R.F. Kuang will be appearing as part of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures in the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall at 7PM on Thursday September 10th.
There is a strange kind of homesickness reserved for a home that may never have existed.
For people raised between languages, countries and versions of themselves, “going back” can take on the force of mythology. Learn the language properly, visit the right place, ask the grandparents the questions you were too young to think of before. Recover enough history, and perhaps some missing piece of the self will click into place.
R.F. Kuang knows that fantasy intimately. She also no longer quite believes it. “I think that for a lot of people in a diaspora, there’s this fantasy of being able to return,” Kuang says. “Which is really a fantasy of a version of yourself that you could never be again. A version of yourself that never left.”
It is the animating tension behind Taipei Story, Kuang’s new novel, out Sept. 8 from William Morrow.
Kuang’s debut, The Poppy War, drew on Chinese history she studied at Georgetown and grew into a trilogy. She followed it with Babel, about translation and British imperialism; Yellowface, a satire of race and publishing; and 2025’s Katabasis, a dark exploration of ambition and power in elite academia.
Taipei Story, by contrast, has “no empire, no explosions,” Kuang says. “It’s not very plotty. There are no twists. There are no battle scenes. All the action kind of happens internally.”
Its protagonist, Lily Chen, is a Chinese American Yale freshman studying Mandarin in Taipei, hoping fluency might bring her closer to her heritage. Instead, she feels increasingly out of place. When her grandfather dies, her search for belonging takes on new urgency: there are questions about her family’s past she may have waited too long to ask.
Kuang puts Lily’s predicament more starkly: she is trying to “succeed at having a cultural identity.”
It is a question that resonates with Kuang’s own life. Born in Guangzhou in 1996, she moved to the United States at five and grew up near Dallas, often one of the only Chinese children in her classroom. She later studied Chinese history at Georgetown, became a Marshall Scholar, and pursued graduate study at Cambridge, Oxford and Yale, where her research included diaspora, Sinophone literature and Asian American literature. She is now the Millard Distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross.
Another key to the novel is contained in its title. Kuang cites Edward Yang’s 1985 film Taipei Story and, more broadly, the Taiwanese New Wave cinema of the 1980s as major influences, calling her title a “love letter” to Yang’s film and the artistic movement around it.
But Kuang’s novel approaches the question of migration from the opposite direction. Yang’s film arrived as Taiwan was rapidly modernizing, with young people confronting whether to stay or leave. Four decades later, Kuang is interested in what happens after someone has left.
“If you left,” she says, “what does coming back look like?”
Kuang says the answer begins with surrendering the idea that returning can somehow undo leaving. “If you let go of that fantasy,” she says, “if you let go of the idea of perfection … then that actually frees you up to have a new and interesting and vulnerable relationship with a place that you couldn’t have had before.”
Ahead of the release of Taipei Story, Kuang spoke about language and belonging, the limits of homecoming, Taiwanese cinema, writing across genres and what can be gained by admitting that sometimes, you simply don’t know.
Q. You immigrated from Guangzhou when you were about five. What was that transition like?
R.F. Kuang: It was an adjustment. My siblings and I had to learn to speak English and get used to going to a school where we were the only Chinese kids in our classrooms.
But honestly, I loved my childhood. I spent a lot of time playing in the woods.
Q. You later spent years studying Chinese history and literature academically. Did it help you understand your own identity?
Kuang: I think it definitely helped me understand that identity. It helped me talk to my grandparents and learn their stories and everything they had been through.
So I’m really glad I went back and started learning Chinese when I was in college.
Q. What is your relationship with Mandarin now? Do you feel like the same person in Chinese and English?
Kuang: I think for a long time I did feel younger in Mandarin, and that’s just because Mandarin for me was associated with talking to my parents and being a young child at home.
But as I got better at Mandarin as a professional language and as a literary language, I think my personalities in both languages have converged.
Q. Is there anything that is easier for you to express in Chinese?
Kuang: Family issues. I think it’s a lot easier for me to talk about people’s emotions and the dynamics of people’s relationships in depth.
And, yeah, there are lots of phrases in Chinese that we don’t have a perfect equivalent for in English. I talk about a lot of them throughout the book.
