Courtesy of John Packman
The majority of R. F. Kuang’s earlier novels relied on the tools of genre fiction, such as murder, twists and climactic battles. Her newest, “Taipei Story,” drops them for a quieter story about grief, the bestselling author told a Portland crowd at an event hosted by Powell’s Books on Sept. 25. She calls it her “funniest” yet.
During this event, Kuang was in conversation with Portland’s own Ling Ling Huang, a novelist and violinist with the Oregon Symphony. The evening, set in downtown Portland’s Newmark Theater, felt less like an ordinary book tour stop and more like a wide-ranging conversation about language, grief, family and what it means to write well.
Huang began the discussion by asking Kuang what guides her in the budding phase of a project, and at what point she realizes that she has something concrete enough to build on.
Kuang described it as “finding two puzzle pieces that click together”: a set of thematic obsessions and a genre scaffold in which to explore them.
“And when they come together, and really sing, I think I know it on a gut level,” she said.
According to Kuang, her debut trilogy, “The Poppy War,” paired family stories about World War II-era China with her love of anime; “Babel” was influenced by Oxford’s strangeness and Victorian social comedy; “Yellowface” borrowed the rhythms of a keyboard battle on X, formerly Twitter.
“Taipei Story,” however, is a deliberate departure from her past plot-heavy works.
The story follows Lily, a young woman spending a summer in an intensive language program in Taiwan while grieving her grandfather’s recent death. Kuang said she wanted to strip away the tools of genre fiction that she has relied on in the past, a plot where murder or twists can cover for minimal character work. “Nobody dies,” Kuang joked, then corrected herself: Lily’s grandfather certainly does. But there is no climactic battle. Instead, the action unfolds in Lily’s head as her arrogant, judgmental assumptions fall away one by one.
The book is inspired by Kuang’s own life, though she insists it is not autobiographical. She made Lily a decade younger than she was. She altered this deliberately, noting that grief and confusion are more comical — and more devastating — when you are 19 and “a little foolish.”
Humor was a recurring theme of the night. Kuang told the crowd she was nervous to show the manuscript to her mother, whose late father inspired the story. Her mother’s first remark about “Taipei Story,” Kuang recalled, was “I didn’t know you were so funny.”
Kuang said that dark humor is a necessary part of mourning.
“Laughter is the only thing that lets you breathe again when you’ve been suffocating in grief for too long,” she said. There is a lot of bleak humor in the book, she added, because many people turn to it as a coping mechanism Kuang said.
Language is the book’s other major occupation. Kuang described Lily’s exhaustion at decoding every street sign and menu, a burden most English speakers have never had to think about. Kuang also pushed back on what she called the diaspora tendency toward self-pity over lost mother tongues.
“You don’t inherit language; language doesn’t sit in the blood. And you also don’t absorb it through osmosis, which I think frustrates people the most. You just don’t pick up a language by being around and listening to family members speak it,” Kuang said. Learning a language, she added, takes active engagement and dedicated instruction, or English speakers would not need years of grammar classes and composition exercises to become professionally competent.
The conversation was also full of lighter moments. Kuang explained that the novel’s opening-chapter photos begin with college students’ travel snapshots and shift to portraits of her grandparents, as a gift to her mother. “Now everybody knows her dad’s a hottie,” Kuang said. Watching her mother and her aunt page through the finished book made the whole project feel worthwhile, she added.
In the audience Q&A, Kuang urged readers to pick up Shadi Bartsch’s translation of the “Aeneid,” and said she would love an hour with Vladimir Nabokov, whom she called “nasty.” When asked about the pressure that writers face to build a brand, she was blunt. “Social media,” she said, “makes you a narcissist,” and “the best way to publish a good book is to just write a good book.”
Kuang’s answer also took a detour into pop music. When asked about how writers can balance building a platform with making good work, she offered Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore,” an expanded edition of her 2025 album released the same day as the event as a cautionary example. She said that she likes some of Swift’s songs, but argued that an artist who spends too much time basking in their fame will become absorbed in their own reputation, which leads to weaker work.
In Kuang’s view, good art demands “some kind of obliteration of the ego,” a willingness to step outside yourself and inhabit worldviews you do not hold.
“There is nothing interesting to say about fame,” she said.
Kuang’s next project, set for release in 2029, is a novel, inspired by “Cloud Atlas,” that will span across centuries and genres.
Kuang called it “super ambitious” and “a sweeping narrative about hope and persistence, despite centuries of cruelty.”
The crowd’s response to Kuang’s presentation was overwhelmingly positive, confirming that the much anticipated event was well worth the wait.
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