Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction
Novelist and Yale doctoral student Rebecca F. Kuang joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation ranging from her resistance to broad claims about ‘national literatures’, through the economics of translation and book publishing, to the historical research behind Babel and Yellowface, the near-impossibility of co-authored fiction, and her own compulsive, deep-work writing habits.
Key ideas
- Kuang resists generalisations about national literatures. Asked to contrast Chinese and Western science fiction, she argues that the diversity within any national literature nearly always exceeds the differences between two national literatures — Liu Cixin’s own debt to Arthur C. Clarke and the golden age of anglophone science fiction is offered as evidence of constant transpacific cross-influence rather than separable traditions.
- Translation and gatekeeping, not literary quality alone, decide which foreign fiction reaches Western readers. Drawing on Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and Julia Lovell’s work on China’s decades-long wait for a Nobel Prize in literature, Kuang argues that a handful of translator-gatekeepers — above all Ken Liu — mediate which Chinese-language fiction becomes visible in English, independent of the work’s merit.
- Publishing’s low entry-level wages narrow who gets to be a gatekeeper. Kuang’s central reform proposal — raising entry-level publishing salaries in cities like New York and London — is offered as a lever on a homogenous editorial class, not a plea for bigger author advances; she details how a nominal six-figure advance, paid in fifths over two to three years and reduced by agent fees and tax, rarely supports a full-time writer.
- Kuang treats history as raw material rather than settled narrative. Researching Babel, she found the popular steampunk image of Victorian Britain belongs to the late nineteenth century, not the 1830s her novel needed — a discovery that reframed the early Victorian period, for her, as itself an era of upheaval rather than a duller prelude to it.
- Kuang’s prolific output rests on a near-compulsive relationship to writing, reinforced by extreme deep-work discipline. She describes writing as a psychological necessity rather than a productivity hack, structures her day around a fixed 9am–noon writing block modelled on Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and credits competitive debate with teaching her to sense, sentence by sentence, when she has lost an audience — while also naming debate’s cost: training people to seek victory rather than truth.
Content
Resisting national-literature generalisations
Asked to characterise how Chinese science fiction differs from Western science fiction, Kuang declines the premise: she argues that the diversity within a national literature routinely exceeds the differences between two national literatures, so that no ‘broad quality’ can honestly be assigned to either Chinese or American science fiction as a whole. She points to the extensive, under-recognised transpacific traffic between the two traditions — it is ‘well documented’, she notes, that Liu Cixin was heavily influenced by the golden age of anglophone science fiction, particularly Arthur C. Clarke, an influence her own fiancé recognised while reading 2001: A Space Odyssey alongside Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. Pressed by Cowen on Hao Jingfang’s ‘Folding Beijing’ — a story Cowen calls without parallel in Western science fiction for its literalised, three-tiered class geography — Kuang endorses it as a fine entry point while resisting the idea that any single story can stand for ‘Chinese science fiction’ as such.
Translation, gatekeeping, and the world literary economy
Kuang extends her scepticism about national-literature generalisations into a structural argument about how foreign fiction reaches English-language readers at all. She credits Ken Liu — simultaneously an acclaimed anglophone writer and the dominant translator of contemporary Chinese science fiction — with substantially determining which Chinese-language work becomes visible in the West, a claim she is careful to frame as being about literary economics rather than a slight on the work’s quality. She situates this in a wider theoretical lineage: Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, on how writers from formerly colonised or peripheral literatures become ‘self-translated men’ moving toward the anglophone literary centre, and Julia Lovell’s research into why it took so long for a Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Against Cowen’s observation that Chinese classics such as Dream of the Red Chamber are far less read in the West than comparably ‘foreign’ authors like Gabriel García Márquez or Orhan Pamuk, Kuang argues the gap reflects the routes translation and marketing money create — or fail to create — rather than any deficiency in the work or in anglophone readers’ openness to it.
The economics of book publishing
Invited to redesign the book trade within realistic, non-utopian limits, Kuang’s proposal is to raise entry-level publishing wages in cities like New York and London to make the industry livable without inherited wealth — she argues this, not bigger advances, is what would diversify the largely homogenous editorial class deciding which manuscripts reach readers. Much of her material draws on the trade she anatomises directly in Yellowface. She walks through why the headline advance figure is misleading: a nominal $100,000 advance is paid in five instalments — on signing (a negotiation that can itself take over a year), on manuscript delivery, on publication, and at 12 and 18 months after — stretching over two to three years and shrinking further after agent fees and tax, so that a working novelist publishing a book a year may earn closer to $30,000 annually and needs other income. On book tour, she names interactions with readers as what redeems the physical ‘indignities of travel’ she otherwise dislikes, while noting to Cowen that authors are received differently by gender on the road.
