The New Yorker:

The author of “Babel” and “Yellowface” is drawn to stories of striving. Her new fantasy novel, “Katabasis,” asks if graduate school is a kind of hell.

By Hua Hsu

Rebecca F. Kuang finished her second year of college with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she took a leave from Georgetown, where she was studying international economics, and got a job in Beijing as a debate instructor. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like mastering the rules of something and then seeing if I can crack it and get really good at it,” she told me. One day, while on a coding website, she came across an ad for Scrivener, a popular word-processing application. Though she had dabbled in fan fiction, she had little experience as a writer. But Scrivener seemed so easy to use that she downloaded it and began writing a fantasy story. Kuang didn’t know much about structuring a story, so she searched Google for how-to books about plotting, world-building, and character development. Each time she finished a chapter, she e-mailed it to her father in Texas, where she’d grown up. He was an ideal reader, offering nothing but praise and a desire for more. When she sent him the final chapter, he asked, “What are you going to do now?” She consulted Google again and, about seven months after she’d begun writing, found an agent.

“The Poppy War,” which was published in 2018, as Kuang was preparing to graduate from college, tells the story of Fang Runin, or Rin, a young orphan from a poor region of the Nikan lands—a thinly veiled China—who distinguishes herself among the privileged students at an élite military school. (Kuang has described Rin as a reimagination of Mao Zedong as a teen-age girl.) Rin possesses shamanic powers that can call forth a vengeful god, but victory on the battlefield doesn’t result in the harmony she had hoped for. She’s brave but not all that reliable—another character calls her an “opium-riddled sack of shit.” “The Poppy War” mixes elements of Kuang’s family history with fictionalizations of the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai. But it’s also about democracy, nationalism, and the fallibility of popular will. The story, which continued in two subsequent books, is filled with big, messy teen-age emotions—from the longing for heroism to the insecurity of trying to measure up to your rivals—that have inspired readers to debate their favorite characters and write their own fan fiction.

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