Learning From Shame: R.F. Kuang on Diaspora, Language and Writing Young Protagonists

R.F. Kuang is, in the best sense, a literary chameleon. Each one of her novels presents a different setting and dynamic, but her oeuvre is unified by careful thought, sharp style, and an uncanny ability to make the pages want to turn. Taipei Story, her seventh book since 2018, is about Lily, a college freshman spending a summer abroad in Taiwan to learn Mandarin. She struggles with assimilation, her roommate, Anna, her internet-famous classmate, JC, her self-perception, and the death of her grandfather.

Kuang and I spoke earlier this month—she is as smart in person as she is on the page, funny, insightful, and extremely curious. An edited version of our conversation follows:

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Adam Dalva: Your book activates so much nostalgia—of course I didn’t have Lily’s exact experience, but I do remember the alienation of being a college student abroad and struggling with both my personal life and a new language. Were you thinking about the way that we look back at this sort of time and say, “Oh my God, what was I doing?”

R.F. Kuang: I was very excited to write a protagonist who was so much younger than me, because up until this point all of my characters have been aging as I age. I started writing the Poppy War trilogy when I was a teenager, and everyone’s a teenager. In Babel, they’re undergrads. In Katabasis, they are PhD students. I just turned 30 this year, and I went back a decade and wrote somebody on the cusp of adulthood. And she’s so book smart, but so amazingly stupid. I found that really fun.

Language is something that is practiced and learned and something that you can be awful at, and also something that you can get better at. But the only way that you get better is by making mistakes.

It’s not from a position of elder arrogance. “I’m 30 now, so I can make fun of the youths.” It’s more being able to let go of a fear of sounding stupid when I’m old enough to see that it really doesn’t matter, that I’d rather make mistakes in public and on the page. When I was a younger writer, I was so nervous about my reader misinterpreting my work or drawing the wrong conclusions about what I believed or my level of expertise, and I tried to show my work on the page. Now I would rather be visibly struggling to learn new material and wrestle with difficult concepts than to be so rigidly attached to an identity of being totally prepared and correct at every turn. Life isn’t an oral exam. I’m messy and the character is messy and we learn a lot more from our mistakes than from received textbook beliefs.

I found it productive to root the narrating voice in somebody for whom the world makes no sense. And the worst part is she thinks she has a grasp on it. She thinks she gets the gist of geopolitics. She thinks she understands the US-Taiwan relationship, the history of mainland China, and the history of Mandarin language education in Taiwan. And she’s just so wrong about everything.

AD: All of that opens so many narrative possibilities for shame and humiliation—and I know from reading your recent Substack essay that shame was one of your interests in this novel.

RK: I think shame and bilingualism go hand-in-hand. Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics was instructive for me here. I’m interested in people for whom identity, especially racial, cultural identity, is a card that you play to establish that you have the upper hand, that your word ought to be given more weight. I explored this from a different angle in Yellowface, which is a satire about people making different claims to cultural authority and acting as cultural gatekeepers on the basis of pretty flimsy credentials.

There’s something similar going on with bilingualism. It’s a great source of shame and embarrassment when you don’t have the fluency that your appearance or social position would indicate that you should have. And people also treat their varying levels of fluency as games of one-upmanship. When you go to a Chinese restaurant with a bunch of other Chinese Americans and one of them can just rattle off all the names of dishes on the menu and you can’t even ask for tea, the attitude being signaled is, “Oh, I’m better than you. I’m more Chinese than you. I’m more connected than you.” So a lot of people don’t speak in Chinese because they don’t want to signal, with their accents or poor grammar, that they are less than.

Taipei Story is interested in severing the entitlements of blood or ethnicity from language ability. Language doesn’t come in your blood. Nobody’s born speaking a language. I’m interested in picking apart what the theorist Rey Chow calls the “myth of consanguinity” in her critique of the concept of the “native speaker.” Language is something that is practiced and learned and something that you can be awful at, and also something that you can get better at. But the only way that you get better is by making mistakes.

I’m fascinated in how the language classroom is a daily exercise in shame and humiliation. Those are productive things. The willingness to go in every day and make a total fool of yourself to a room of 10 other people in front of a language teacher who’s actively laughing at you. David Sedaris has a wonderful essay about learning French where he talks about shame almost as a kink. It’s a feeling you grow to enjoy, because unless you were going through that friction, you would be making no progress at all.

AD: I feel very inspired by that as someone who fails at language acquisition of all sorts. And I was thinking about how the final test for learning a language is being casual in a restaurant, whereas the final test, if you’re a student studying Descartes, is an exam about Descartes.

