Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang with Rebecca F. Kuang
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What is the premise of Rebecca F. Kuang’s *Taipei Story*?
I'm Sarah Pasco. And I'm Carrie Adlois. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read
too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we created the Weirdos Book Club. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted
and appreciated. Each week we're joined by amazing comedian guests and writer guests to discuss some wonderfully and crucially weird books, writing, reading, and just generally being a weirdo.
You don't even need to have read the books to join in, it will be a really interesting, wide-ranging conversation, and maybe you'll want to read the book afterwards. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you.
This week's book guest is Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuong.
What's it about? A 19-year-old Chinese American goes to Taiwan for a three-month Mandarin language course. What
qualifies it for the Weirdos Book Club? Well, it's very weird to share a bed and bathroom with your best friend from Uni for 12 stinky weeks. In
this episode, we discuss
teenagers, language, idioms, hot boys, and toilet paper. And joining us this week is Rebecca herself. Rebecca is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author. She has written Catabasis, Babel, The Poppy War, and the Global Phenomenon that was Yellowface. She is an incredibly intelligent, brilliant person. She's currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian languages and literature at Yale. And this is her brand new book, Taipei Storybook. Welcome to the podcast. Rebecca F. Quang. We're very excited. We're so excited to have you here. Um and we want to just straight away, let's hit the hot topic. What on your book, when it says you write in two different names. So we have writings R. F. Quang, which people might know you for, like the Babel series, Poppywar, Catabases, and Yellow Face, you wrote as Rebecca F.
Quang, yeah. Is there like is that just a kind of like sci fi needing two initials thing or that is a marketing question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um I really never think about uh production or packaging when I'm writing my stories. Um then the team comes back and they have all these ideas. And in the case of Yellowface, um the UK team actually uh came to us and said, uh in Over here, when you publish under your initials, it seems like you're hiding something. So we want to publish this book because it's literary fiction under Rebecca F. Quan.
J.K. Rowling has a lot to answer for.
person I can think of. I think we need to go back to
J.
R. Tolkien.
I think he caused the
problems. What
was he hiding?
I think his for name is just really long and thick. He was
just J. R. R. Tolkien. John
old Ronald
Ronald. But he could have just been Ronald having read Yellow Face as well. That's one of
the first books we did on our podcast actually. I loved it so much. We loved it. It's such a massive success.
Yeah, it was everywhere in the world.
Yeah. Is it crazy?
Um, I think none of us were expecting it to take off the way that it did when we were pitching the book and even talking about it in house, we were all like, Oh, this is a really niche story that's only gonna appeal to people who have some publishing experience or are interested in these topics and I think everybody was kind of astounded when it hit the way it did.
Yeah, but as you say, 'cause I that's I think when I first heard about it, because it was so well, an expose in some ways of what publishing can be like or um a little bit gossipy, even just like elements of like authors being at um a festival or something like that. But obviously the people in publishing were like, Have you read this yet?
And so and
that's how you sort of create the buzz right from the beginning.
Definitely. I mean it was an incredible book. And this is incredible as well. I absolutely loved this so much. I think what I want to say about your name first is I feel like I I'm struggling not to call you Rebecca because I feel like in my head you're RF.
No, it's only ever RF on the book. On the book, so it's Becky in real life.
Oh nice. But this is such a beautiful, beautiful book and it's it is very personal. It's educational.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the premise of Rebecca F. Kuang’s *Taipei Story*?
0:04–5:35
2
Why does Rebecca publish under the initials R.F. Kuang instead of her full name?
5:35–11:48
3
How did *Yellowface* become a global phenomenon and what impact did it have on her career?
11:48–16:43
4
What personal events inspired Rebecca to write the autobiographical *Taipei Story*?
16:43–21:02
5
How does the novel explore the challenges of learning Mandarin as a heritage speaker?
21:02–28:23
6
What does the book reveal about teenage friendships, romance, and the pressure to succeed?
28:23–39:40
7
How does Rebecca use humor and language play to convey cultural nuances?
39:40–42:01
Speakers
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