lots of diaspora people carry around with them, even though it makes total sense if they've been raised in an Anglophone environment that English would be a dominant language. There is that secret guilt that they're not as good as their parents' mother tongue. Something else that is particular to Lily is there's hints of this layered throughout the book, but there's a very sad family reason why she is so... driven to perfection in the way that she is. She doesn't come from a great home environment. She has very unstable and toxic parents. And her older sister has struggled with a lot of mental health issues. But because her parents prize academic performance and achievement so much because that was their ticket out of poverty, that was how they came to the U.S. and sort of built a life. Speaker 2 (9:32) they then transfer all of their expectations onto Lily. And I wrote a line where Lily's mother said to her, well, it's good that you at least are good at school because otherwise your dad would have killed himself, which is just another one of the hilariously dark things that Lily kind of takes for granted. But I think that it... It's not purely coming from Lily herself. This has been a coping mechanism her entire life, that while there's screaming and shouting and volatility going on downstairs, if she can just lock herself in a room and do her homework, then nobody has a reason to yell at her. And I think that is coming from a place of emotional truth for me as well. And Speaker 3 (10:16) when things do get harder for Lily as the summer goes on, she does again always have her work to retreat. to even though we can see that when her brain is really busy it's really hard when she's sitting there with her cards and going over her words that she's getting distracted but still that is her place of sort of regimenting things like creating something solid Speaker 2 (10:35) Yeah, it really is a coping mechanism. Every time she's emotionally unsettled, she thinks, well, the thing that I'm good at and the thing I know I can be rewarded for and the thing I know that I can't get in trouble for is sitting and memorizing flashcards and mastering material. And part of what she has to learn is that outside of the really regimented structure of the reward system of being at a school. You have to learn to do things and find your own purpose in them and know what it's for rather than