History as material: Babel and the Treaty of Versailles
Kuang traces her path from an undergraduate degree in international economics, through history, to her present focus on Sinophone literature — a shift driven by her discovery that she cared more about the stories people tell about historical events than about events like military history in isolation. Asked whether China was treated fairly at the Treaty of Versailles — a moment referenced early in Yellowface — she distinguishes her expertise sharply: she knows the effect (a wave of domestic protest that many read as a moment of Chinese national awakening) but defers on causal blame to historians. Researching the 1830s setting of Babel, she found she could not lean on the familiar steampunk furniture of shows like Penny Dreadful, because that material culture belongs to the late nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution had run further; recognising the early Victorian decades as their own era of incipient technological and social upheaval, not a duller prelude, reshaped the novel’s world-building.
Empire’s counterfactual: Hong Kong, Singapore, and colonial legacy
Pressed by Cowen on why British imperial rule appears to have ‘worked’ comparatively well in Hong Kong and Singapore — both now markedly richer than most postcolonial states, with Hong Kong outperforming its close mainland comparator Guangzhou until recently — Kuang declines to accept the framing. She argues that historical counterfactuals of this kind (‘would Singapore have this economy without the British Empire?’) are close to unanswerable, and that broad comparisons across colonial territories flatten real differences in the methods and pervasiveness of colonial extraction from place to place, making claims like ‘why did Hong Kong prosper while India did not’ analytically unreliable even when the comparator looks unusually clean.
Co-authorship and the solitary work of fiction
Asked why co-authored novels remain rare compared with collaborative film, television, music, and even scholarship, Kuang locates the difficulty in the fluidity of her own process — a sentence written in a third act can retroactively require rewriting the first — which makes shared authorship logistically punishing unless a book’s structure cleanly separates each author’s material, as in the epistolary This Is How You Lose the Time War. She frames novel-writing as a deeply psychological process, comparable to therapy, in which she becomes ‘a different person with each novel’; splitting that burden across two people, she argues, would require not only reconciling two relationships to the text but two people’s relationship to each other. Yellowface — her novel about literary theft dressed as collaboration — supplies the episode’s second recurring thread: pressed on why the internet ‘brings out the mean side of people’, Kuang agrees with Cowen that anonymity removes the social cost of face-to-face contact, and adds that the internet’s relentless stimulation rewards quick, reductive, tribal judgement over the patient consideration that written fiction, by contrast, can afford.
Craft, debate, and the discipline of writing
Kuang credits one writing instructor in particular, Jeanne Cavelos of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, with a specific and transferable skill: diagnosing exactly where a manuscript’s structure has failed while deliberately withholding the solution, so the writer is forced to find an organic fix rather than one imposed in someone else’s voice. She traces two lasting benefits from her years of competitive debate — freedom from public-speaking anxiety, useful on book tour, and a trained instinct for when a sentence has ‘connected’ with an audience, which she carries into prose — but volunteers debate’s cost unprompted: it trains people to defend a position rather than to ask what an opponent is right about, an instinct she calls actively harmful in graduate seminars and public life. Her prodigious output, she says, is less discipline than compulsion — she is ‘built’ to feel writing as the default state rather than an achievement — channelled through an extremist, Cal Newport-style deep-work schedule: a fixed 9am–noon block for fiction, with progressively less-demanding tasks filling the rest of the day.
Place, Taiwan, and graduate-student depression
Kuang describes her writing as inseparable from where she is living — Beijing for The Poppy War, Oxford for Babel, a pandemic-locked home for Yellowface — and, on a recent Taiwan trip, singles out Taipei’s public transport (down to a stranger on the subway reprimanding her for sipping water) as more orderly than anything she has seen in the United States, while noting Taiwanese infrastructure’s visibly Japanese inheritance, a point Cowen affirms. Asked about elevated depression rates among graduate students, she attributes much of it — among the humanities students she knows best — to a brutal academic job market with few adjacent industry paths that value close literary reading, a contrast Cowen extends by suggesting his own economics graduate students report a stronger sense of mission that offsets some of that anxiety.
See also
- Rebecca F. Kuang — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Babel — Kuang’s Victorian-set novel; its 1830s research underpins the history-in-fiction discussion (candidate for a book page)
- Yellowface — Kuang’s novel of the book trade; source of the publishing and co-authorship discussion (candidate for a book page)