Rebecca F Kuang hurtled through the first draft of Yellowface, her best-selling 2023 satirical thriller about race and the publishing industry, in a mere month. You’ll know Yellowface: the one with the bright lemony cover and the monochrome side-eyes floating along the top? The award-winning book has now sold more than 1.5 million copies and is being developed for television; Kuang says the idea came to her “fully formed”.
But the 30-year-old novelist and academic – speaking to me from a London hotel room in the run-up to the release of her new book Taipei Story – insists she is unlikely to write a follow-up to Yellowface, or even necessarily another thriller. “I think it’s really dangerous as an artist to chase the market or try to recapture lightning in a bottle. It would just be a massive disappointment to write a book that hits the same audience as Yellowface.” And readers should expect something very different: Taipei Story is an altogether quieter affair, a coming-of-age tale about a Chinese American undergrad studying abroad who suffers an extreme identity crisis after her grandfather dies. The two books are worlds apart.
Genre-hopping, career-hopping and location-hopping are all kind of Kuang’s thing, though. Born in Guangzhou, China, she emigrated with her parents and two siblings to the US aged four. She was raised in Dallas, Texas, where she says she was one of just two Asian kids at school and was bullied for her strong Chinese accent (long since gone). At high school, she was seriously into debating and it’s here that she also met her husband, Bennett Eckert-Kuang – although they didn’t date until later, reconnecting at college. Now, they live in Boston, where Eckert-Kuang is a PhD student and researcher in philosophy at MIT. Kuang is finishing her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature, and is also visiting professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