RK: Oh, that’s such a good point. I feel that way, especially in French. I have pretty good reading fluency in French, but almost no speaking ability. And I still wouldn’t dare to order myself breakfast at a Parisian cafe. There’s a moment near the end of the book where Lily is thinking about what acquiring all this Chinese has gotten her, as opposed to playing the guitar or carpentry or woodworking or visual arts. Obviously learning languages is a wonderful thing, but in a different case, particularly for a heritage speaker, it just puts you back at square one amongst all the other people who already speak and live and work in that language.

AD: Taipei Story uses the death of Lily’s grandfather as a counter example of what language can do. I was just reading the Proust sequence where Marcel’s grandmother dies, which is maybe my favorite scene in literature. A grandparent dying is such an intense experience, the repository of family history being lost. And yet the lead has this thought, paraphrasing, that you actually don’t get that much social mileage out of a grandparent dying. So she’s experiencing this deep loss, but the people around her don’t particularly care. And at the same time, she begins to get obsessed with the questions she wishes she could have asked about him about his time in Cambodia. Language would have been a way to cross that divide, but she can’t even go to the funeral. She can just go to the airport to meet her mother for a few hours.

RK: I don’t like being in airports, but I really like airport scenes, especially those in Taiwanese cinema—for instance, the farewell scene in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet really gets me. I was thinking, for people who really exist in multiple cultures, multiple languages, that the flight over is such a strange space where you’re literally caught in the in-between. The flight attendant’s coming down and she’s speaking in both languages and you have to decide which one you want to pick. And so I opened the novel when she’s landing in Taipei Taoyuan Airport. And the emotional peak, the climax, the middle bit with her mother, is these four hours in that liminal space of the airport. And the final scene is her departing and thinking about, as she passes through this portal, if has she really transformed into a different person?

But to answer the question about lost time, I’m working with a fantasy of connection. I think a lot of us, whether or not you’re a part of a diaspora community, experience interactions with grandparents that are tinged with guilt and grief. You’re already mourning their passing and all the conversations that you didn’t have, even while they’re still here. In diaspora communities there’s this fantasy of, “Oh, if I actually did go back, if I did live with them, if I could speak the language, we would have this beautiful connection and they would tell me the truth of everything that they had been through, and I could properly honor that.”

Lily thinks that the only barrier to resolving this fantasy is getting good enough at Chinese, which she doesn’t do in time. But sometimes people don’t want to tell you their stories. Sometimes previous generations think, “That really has nothing to do with you.” She asks her mother, “Why didn’t anybody tell me? This is such a massive traumatic part of our family history; why was I not brought in on this?” And her mother’s just like, “Well, it’s kind of sad, so why would I want to talk about it with you?” And the most charitable way of interpreting that is they lived through all that pain. They fought all those struggles. They escaped everything they did so that Lily, the luckiest generation, doesn’t even have to think about it. For Lily’s grandfather and for her mother, this is a good outcome, the fact that what happened in Cambodia would never cross her mind. But Lily views this as rejection. That involves a lot of assumptions about what we get to be included in and what stories we ought to have access to.

AD: It feeds into something that you’re dealing with in many ways in Taipei Story: expectation versus reality. As with the question of tourism. When I was 19, I actually went to Taipei for a week and I did all the things that Lily does her first week. I looked at the Jadeite Cabbage, I went to Taipei 101, I saw the mass damper. And I was thinking about this beautiful line in Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness where his character goes to Venice and thinks, “I had never cared about important things, their edges were rubbed smooth by too much looking.” As your novel goes along, Lily begins to have rounder experiences in ways that surprise her, ways that might not even be linked to being in Taipei.

I’m working with a fantasy of connection. I think a lot of us, whether or not you’re a part of a diaspora community, experience interactions with grandparents that are tinged with guilt and grief.

RK: When I taught Reading and Writing the Modern Essay, which is one of the undergraduate writing seminars at Yale, the class used the same four units for the first part of the course, but we got leeway to choose our fifth module. I taught travel writing. I started with assigning a provocative New Yorker essay by Agnes Callard, where she argues in part that the expectations that we have when we travel are already so saturated with travel writing and photos that we know the Parthenon from a postcard better than we remember the experience of looking at it. If everything’s been seen and done and all of your experiences aren’t even spontaneous discoveries, if you’re just following a checklist, what are you doing?

And this is complicated in Lily and Anna’s case, because after she and her classmates have formed this little crew, there’s this bizarre pecking order of authority that supposedly has to do with their language level, but really has to do with some silly assumptions about their race. They basically don’t listen to the white kids about where they ought to go, but because Lily and Anna are heritage speakers, although neither of them has ever stepped foot in Taiwan, everybody else looks to them for guidance about what restaurants to go to and what to order and what certain cultural codes mean. Lily is constantly running off to Google things in the bathroom because she feels like she ought to know the answers, but she doesn’t.

