R.F. Kuang is one of the top bestselling authors at the moment and she's known for churning out novels that blow up on "booktok". She's been trying to angle herself as a serious figure in literary fiction recently - she even got a glowing profile in [The New Yorker](https://archive.is/IK2x
suggesting that she should get a Booker prize.
Kuang's writing is extremely heavy-handed and frankly quite shallow. For example, *Babel* is supposed to be this "dark academia" narrative set at Oxford University exploring the evils of British imperialism, but Kuang chooses to write multiple scenes where the ethnic characters complain about the food in England not being spicy enough:
>For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.
The premise of *Babel* is a group of Black/Chinese/Indian friends at Oxford working to destroy the British Empire from within. The story is supposed to take place in 1830s England, yet the characters talk about colonialism using modern jargon like they're Tumblr users in 2020. This is an actual quote from the book:
>Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’
There's also Kuang's *Poppy War* trilogy, which is supposed to be a grimdark fantasy rendition of the Sino-Japanese War and the rise of Mao Zedong. Except... Kuang is a turbo-liberal who hates China and thinks Chinese people need to apologize for their "Han privilege". Here are some funny details about the *Poppy War* trilogy:
* The MC of *Poppy War* is literally just Mao, but Mao was a straight Chinese guy (that's Han supremacist patriarchy!!!). So Kuang rewrites Mao Zedong into a black-skinned indigenous Taiwanese woman addicted to opium.
* *TPW* revolves around the Sino-Japanese war, where Japan attacked China and massacred millions of civilians, but at the end of the 1st book, Kuang completely inverts the dynamic and has China commit genocide against Japan.
* Chinese people in this story unlock their racial superpowers by smoking opium.
* There is one (1) white female character in the trilogy, a nun named Sister Petra. Kuang has her MC (the black female Mao) torture the white woman to death - and Kuang frames the scene as a righteous and satisfying moment.
* In book 2, Kuang randomly inserts a scene where the characters discuss Europeans having larger dicks than Chinese men (for context, "Hesperians" are her stand-in for Europeans and "Nikara" are Chinese):
>“Have you seen their penises?” Kitay asked.
>Rin nearly spat out her fish. “What?” He gestured with his hands. “Hesperian men are supposed to be much, ah, bigger than Nikara men. Salkhi said so.”
>“How would Salkhi know?”
>“How do you think?” Kitay waggled his eyebrows. “Admit it, you’ve thought about it.”
* R.F. Kuang ends the trilogy by having her Mao Zedong stand-in commit suicide because he realizes the error of his ways. The Mao character just kills herself and willingly hands over power to the Kuomintang.
* Kuang's Mao Zedong character literally has zero ideology, despite the fact that communism was a crucial part of Mao's rise to power. Kuang just straight up refuses to touch the communism stuff with a 10 foot pole
So what kind of social causes does R.F. Kuang actually feel enthused about exploring? Well, in *Yellowface*, she writes a scene where her self-insert character (an Asian female author) gets "harassed" for dating white guys, which is supposed to be some great injustice. If you had any doubt that Kuang is terminally online, the scene literally mentions Elliot Rodger:
I think it's revealing that Kuang names her own self-insert "Athena". Also, that scene in Yellowface is literally based on Kuang's own experiences. In 2018, she published [a weird blog post](https://archive.is/5boCY) where she was defending herself for dating white guys, which she desperately tried to scrub off the internet. Direct quotes from it:
>I am aware of how my relationship with my white partner is situated in a long history of a) the emasculation and demonization of Asian men, and b) oppressive relationships between white men and Asian women. I understand the instinct to believe that an Asian woman who dates a white man must hate her own race. I *get* that.
>But see, you don’t get to tell me who I should date. You don’t get to make assumptions about my “racial preferences” when you don’t know me, you don’t know my boyfriend, and you don’t know a thing about our relationship. That’s misogynistic. That strips me of my agency because it purports to make my personal decisions for me.
>You certainly don’t get to tell me that I have “no standing” among Asians if I “sleep white.” I advocate with my words. I don’t advocate with my vagina.
Literally wtf is this self-victimizing, navel-gazing nonsense. This is who the media is trying to position as a literary thought leader nowadays.