Q. Taipei Story is interested in what happens when the diasporic fantasy of homecoming doesn’t work. Do you think diaspora creates an imagined version of home that no actual city or country could satisfy?
Kuang: I think that for a lot of people in a diaspora, there’s this fantasy of being able to return, which is really a fantasy of a version of yourself that you could never be again. A version of yourself that never left.
And I think because there’s no way to ever become that person, a lot of people are disappointed when they return and they find everything is different and they don’t quite belong. But one of the arguments that the novel is making is that if you let go of that fantasy, if you let go of the idea of perfection, if you stop thinking that all of your problems wouldn’t have existed if you had just never left, then that actually frees you up to have a new and interesting and vulnerable relationship with a place that you couldn’t have had before.
Q. Why call it Taipei Story?
Kuang: There’s a fantastic film called Taipei Story from the ’80s, and I’m very influenced by that era of Taiwanese cinema.
So it was like a love letter to that film and to that artistic movement, because they are also thinking about diaspora, but they’re thinking about leaving. They’re thinking about what it means to stay or go in Taiwan in a globalized world. And 40 years later, I’m thinking about what it means to return.
Q. Edward Yang and other Taiwanese New Wave directors created such powerful images of Taipei. How did you approach writing a city that already has that cinematic history?
Kuang: When I think about Taiwanese New Wave cinema and the directors working in the ’80s, such as Edward Yang, I don’t read them so much as building a mythology of their home, but rather interrogating the mythologies that have been projected onto it.
Taipei Story comes about 40 years after the original film. The film is created at a moment of Taiwanese modernization and entering the global economy, and it’s asking questions about what the best future is for two young Taiwanese people: Is it to stay, or is it to go?
And Taipei Story, written in the 2020s, after a lot of these movements have played out, is asking the question: Well, if you left, what does coming back look like? What does reconnection look like?
I think that’s how they’re in conversation with each other.
Q. What does Lily misunderstand about Taipei when she first arrives?
Kuang: Pretty much everything.
She thinks she’s going to feel at home. She doesn’t. She thinks she’s going to feel some sort of familial connection to Taiwan. She doesn’t. Her family’s never lived in Taiwan. She’s the first person in her family to have stepped foot there.
She thinks there’s something about Mandarin Chinese that is essential to Taiwanese identity. That’s not true. Mandarin only became a dominant language in the middle of the 20th century for really historically contingent reasons.
She doesn’t understand the multiple ethnic groups and languages spoken in Taiwan. She doesn’t understand the complexities of Taiwan’s relationship to mainland China or the history of martial law in Taiwan under the Nationalist Party. She doesn’t understand local politics.
She gets pretty much everything wrong.
So the book is very much written from the perspective of an American college student who goes abroad with one idea of the world and comes back with another.
Q. Were those mistakes drawn at all from mistakes you made when you were younger?
Kuang: When I was a college student, I had the same misunderstandings because, well, first of all, I was American.
And second of all, I was a teenager. And American teenagers, you know, there’s a lot of learning to do. I think that’s just going to be a lifelong journey for me: continuing to study Chinese and continuing to go back and understand more complex and nuanced details about places where I am an outsider.
Q. That word, “outsider,” becomes important in the novel. Lily seems convinced she can somehow become successfully Chinese if she studies enough. Were you interested in questioning whether cultural identity itself can be mastered?
Kuang: Not so much that identity can be mastered through research, but that one can succeed at having a cultural identity.
Lily’s main insecurity is that she doesn’t want to come off like a foreigner. She doesn’t want people to know that she’s American, and she’s afraid of seeming like a tourist. And the ethical position the novel moves toward at the end is: It’s okay to admit that you’re an outsider. It’s okay that you don’t fully belong in a place, that you’re not a local.
Lily is so full of judgments about other people, but it’s only when you admit that you don’t know the cultural norms and you need help that you can start to learn and make meaningful connections with people.
At the start of the book, Lily is still caught in this trap of wanting to be so perfectly Chinese and assimilate so perfectly that she actually doesn’t dare interact with Taiwanese society in any meaningful way.
Q. Lily also wants access to her family’s past. Yet some relatives don’t want to tell her everything. What interested you in the conflict between wanting your family history and another person’s right not to revisit it?
