School comes first and the stories come out of that. For instance, Book Three focuses a lot on military campaigns in the Chinese civil war, and I knew all of that already because I’ve written papers about it, so it was easy to map out the campaign and map out the strategy because I’ve been thinking about them for a long time. Also, fiction writing,... See more

There are too many reasons why I did this. Firstly, I love fantasy; it’s really fucking fun to read, and that’s what I wanted to write because it’s cool. The second reason is that writing it as a nonfiction family autobiography would be immensely painful — not for me, but for the people whom I’d be interviewing, and I would have to be asking... See more

There’s a lot going on there. Altan and Rin are different manifestations of how war and trauma are cyclical. Altan in particular, because his response to what was done to him is to burn the rest of the world down and Rin’s response to what happened to her and Altan and the rest of their entire race is to burn a country down. They’re also... See more

Without interesting things to study and interesting things to think about, I think that my stories would go stale really fast. Also I think the best novels that I’ve ever read changed the way that I thought about the world or taught me something that I didn’t know before, and I don’t know how you get that without constantly exploring and studying... See more

All of these are fair criticisms of Japan. But [in China], there’s also politically motivated, flagrant nationalist propaganda arguing that all of Japan [today] is militaristic and fascist, which is completely not true: the Japan of today is not similar to the military empire of Japan during WWII. A lot of important people have written about how... See more

CS: You were nineteen when you first finished it. How has your youth affected your writing and your status as author?

RFK: I was thinking about this earlier today. Starting as a teenager when I began writing The Poppy War and wrapping up the third book as a 22-year-old sort of mirrors the character path that Rin goes through. It’s cool being able... See more

Because even if you didn’t live through it but all you’ve grown up with are family members telling the stories of what happened, that trauma gets passed on, and without proper acknowledgement, it’s really difficult to move on. It’s not parallel to the Holocaust. I don’t know a lot of people who would want to do the same thing to Germany in its... See more

I was reading all this stuff by my freshman year of college, and it’s hard to separate when the academic interest started. I was just really into the stories that my family was telling me about their experiences in Chinese history. That really covers everything: every bad thing imaginable

that happened to China in the 20th century. It’s hard to... See more

The simplistic version of this answer is that its been politicized heavily, but that this is not a black and white issue where one side is clearly at blame. I can’t say that all of Japan has disrespected the legacy of Nanjing, because the history and politics are so complex. But it is true that on the Japanese side, there are many people in... See more