In the newest Claudia Rankine novel, Triage, two students who call themselves sisters meet as undergrads and spend half a life circling each other in friendship inside and outside of the academy. Every time they meet in person, they do a bit where they have to physically collapse to the ground. This gesture takes on a darker meaning as the years go on and the American university system slowly buckles beneath them, falling apart under the weight of unchecked capitalism, academic censorship, and a political regime that wants to tear down educational institutions and remake them in its own image.

 

Reading this book, I kept coming back to one question: What is an education actually for? I think schools are met with such suspicion and hostility in American culture because they fundamentally cannot turn a profit, despite the best efforts of our most elite universities to function as hedge funds. Contemplation isn’t easily measured; there are no deliverables or quarterly goals attached to curiosity. Anything enduring that a university produces requires hours of inefficient labor that cannot be easily tracked. People who produce work that cannot be easily tracked always create a bit of unease, but that unease increases when the culture turns its gaze to the small number of highly visible non-white, non-male academics. With those professors as figureheads, the university becomes something to be feared and torn apart, its emissaries seemingly hounded to death, as in the recent case of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday. 

Triage is a book to read right now, as the school year begins. Around this time, a perennial flurry of articles always seems to appear, telling us how college freshmen are somehow already wrong. This year’s panic was around the loss of literacy in kids and teens—a very scary problem, though most of the coverage seemed to take the stance that all of these students are irrevocably broken, that there is nothing, no education, that could fix the decline.

Triage reminded me that despite that cynical exercise of disbelief in education and youth, a whole world of grief and fellowship exists just beneath the surface.

 

It’s a hazy afternoon in August when I meet Rebecca F. Kuang, who publishes under the name R.F. Kuang, for lunch near Columbus Circle in New York. Kuang is the author of the best-selling novel Yellowface, a satire of Asian American assimilation set in the academy, as well as the fantasy trilogy The Poppy War and the speculative fiction books Babel and Katabasis. Taipei Story, her new novel released September 8, is a departure in style but still grounded in an academic setting. It follows Lily, who emigrated from China to the United States with her parents when she was young, who dutifully tries to learn Chinese in hopes that it will help her understand herself and her family. Lily is also acutely aware of how cliché that desire is and is young enough to find it embarrassing. What follows is a melancholic comedy of manners, set in a language exchange program at a university in Taipei, that slowly unfurls into a meditation on how an individual life connects (or, devastatingly, does not connect) with historic global shifts outside of any one person’s control. “Lily is struggling with understanding that maybe you don’t belong to a place,” Kuang tells me. “And even though you do learn your own family history, maybe you don’t have a claim to that history either.”

A big part of this book is the question of authenticity, which I feel is a question that people come back to again and again, especially first-generation immigrants to this country. Can you talk a bit about wanting to explore that? 

Taipei Story starts with a really undergraduate assumption: “If I’m born to a certain family, if I belong to a certain lineage or heritage, what sorts of ways of moving through the world am I entitled to? What stories do I feel like I should know already? What languages do I expect I should speak?”

This isn’t just true of Chinese American families. I think it’s true of so many people whose parents speak a different language than they do. They’re always asking, “How much am I on the inside [of this culture]? How much am I standing, observing from the outside?”

Lily moves off to Taipei on this ridiculous heritage-reclamation journey. The fact that she’s going to Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese to reconnect to her Chinese culture is already a premise that is absurd on every level. Her family has never lived in Taiwan. Mandarin was not even the dominant language in Taiwan until the mid-20th century, and Taiwan’s history is one of colonialism. So, we can’t really argue there is an authentic, untouched identity there that she wouldn’t have been connected to based on her family. There’s a historical element that is also making this a really errant journey for this character that she doesn’t even seem to consider until very far into her time there. There’s such a complex history of language policy that’s related to successive occupations of Taiwan that Lily has only the fuzziest idea of. And it’s a history that really has nothing to do with her.

I did want to set her up to fail in a lot of ways because the project that she’s going [to Taipei] with—which is a very innocent, naive, well-intentioned project—is already the product of modern fictional narratives about how language is tied to nationality and ethnicity. It’s something that is, I think, deliberately a part of a soft power, language education first, that does come from Taipei but also does come from Beijing.

 

 

Lily feels a lot of shame and humiliation around what she thinks she is supposed to know already about the language and about the culture of Taipei. 

The first chapter is all about comparisons. All she’s thinking about is, I don’t feel Chinese enough, but I’m trying to get it back, and now I’m on this singular journey to recover it. And then she immediately sees this young, American-born Chinese couple on the airplane going on the exact same journey that she is. She’s like, “But surely their Chinese is worse than mine. Surely they haven’t kept in touch in the same ways. Surely what they’re going through is more cringe than what I’m going through.” Because she doesn’t want to be in the typical diaspora story. By the end, she realizes this is actually an extremely typical experience. Everybody has this shame. Everybody is working through it. And she hopes that that couple had a good summer.

