Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction

29:48Have you seen the Chinese series? I think it is for television. No, people have told me it's boring. It is now on YouTube with subtitles, which is not how I would prefer to watch it. There's a Netflix -Americanized version of it coming, which I fear for, and probably won't watch, but I'll look out for the reviews. What is it you do to follow what's new and coming out in China that's interesting to you? This is actually something I need to figure out because I am scaling back significantly from all social media and following people whose opinions I respect and seeing what's trending used to be my way of following not just what's coming out in China but what's going on all over the world.

30:36And I know that longer fine Twitter is a very interesting place to be. I've recently read a lot of literature about how it would help us if we slowed down. I don't know, there's this term, slow news that I really can't define for you. but boils down to being much more careful about the ideas that we're ingesting and turning them over and reading thorough comprehensive coverage than quick takes. But I have yet to figure out exactly what those sources should be. I'll take recommendations if you have them. No, I have zero. I mean, I count on people like you. Maybe you tweet something or it's in one of your talks, one of your interviews, but I have no sources anymore and I don't go to China anymore.

31:16I'm afraid too, frankly. Well, you see my great advantages that I have Chinese family members, and I also have Chinese classmates and colleagues at a department that focuses specifically on these topics. So I can just wander into a department talk or ask people what they're researching, but I would like to find some new sources and newsletters and podcasts that aren't just the hottest underdeveloped new take on Twitter, but that's the work in progress for me. What surprised you most about your recent Taiwan trip? Hmm. This is a great question because a lot of things were delightful and new and interesting, but I'm trying to sort through preconceptions about what life would be like and if any of those was proven false in a really significant way.

32:09This is hard because I'd previously been to Taiwan in 2017, I don't have to say. So I knew a bit about what I was going to get into. It surprises me each time how retro it feels. That's what I would say. So the first time I went there, I think, was 1988 or 89. And if I go more recently, of course it's different, but it's not nearly as different as I would expect. It's not different in the way that either, say, South Korea or even Thailand would be different. It looks to me early 1990s somehow and that it hasn't, it has changed an enormous amount. But in terms of the externals, I'm always surprised how little it's changed.

32:58Well, I can't compare with the 80s and 90s, so I couldn't say. I will say one thing that comes up with in conversations with all my friends in Boston for asking, oh, what's Taipei like is that the public transportation is just so vastly superior to most public transportation in the US. I mean the Jowing System comes regularly, frequently, there's a little sign that tells you at five second intervals how long until the next train, people line up, they queue to get on the train. There's actually little lines drawn on the platform so that people politely wait their turn, people don't eat or drink.

33:41Oh, I, yeah, actually, okay, here's my answer from what surprised me the most. I knew there were rules about no eating or drinking on the subway, but I thought this was just things that could have an odor right or could possibly make a mess. So we were on the red line headed to Beto and the old lady across from me. So I take a sip of water and she says you can't do that. And I'm stunned, first of all, that she's talking to me, but also that you can't even drink water on the subway. But apparently this is a rule. And supposedly most people are lax about it, and not everybody will get it falling.

34:16Your grill, like that old lady that didn't but that road did surprise me. I'm not sure what the reasoning is. It surprises me how Japanese, a lot of Taiwanese infrastructure feels, including the subway, the way the electric lines are laid out the way many of the streets or corners or intersections look and feel. It's more Japanese in origin than I would have ever thought until I went. Would you prefer the food in Taipei or Beijing if you had to choose? I haven't lived in Beijing since 2015 so I couldn't say I do think the food in Taipei was incredible and I miss it every day. I very much like Western Chinese food and Sichuan and Yunnan and those to me are better represented in Beijing may have changed since I've been there but I don't think it has if anything there's probably more of it so I would vote for Beijing.

35:11It's the one place in China where you can get food from almost all other parts of China. Maybe. I do remember eating very well when I was in Beijing but I was especially delighted delighted with the soybean pudding and Taipei because that's a little difficult to get here in the state. So you're called that even at the local dim sum restaurant you could only get it on Sundays at specific hours and Taipei it's everywhere and it's so inexpensive and there were weeks where I had a progress every single day and it was marvelous. Going back to the distant past, what is it about the 1830s in Victorian England that you find so interesting?

