RF Kuang at Singapore Writers Festival 2025: On identity, storytelling, and finding joy in Singapore

How has your Chinese-American background and academic experience shaped your storytelling?

Writing fiction is my form of academic note-taking, literally. When I write fiction, it’s usually a way to process a new field for myself and a way to understand my identity as a Chinese-American woman, among other things.

A lot of the topics I write about, I actually come to them as a beginner. I want my text to reflect that novice’s passion and excitement, rather than the teacher’s condescension.

When I was an undergraduate sitting for my lectures, I’d do this thing. On the right side of my notebook, I would take notes of what the professor was saying factually, and on the left side, I would write down story ideas based on what he was talking about.

For instance, I was at this philosophy seminar, and a guest scholar came in and he wrote a paper on the “epistemic inequality and understandings of oppression exploitation” – which is really a lot of long, boring words. But it’s essentially about the myth that if you’re suffering from an unequal power relationship, then you are more qualified than anybody else to describe it.

So as he was going through these clinical and logical – and so, so dry – arguments, I was drafting this story about alien biologists.

They go to a planet and they witness horrible things happening to the aliens, but every oppressed alien that the biologists speak to is telling them: “No! Things are absolutely fine!”