This wrinkle of being a heritage tourist comes up again when Lily’s thinking about a Jamaica Kincaid essay that she was assigned—that’s the first part of A Small Place, which really has nothing to do with Lily’s situation at all—and it’s another symptom of Lily’s need to make everything that ever happened in the history of the world about her. When she’s thinking about Kincaid’s reflections on British tourists, she wonders, “but ethically, does that implicate me? Are we in a similar situation just because I’m American? Does that make me so bad?” And it’s just a very undergraduate, torturous, navel-gazing question about whether every interaction is already colored by expectation and a tourism industry, and in this case, the long history of foreign language programs as soft power, which is just the tip of a massive geopolitical historical iceberg.

AD: I was fascinated by the way you write about gossip in this book, and it feeds into what we’re talking about with how we construct identity. When we’re in an airplane going to a place, we can say, “I’m going to take on a new self. This is who I’m going to be now.” But then gossip can sometimes circulate and trap someone. You have this wonderful character, JC, who at first readers might feel is going to be a love interest. And then it turns into something pretty nefarious.

RK: I had so much fun writing the interactions between Lily and JC. I guess a place to start is that I wanted to write a book without a bad guy. You use the word nefarious, but there’s not actually any malice involved. It’s a lot of miscommunication. And I don’t really think JC does anything wrong. He does things that are extremely immature, but none of it is motivated by an actual desire to hurt Lily. And I feel that very little of the gossip as it spreads through her program is motivated by a desire to hurt Lily either. Lily’s revelations at the end of the book take the form of, “Oh wait, it really wasn’t as bad as I thought.” I think the gossip hits Lily very hard because she feels the back of her neck prickle because she thinks everybody’s looking at her. And she’s not wrong. But it doesn’t take the form of this social ostracization ala an Edith Wharton novel. She assigned that pariah status to herself and decides, “I have to be completely alone for the last few weeks of my time in Taipei.” And so it’s less about the insidious nature of perceptions or bout Lily being frozen into an image against her will, and more about adolescents disproportionately assigning stakes to things.

AD: We both teach. I went to college a while ago, but I still remember all my teachers. I can tell you pretty much beat-for-beat what happened in junior year Japanese literature classes. And yet if I went to see that professor, he would have no idea who I am. This idea of disproportionate experience comes up for me as a teacher, the thought that there might be a student in the corner who doesn’t really talk, and I don’t think about them very much, but probably 15 years later, they’ll still have a memory of my class, whereas I am statistically likely to not remember them at all.

RK: I’m going to start my first position as a professor in the fall, but I’ve been teaching as a grad student for a couple of years. And the first few cohorts I had, within the first three weeks, I knew everybody’s names, knew their stories, and I really thought, “I’m going to remember these kids for the rest of my life.” I got used to the sound of their writing and had a personal investment in all of their arcs. But there was a moment this past spring where I was thinking about a class from just that previous fall and I was like, “I don’t know their names.” I can think of some of their faces, but it’s like I completely memory holed them after I turned in their final grades.

I don’t think that diminishes my investment in them as instructor, but there’s one of me and 15 of them. And I think probably there are always going to be some standout students, but no matter how positive an experience we have, I just don’t think about them that much, and maybe they’ll think about me a lot more. And it’s particularly complicated in the case of language instructors, because to loop back to what I was saying about shame and humiliation, I think we form an attachment to language instructors, especially if you’re heritage students, that are very necessary. I’m sure you could do a lot with this with psychoanalysis and stuff about transference and attachment. I found Merve Emre’s essay “Are You My Mother?” especially helpful on this. There’s this parental projection for Lily. And I think a lot of heritage speakers feel that way, because they might’ve come from context where most of the people that they ever spoke that language around was a family member.

When I was in Taiwan, I was taking classes and I just kept thinking, “You’re not my mom. You’re not my mom. You’re not my aunt.” But there was some buried, unconscious part of me that kept feeling this way. And Lily has shared so much with her one-on-one teacher. She has cried in the classroom. She has admitted very vulnerable things. She’s really dug deep into herself and offered herself up raw and hurting and struggling. And so I wanted to include that image near the end of the semester, or the end of term, where her teacher’s scrolling through all the folders to get to Lily’s essay. And she’s like, “Oh, shit. I’m a folder to her.” And you just have to accept that as a student, otherwise you’re being weird.