35:51Everyone has such a preference for the late 19th century when we think about the Victorian era and contemporary film and novels that are set in the Victorian era. They're all post -the -industrial revolution. They're post -ickens. They're post -the inventions of all sorts of technologies that linger in our imagination as the steampunk Victorian era aesthetic. So when I was drafting Babel and doing some research into what technology's existed, what my character's life sort of been like, I was at first disappointed to find that I couldn't rely on shows like Penny Dread for, right, things said in the late 19th century because a lot of that stuff had not been invented yet and the reason why is because the Industrial revolutions really kicking off in the early half of the 20th century.

36:47And as I sat with that for a while, I realized I should not be so disappointed to be on the early end of the Victorians, but rather that this too is an era of incredible change and also the start of incredible social inequality. And this is when the movements that later, disraeli and gate skill and Dickens were describing, meaning this is the seed of all that tremendous social change. Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world? What do you mean by work so much better? Well, Singapore today per capita. It's a richer nation than the United States.

37:29So it's hard to think, well, I'd rather go back and redo that whole history. If you're a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, well, we'll take what we got. But it was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us. People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right? Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China, and now that it's back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again. So it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism. It's true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era and that would take hours and hours to unpack.

38:10I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about historical counterfactual such as, oh, if it were not for the British Empire, Wood Singham Port have the economy does today or would Hong Kong have the culture it does today because we don't really know, but also I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do as well because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. So it feels like a kind of useless comparison to say, oh why has Hong Kong prospered under British well -well India, hasn't, et cetera.

38:55But it seems if anywhere we know it's Hong Kong, you can look at Guangzhou. It's a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. And without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would have been about those of the rest of southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. not not others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn't that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison? Maybe. Again, I'm not a historian, so I don't have a lot to say about this.

39:33I just think it's pretty tricky to argue that places prosper solely due to British presence when, you know, without the British there are lots of alternate ways. things could have gone and we just don't know. Your book Yellow Face, quite a bit of the plot revolves around what one might call a co -authored novel. Why are there not more co -authored novels? There's plenty of co -authored works in scholarship, right? Often to the benefit of the work. Certainly, movies television by their nature are co -authored. A lot of great music, most great music is done in groups, right? rather than, oh, just Bob Dylan, though he's wonderful.

40:16What is it about fiction that makes co -authorship so difficult? Perhaps just that writers aren't possible to work with, and we'll become possessive and act like divas about their creative territory. But, well, I don't play in a band, so I don't know if writing music as part of a group is different in that everyone has their designated roles, like the vocalist focuses on the vocals, the guitarist focuses on the guitar, et cetera. Maybe watching that Beatles document you would help with this, actually. But the problem with co -writing a book is that it's really hard to designate who's in charge of what when all the pieces are constantly in flux and at least my writing process means that anything can change it, any given moment, a sentence that I really like and act three, you might mean that I go back and change any number of things about act one.

41:13And first of all, logistically, that just makes it a nightmare for the other person to keep announcing that you've changed your mind about the direction of the book. But unless you're writing a book such as, for instance, this is how you lose the time war, which is told in a pistol -air format where the two co -authors just wrote the two different perspectives of the two main characters. Aside from cases where the narrative chunks are very clearly delineated, I think it becomes almost impossible to merge your voices into an organic hole while taking into account the multiple changes and creative differences that are going to crop up along the way.

41:56I mean, I'm so territorial and personicity about my work that I refuse to show or readjust to anybody until there's a fairly clean initial version that we can then hack apart and make edits to, but if somebody asks me to co -write a novel with somebody else, I mean only one of us would be alive at the end of the process. But you could appoint a dictator, right? Someone in charge have that settled by contract. One of you pays the other, some share of the royalties, and you could have the final word. So I've co -authored plenty of things, never fiction, not deliberately fiction at least, and they've all worked out great, in fact.

42:35I'm sure that it's much easier to do with nonfiction, and I also can only speak for my own relationship to writing. I'm sure there are lots of other authors who would happily work with co -authors, but it is such an intimate process that involves a deep understanding of every character and also deep understanding of yourself, I think that I become a different person with each novel I write and everything is a bit like therapy in a sense. Not that I'm exactly chronicling my emotional journeys, but they have to do with what's troubling me at the time and what questions are acutely bothering me and to split this psychological burden across two people would mean that not only do we have to clarify our relationships to the text, but we'd also have to clarify our relationships to each other.

