K-Ming Chang likes to say that she writes about “queer daughterhood”—the family ties that bind lineages of women through reinvention, love, and lore. It’s a rich theme that courses through her wildly imaginative new story collection, Gods of Want (One World/Random House, July 12), as well as her debut novel, Bestiary (2020), both of which received starred reviews from Kirkus. In Gods of Want, Chang deploys lyrical prose to tell stories of Taiwanese immigrant families that veer into the surreal and surprising, with magazine ads that can spring to life and schoolgirls who can swallow each other whole. Chang spoke to us via Zoom from northern California, where she had stopped on a road trip that she’d planned with meticulous detail. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Are you a planner, both in life and in your writing?
I use a Japanese planner called the Hobonichi really intensely, and I treasure it like a security blanket. But I’m the opposite when it comes to writing. I have to not know where I’m going. It has to feel like play. If I ever try to outline to create the shape of a story, I find I lose my sense of motivation and playfulness toward it.
Writing this book was a serendipitous event. I was writing all of these stories for the longest time, and there was a constant feeling of discovery with dovetailing images, words, and sounds. There were a lot of M words—melons, including a character named Melon; mothers; moons; mouths. I love wordplay and the microunit of the word. Once I started playing with these microunits and seeing the recurrence of all these M words, that’s when I started to feel the associative process of sectioning the book into “Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths.” The triptych appealed to me.
You teach classes in flash fiction. How does this form play out in this book?
I originally wrote certain moments in these stories as stand-alone flash pieces. As I was revising, I was particularly stuck on stories like “Mariela,” which is now my favorite story in the collection, and “Nüwa,” which is about a [mythical] snake train. I had these revision plans—written in my planner!—and they felt so not alive to me anymore. Many weeks went by, and I decided to write some flash pieces because that’s the most organic kind of writing that I can immediately enter, and I ended up writing two back-to-back. I wondered if they could be a suite of linked pieces, but then I copied and pasted the first one into “Nüwa,” then put the second one into “Mariela.” They were exactly what I needed for both stories. The writing was showing me thematically where these stories needed to go and what they were really about at their core. Flash [writing] allows you to discover the meaning of something.
[In the book,] those flash pieces are published almost exactly in their original forms; I just added the character names. This sort of thing has never happened to me as a writer before, and I feel like it’s a haunted moment in creating this collection that scared me in a good way.
What inspires the way you play with words?
I discover the most joy in writing when I’m thinking about what’s the next word or how to begin a sentence, more than the delight of constructing narrative, which seems to happen incidentally or through labor. I’m always trying to ambush myself and create moments of being jolted, surprised, or shocked that keep me moving through the writing.
Recently, reading fiction in translation has been most inspiring and influential for my own work. I find that after I read something in translation, I’ll come away thinking, I didn’t know this was possible. I didn’t know you could make sentences this way. Anything could be possible, and that’s delightful and interesting to me. There are so many more ways to tell a story than what I have been taught and had internalized as the only way to tell a story. In translated fiction, there’s something about the language that feels both deeply familiar and off-kilter in some way. Because I delight in the unexpected, I find myself literally translating dialogue or idioms from Mandarin, and people will say, Oh my God, that’s so creative. How did you come up with that?
I’m taking an amazing Taiwanese literature class online with the literary translator and writer Jenna Tang, and we were talking about how much poop is involved in Taiwanese slang and language. It’s really normalized, and it signals intimacy, which I get into in Bestiary as well. Talking about your body in this way is a kind of love language. For the women in this collection, bodily and physical intimacy is embedded in everything that they do.
You are not afraid to write about the grotesque, about bodily fluids and emissions, subjects that I’ve seen discouraged in literary writing. Did you have to push to keep these parts?
I’m interested in bringing lyricism and poetry to things that are considered crass or disgusting. My editor, Nicole Counts, and my agent, Julia Kardon, really understood that was deeply embedded in my style. In some ways, I felt freed by other women writers and queer writers being scatological, like Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart or Ottessa Moshfegh’s work. There is something about aversion and disgust that is so similar to attraction and fascination. I felt there was something queer about being so averse to something because you’re deeply attracted to it. I experienced that a lot as a child, how the feeling of wonder and feeling of horror were similar physical sensations. What does it mean to see this really disgusting thing as deeply beautiful or worthy of looking at closely, and what does that reveal about the consciousness of the character?
I noticed that you dedicated your book to your writing group: Amy Haejung, Pik-Shuen Fung, Kyle Lucia Wu, and Annina Zheng-Hardy. How does community nurture you as a writer?
My writing group has been one of the most transformative things for my writing. These are really the people I want to be writing for. I’m a big fan of writing for your friends, for the people who are interested in what you are doing. This group is very into experimentation, play, and making writing very low stakes. I find this has helped me discover a new kind of intimacy around writing, with people who know a lot of details about my life.
I met Pik-Shuen [author of the novel Ghost Forest] at a Kundiman Retreat [for Asian American writers], and we started talking months later about forming a writing group. I’d always wanted to be in one, but I had been mildly traumatized by certain forms of feedback. But we make our own rules and have been meeting consistently for years. We’ve become pen pals in a way, because we all used to be in New York City but now we’re spread out. Yet as we’ve spread out, we continue to find each other in our own locations, sending each other rogue emails of well wishes and pictures of each others’ books in the wild. This kind of intimacy is not talked about that often in terms of the writing process.
Hannah Bae is a Korean American writer, journalist, and illustrator and winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.