I do think shame goes away once you all acknowledge that you’re all in the same boat. 

That’s the magical moment in any language class. And I’ve been in a bunch of different types of language classes. I studied Italian; I studied French; I studied Japanese. And there always is that lovely moment where, in the first few days, everybody’s terrified to open their mouths because you don’t want people to hear your bad accent. You don’t want to give the wrong answer. And then something clicks and you all realize, “Wow, we are all extremely bad at Japanese.” And then you go from hesitation to play and everybody’s just tossing around all sorts of ridiculous combinations to see what works. Lily’s not quite there at the end of the book, but I think she is moving toward letting go of reaching for judgment immediately when she sees anybody similar to her.

 

 

A lot of what Lily feels and a lot of the humor in the book comes from her cringing. And I’m wondering if you can talk about using that emotion. Cringe is also a buzzword on the internet. And then there’s a cliché that cringe is limiting to young people because they’re stopping at the cringe; they’re not pushing through the cringe to make something true.

I’m not super online, so I don’t know the context of the discourse around cringe. … I think in Lily’s case—and I’m reaching for this because it’s how I felt as a teenager—she sort of defaults to this ironic detachment in a lot of situations because she doesn’t want to embarrass herself or doesn’t want to do the earnest, wholehearted thing because it’s cringe. She is terrified about engaging with the city around her in any sort of way because of the potential of being earnest. 

She’s trying to behave ironically and detached and not like a stereotypical boorish American study-abroad student would. She’s trying to not act like a foreigner, even though that’s exactly what she is. [Because of that,] she misses all of these opportunities to engage and speak to people and learn about what’s going on. She’s terrified of putting a foot out of line. She’s terrified of being laughed at. And I think the book is trying to make an argument for why it’s really good to be laughed at and learn to laugh at yourself. And she’s fine with learning at the end. 

I teach undergrad writing seminars. [In class,] you’re sharing your writing and you’re inviting judgment. But I’ve actually been really delighted by how earnest and careful and experimental they’re willing to get with me. And I think it’s in part because I do try to inculcate this classroom attitude of, like, “This is where we will fail. This is where we’ll experiment and produce our worst article, read it out loud, and really have fun with it.” Everybody rolls their sleeves up and starts playing with mud, and it’s fantastic. It’s a good attitude in terms of both teaching pedagogy and learning a new language and being creative.

Grief is also a big part of this novel, especially grief around things that are unspoken or unsaid. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that emotion.

I’ve had a lot of loss in my family over the last few years. As people get older, life stuff happens. I always write in response to whatever I’m feeling. I think grief has been very dominant. The thing that hit me hardest when I was in the shock waves of it is how silent everybody gets around you. And it’s not just like your own silence and your own failure to do things with a relative before they pass, but after they’re gone and you’re in mourning, people are so afraid of saying the wrong thing. People treat you like you’re made of glass. And there’s this routine set of nice things everybody says. “Can you let us know? Can we do anything?” But nobody ever makes, like, a foul joke. 

Having been inside it, I really wish somebody had said something to make me laugh. Because the opposite of that suffocating silence of grief is laughing. And I think you only start to heal when you start laughing about shared memories or laughing about the absurdity of it all and laughing about the awkward ways in which people think about death. And I think that was a journey I wanted to put early on, going from that silence to Lily being able to laugh at herself at the situation. Just kind of embracing this absurdist optimism about the world. It can feel like this loss is all that the world can ever consist of and life cannot continue. Like the earth isn’t going to keep spinning. You need people to laugh at you.  

 

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Isle McElroy, author of the novels The Atmospherians, People Collide, and the upcoming Satellite.

Isle McElroy: “My desk always has two things: a pile of books I’m currently reading and a candle to keep me company while I write. I’m a very routine-oriented writer and superstitious. I don’t like residencies because it takes too long to feel creative at new desks. I’ve written my last two novels, People Collide and Satellite, at this cheap IKEA desk; I can’t upgrade it now. I always keep the window open, and I like hearing my neighbors’ conversations and the construction across the street. They’re pleasant interruptions. At my first apartment in Brooklyn, my bedroom only had a small skylight—no window—and I didn’t write a thing over the five months I was there. I’ve kept dried flowers on the windowsill for years now—they were originally given to me by a roommate—and a few healing stones gifted to me by a friend after I broke my collarbone. In the afternoons, the wind blows the curtain gingerly into my face, another pleasant interruption. Tacked to the wall is ephemera: photo-booth pics with my partner, cards from friends, a line from a Yiyun Li novel written on a scrap of brown paper. There’s a ruler too to remind me of a story another friend told me about growing a foot. Ideally, I’ll get a few more books out of this desk before it collapses.”