43:26So yeah, we would end up killing each other or getting married, I think. And I'm already getting married, so that's not interesting to me. Another theme in yellow face. Why is it that the internet brings out the mean side of people so much? Why do you think this is the case? I've thought about it a long time. I don't feel I understand it very well, But it could be that we're naturally somewhat mean and judgmental. And there's something softening about face -to -face contact. But it's the absence of the face -to -face contact that matters, not because it's the internet. That's the closest I've come to an answer.

44:08That our internet selves are not so far from our real selves. And the other is an adjustment that we're used to making to live in civilized society. I think that's right. There is the protection of anonymity. If you're just a string of letters, you can spew whatever you want and not deal with the consequences the same way you would if you were sitting next to somebody in real life. I think another complicating factor is that the internet is so distracting and it doesn't encourage us to think in nuance or to slow down or consider multiple sides of a problem. It is an immense amount of stimulation all at once that it rewards quick, easy, reductive judgments.

45:00I mean this is how many tweets go viral, right? They're very funny but they also use a shorthand to capture some kind of emotion or quick judgment statement about a problem and usually it's problems that resist and are very vulnerable to these quick judgment statements. And when you look at everything in binary reductive terms, then of course, tribalism becomes a threat and it's easy to devolve into the easiest, coolest judgments about others rather than considering that even people you disagree deeply with might have a point. From one of your short stories, Star Wars, the Empire strikes back.

45:45Why don't Imperial Walkers have a lower center of gravity? I don't know. You have to ask their engineers. I understand almost nothing about the manufacture of spaceships. They have these long spindly legs, right? And they fire these very weak charges. And presumably they're shooting at things on the ground, right? so they don't need to be up that high if anything that makes the charge as weaker. I don't know. I just think it looks really fun on screen. I think there's something to be said for spaceships or alien craft that resemble animals to us because it's an easy pattern that we can fit them to in terms of how they move and how we assess them as threats.

46:30And also importantly, it gives an easy solution for low -tech rebels to attack. Some questions about your own history. How do you feel it influenced you to grow up in Dallas? Well, for a long time, I had a bit of a southern twang in my English and my parents were very tickled by this. Well, first I had a pretty obvious Chinese accent and then as I spent more time in American public schools, I lost that and developed quite a text and accent. And they thought it was the funniest thing in the world. So sometimes they would have dinner parties and invite your Chinese American friends and they would ask my sister and I to come downstairs and recite a Pledge of Allegiance of the most exaggerated text and accent we could.

47:20And everyone thought it was great fun. So there's some deeper point here about identity and accents and linguistic play, but that's just the first thing that comes to mind. How is it you think that doing so much debate influenced your writing? I am still friends with a lot of debate coaches, a lot of the folks who I competed against or was on a debate team with, they still work in debate education and they coach debates. So we actually have a lot of conversations about how we think it benefits high schools, is how it trains us to think what debate is good for and also what debate is not good for.

47:59I think there are two main benefits I took from debate. The first is that I've never been afraid of public speaking, at least not since ninth grade, and this is a tremendous advantage, especially if you're being sent out on BookTor. It is really good not to get stage fright before you step about in front of hundreds of people. And the second thing I took away from debate is this kind of electric sense of knowing when you've connected with an audience, because especially in the final speeches, right? When you have to tie everything together and you only have three minutes to make all your most important points.

48:38And especially later on in a tournament where the rooms might be packed with spectators, you have this spidey sense of when a sentence you've just uttered resonates with the crowd. You can feel the crowd's energy. You know exactly what to say that we'll get people on your side who know how to phrase things and then most concise and affectively compelling way, which is not to say I'm always very good at this, but I always knew when I had done it successfully. And I think that translates into writing compelling fiction because you know when you're boring the audience. You know when you've gone on too long about a tangent that nobody really cares about.

49:17You have that ticking clock in the back of your head and you know you've got to come around and get right to the point, the core, the center, the electric sentience that the reader is really there for. And I don't strike that chord all the time, but I know when I have, and I think debate has been very valuable in inculcating that instinct. But there are, well you didn't ask this, but I think there are lots of things that debate is not good for. What is that not good for? Well, you simply can't affirm or negate most of the resolutions that high school debaters are asked to talk about. And I think to be encourages thinking about these statements in terms of the truth and in terms of who's right or wrong rather than what are all the sides of the statement and how can we sift through all the voices and conversations going on to arrive at a compromise that benefits the most people.