Kuang: Going back to the diaspora fantasy we were talking about, I think there’s also this fantasy of understanding and fitting in with the lineage that your parents and grandparents are a part of.
And we think part of that is being entitled to their life stories: knowing everything that they lived through, getting all the details. I wanted to portray a dynamic where actually the people that Lily is asking this from don’t want to share. It’s not a happy memory for them. They don’t understand why they would continue to revisit it. From their perspective, it’s ideal if Lily doesn’t have to think about the things that they did. But Lily interprets that as rejection. She thinks that means they don’t want her fully in their family.
Q. You spent time in Taipei before writing the novel. How long were you there, and what could you only learn by physically being in the city?
Kuang: I was there for a little over two months. I think a lot of the details of place: how the heat felt, descriptions of urban space, descriptions of the food in particular. Just all of that sensory information I could only get when I was physically there.
I had a lot of fun describing restaurants and cafes that they go to. There’s a movie theater that she visits quite a lot. I went to that movie theater. And also how she feels walking around the major tourist destinations, the places that everybody goes to, and thinking about the misunderstandings she has about the importance of those Nationalist monuments and how that’s different from the truth of how local Taiwanese people think about those monuments. All of that place detail is very much part of the novel.
Q. How much of yourself is in Lily?
Kuang: A little bit. I put a little bit of myself in every character that I write.
But Lily and I are very different. She’s much younger than me. She reacts to situations in ways that I wouldn’t. She feels a lot more strongly than I do. She makes more mistakes than I do.
She’s just a much more interesting character for a piece of fiction.
Q. When did you begin writing Taipei Story?
Kuang: I would say maybe the fall of 2024 is when I started drafting the novel.
By April of 2025, I had a first draft ready to show my editor. So I think it took about seven to eight months just for the first draft, but then another year of editing and revision and polishing the story.
Q. What does your writing day look like?
Kuang: I work best in the mornings.
My normal routine is I wake up, I go on a run and then I write for a couple of hours.
It’s really simple.
Q. Your 20s have been unusually achievement-heavy: bestselling novels alongside Cambridge, Oxford and Yale. Where does that drive come from?
Kuang: I think I’m just really curious, and I really like to read, and I like to write.
So I’ve picked professions where I get to read a lot and I get to write a lot. And I just feel very lucky that it’s my job to tell stories and to think about the ways that other people have told stories. I think that’s such a massive privilege and blessing.
Q. You’ve moved from military fantasy to historical fantasy, publishing satire, dark academia and now contemporary literary fiction. Why keep changing genres?
Kuang: I just think I have a lot of different interests, and I like to read very broadly.
I don’t like to do the same thing twice.
Every few years I get very excited about a new set of stylistic expectations and tropes and norms, and then I read around that genre to really understand the voice of that genre. And then I try something in that space myself.
I think that’s how I’ll always be as a storyteller. I like the constant evolution.
Q. You started The Poppy War when you were 19. How different is the writer sitting here now?
Kuang: I started writing The Poppy War when I was 19, so over 10 years ago now.
I’ve changed in almost every way as a writer. I think my writing process has really slowed down. My research process has become deeper and richer as I’ve come to understand more of the world and my research skills have improved.
Stylistically, I have different interests. Thematically, I have different interests. So many different things. I’m very fortunate that I have publishers who are willing to let me keep trying out new things.
Q. Is there a risk to changing so much when readers have very specific expectations of an R.F. Kuang novel?
Kuang: The biggest thing is just doing something new. People enjoy an author’s writing and they might expect work because they know what they expect from me.
I can’t do the same thing twice, and I would never want to try to. And I also can’t write to market expectations. I can only write what’s really interesting to me.
You always take the risk that you write something your readers won’t like, or it’s not what they want to read in that particular moment. But the previous books will always be there.
Q. You have lived in a remarkable number of places. After writing a book preoccupied with returning home, what does “home” mean to you?
Kuang: I’ve always moved around a lot. Guangzhou, China, has been home. Dallas, Texas. Washington, D.C. Oxford and Cambridge have both been home for a while. New Haven was home. Now it’s Boston. So I just feel, again, really lucky that I’ve gotten to learn so many places.
