This week, I went to listen to Rebecca F. Kuang. She's the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Phew. And yes, if she weren't so damn erudite, incisive, intelligent and just plain funny, it would be much, much simpler to hate her. In fact, it is difficult not to immediately immerse yourself into serious fandom.
As it was, her take on everything from the decline of twitter (archival, it's all about #booktok now and her younger students thank her for illuminating what it must have been like when Twitter was a thing) to the debate over who gets to write which books. Hint: she is a fierce defender of artistic freedom and thinks the questions that should be asked are not always the obvious ones. For instance, in writing, where are your sources from? Which sources have you looked at? Which sources have you not? And, in a theme she returned to several times, who actually is making money out of whose stories? Her hour-long talk left the audience aching for more. The Q & A was a forest of hands wanting to understand as much as they could about the character of June (Yellowface) and her motivations, whether she was a 'good' or 'bad' person; about novels to come (spoiler alert - the 1980s feature); how Phantom of the Opera has a lot to answer for and how a certain Popsugar dance video is a massive trigger.
For those of you who have not yet read Yellowface, the book centres around racial appropriation, the complexities of the publishing world, friendships and professional rivalry. The protagonist, Juniper Song, is most definitely not Asian-American, something that takes on an overwhelming importance in the novel. If this all sounds too serious, the theme maybe, the story flows rapidly around it, leaving the reader constantly wanting to know, 'what happens next?'
Quite often the heroes we look up to seem to have all too solid clay feet in a world where positive East Asian role models are sorely lacking. In this case, Rebecca Kuang lived up to, and more, every expectation I had of an author whose books I adore. I'm just waiting for the next one.
Comentarios