50:14And since the point of debate is to win, right, you are naturally not thinking about, well, what are the things my opponent is right about? This is not a good instinct to take into college. It will make you the asshole and discussion seminars if you are only concerned with being right and getting the crowd on your side rather than seeking the truth, and especially not good for public office, I think it's devastating actually when we have public figures who are more interested in putting each other down and proving that they've done more research, they're more clever, they have equipping your terms of phrase rather than pursuing some kind of collaborative search for the truth.

50:57You once said that your writing is inspired by place and a sense of place. What does that mean? Oh, that's really simple. I just end up writing stories about where I am, what I'm eating, what I'm looking at, or I'm walking, what language I'm living in, what stories I'm hearing, and I think all right, those are inspired by where they are. So when I was writing the popular trilogy, or at least when I started, I was living in Beijing. Then when I started writing Babel, I was at Oxford when I wrote yellow face this was doing mid -2021 so we were all at home and largely existing on the internet which was the worst place to be and now I'm writing a book.

51:41That is normally set in hell but psychologically set in a PhD program. Rates of depression amongst graduate students, they measure as being very high today in the United States and also I think in England. Why use that? It feels like it should be this wonderful time in one's life. You get to work with ideas. There's some chance you're not pressured to earn money. Not true for everyone, but for many people. And yet rates of serious depression can be 25 % or higher. I mean, you're in graduate school now. How do you think about what's going on there? Do you work with graduate students now? all the time, absolutely.

52:22And I don't feel it's true of the ones I have contact with. But when I meet others, I hear about it plenty and other institutions. To me, my own institution feels very high morale for whatever reasons. Do you have a guess about why your students might be different? I think they have somehow a greater sense of purpose of using economics to improve the world. and less a sense of, well, I need to write this 90 -page paper and make it perfect or no one will give me a job. And missing out on some of that latter form of social anxiety is in some ways bad for them, but it keeps them happier and actually fairly productive.

53:02So I think sense of mission is the difference. That's interesting. I am tempted to agree with you that grad school should be the happiest time of your life, and that really grad students don't have all that much to complain about because when you think about the setup, you're being paid to just read and talk and research about the questions that are the most interesting questions to you in the world. That's why you would have entered the fields and there are very few obligations other than teaching. And again, teaching should be a great pleasure because you get to enter the classroom and talk about that, which is most interesting to you.

53:43That being said, there are a lot of reasons why grad students I know today are deeply depressed and pessimistic about their future prospects and the first is that the job market is awful. I mostly know humanities students, right? People who study English literature or comparative literature or philosophy or American studies, etc. And I'm curious if you disagree This might be one difference between the grad students I know and economists, which is that if they don't get a job in which they're able to teach and research those subjects, then there aren't a lot of other All academia prospects where they can put those skills to good use.

54:27I mean I can think of vanishingly few tenure track jobs in English and even fewer industry jobs that value the ability to critically read. I don't know, Jane Austen, right? So maybe that's part of it, knowing that they are spending their 20s in a field that will not reward them and means that they probably will have to start completely over in a different career once they've graduated. I agree that's a difference. Let's say one thinks about you and writing. So I've never counted the number of pages you've written, but it's a pretty high number, right? And I know plenty of other graduate students, they have trouble writing anything at all.

55:08That's not you. So what's the thing in you that makes you so extreme and different from a lot of other people who have trouble writing? Well, for me it's a compulsion. So if I'm not writing, then I don't feel right. I feel extremely unsatisfied. I am the kind of person who's really bad at being on holiday. And if I go on holiday that it must be a productive holiday, the kind where I am up and walking and roaming the city from sunrise to sunset and absolutely exhausting myself because I do very badly at sitting around and twiddling my thumbs and I think there is a great pleasure in creation and playing around with words and figuring out how not just to express myself but to summarize is strains of history or retell myths or anecdotes that I've heard in the past.

56:08And this is just such an ongoing compulsion that if I stop then that doesn't feel like rest or a default to normal, the normal state is writing. And I think I'm just built like this and it's not a productivity hacks and people really want to write. And other people have other hobbies and passions and things that are pleasurable to them. I tell people who want to write, they should try to write every single day without exception. They don't all like hearing that and obviously it's not how every writer works but it's a good initial test to see whether you really want to be a writer. You're writing side which has been very successful.

56:51You're scholarly study side. How do those two asymptote together into something that you will keep on doing? Thank you. Have a take on that. This is an ongoing problem for me because... Is it a problem though? Sorry to interrupt. It's something that I'm trying to figure out. There doesn't seem to be a lot of value in having published five, six novels on the job market in the fields that I would like to get hired in. So there seems to be a significant trade -off between focusing on my fiction career and doing well in my studies. I'm also at a period in my studies where it's sink or swim, either I commit now or I don't, because you can kind of muddle through and undergraduate degree while having your soul focused elsewhere.

57:46And I think this is even true for master's degrees in the first few years of the PhD program. but reading for your qualifying exams and writing a dissertation, I think involves the all -encompassing focus that I'm used to bringing to my manuscripts and they demand that I'm thinking about those problems every second of every day. At the same time, I'm on contract for at least three new books at the moment, so this makes scheduling very difficult and the only way I've been able to strike some kind of balances in between is to become a devotee of Cal Newport. I don't know if you've had Cal Newport on the podcast.

58:25No, but I know him. I know he's worked. I recently read digital minimalism because I was fed up with social media. I found it very compelling and then I read deep work too. And I know lots of people have strong feelings going about all those books. I think I'm the kind of person who that advice is very helpful for the kind of extremist approach to deep work And this is just what I do now. I have gotten pretty strict about whose emails I answer when I answer emails Who I make time for and who I don't so that I'm able to spend the most productive and focused hours of my day Which is from 9 to 12 in the morning writing fiction and then as the hours trickle on after that of my brain becomes more and more tired.

59:10I shift to tasks that are less and less engaging until by the end of the day. I'm just firing off. Yes, thank you. Sounds good in my inbox. We have the same most productive hours to do the moment also. Do you at all worry if your writing is inspired by a sense of place and you stop moving around a lot which might happen in your life that you'll asymptote into a single style of writing or that's something you would welcome. Because all your books are in quite different styles, genres. Some of them you couldn't easily categorize, right? Will you ask some tote or does it become a big thing moving outwards in all directions at once?

59:50This is not a worry for me because I never intend to settle in one place. I like the sense of adventure too much. And even if I'm based for nine months of the year at some academic institution that still leaves the summer to explore and learn and think in new languages. I very much make it a priority to have the flexibility to pick up everything and move to a different city at any stage in my life. And this is what I've structured a lot of my life around having that ability to learn and become a new person and shed my skin every few years. So this is not to worry to me because it is the thing that I've made all my decisions to allow me to do.

1:00:34Ask two questions and they're related. First, if you could be a tourist of sorts going back into the past, you spend six months in a time and place of your choosing. You automatically know the language. You have whatever immunological protections you might need. Where do you spend that six months? I am fascinated by the Cold War psyche and this might be because we're reading Watchmen right now, which is a comic book that I'd slept on for many years and I hadn't realized what a Cold War work of fiction it was, but I was born in 96, right? So I know from that period is mediated through film and from novels and it's just such an extraordinary mindset to think that any moment now the whole world might go extinct to be told at school that if you duck under your desk you might survive a nuclear blast and I would really like to just walk around and talk to people to understand how people felt and how people were living.

1:01:40Some of that you can still pick up by talking to older people now of course you can't live in it but it's not completely gone. Yeah, that's true. And last question, you get to spend six months in the future somewhere now. Imagine you're relieved from your, you finished up at Yale, done whatever, and you can pick six months and live there somewhere you haven't lived yet. Where do you pick and why? The next place, so to speak, unconstrained. Well, I'd like to go somewhere really speak Chinese, because I don't spend enough time living in Chinese and when I was in Taipei this past summer and living it in it for most hours during the day, I felt that pathways were being unlocked in my brain and my ability to read and an interpret text was improving by huge margins but I've already lived in Taipei so I can't say that I might just go on a backpacking trip for six months across all of the cities and villages in Taiwan that I haven't been to.

1:02:46And I've only been to Taipei. I haven't been to Tai Nargosham or any of the other major regions. So it's a bit of a cheating answer, but these are very new places for me. So that's what I would want to do. And also something that is a realistic journey for me in the near future. The rest of the country is very different from Taipei. I think at least the parts I've been to. Anyway, Rebecca, Becca, thank you very much. Her new book loved it yellow face. Out this year and she tells us over time, there will be at least three more books coming. I'm sure many more. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler.

1:03:26You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. on Twitter, I'm Attyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convuse. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.