“My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.”
— Excerpted from K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, available here
Long before I had the honor of interviewing her, I was an avid lover of K-Ming Chang’s writing. I followed her publications—poetry and prose alike, both of which she executed beautifully—with a passion that was practically religious, and when she released her debut novel BESTIARY, of course I devoured that too.
A cursory Google search can tell you this much: her name, her age, her accolades. At just 23 years old, K-Ming Chang has been recognized as a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree; BESTIARY was longlisted for the Center of Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Digging a little deeper, you can find the pieces of hers that have been published online, and you can fall in love with the way she strings words together to convey something heartrendingly beautiful, can notice her recurring themes of myth, and queerness, and the body.
When you meet someone’s writing before you meet them, it’s an exhilarating paradox, of knowing so much and yet nothing at all. I may have read K-Ming Chang’s work for years, but I was still shocked with how interviewing her felt like nothing so much as it felt like talking to a friend. Even through a screen, she was endlessly warm, sincere, and funny. In this interview, she cuts to what is at the heart of her mythology.
Read more of K-Ming Chang’s work on her website.
by Trina Quach
If someone who has never read any of your work before picks up a piece of your writing, be it a poem or BESTIARY or something else entirely, what would you want it to be and why?
Oh, I love that question! I guess I would hope that it feels like an opening up of possibilities. An element of the unexpected is something that I always try to work toward in my writing, whether it’s a sentence or a much longer piece of worth is feeling that this piece makes something possible that wasn’t possible before. An opening up of something. That’s usually when I feel satisfied with something, or feel like it’s ready to be shared or given to someone else.
That’s such an evocative way of phrasing! Do you personally have a favorite work, and if so, what is it? And what did or do you hope that readers take away, either when they read that specific work, or just in general?
I always feel like my favorite thing is whatever I’m working on. And then as soon as I’m done with it, I’m like, I hate it, I wanna move on to the next thing. I think my favorite things are those that I think are still in progress where I’m still in that exciting phase of exploration and play. I just like to stay suspended in that, because it doesn’t last forever. And looking back, even though now BESTIARY feels so recent—the entire process took a long time, so it’s more representative of the writer I was two years ago than the writer I am now, and it holds a very special place in my heart. That book will always represent something really, really major for me. Writing that book was definitely so playful. It felt like, because I didn’t put so many expectations on myself, I was an amateur, I was a beginner. That feeling of not knowing what form or shape it was going to take was really singular and definitely something I don’t have as much anymore. So for that reason, it’s a very personal project, one that’s near and dear to my heart.
Do you have any tips for growing more comfortable with confronting your past writing? Not even necessarily revisions, but just reading it again, and being able to do so without passing judgement?
It’s okay to be perpetually embarrassed, or ashamed. I know that we tend to really want to push away feelings of shame or embarrassment, but sometimes I find it really helpful to really lean into it, and acknowledge it—and to realize that in some ways, that feeling of being embarrassed by something can be a sign of growth. I’m definitely okay with looking back on things and not thinking that it was the best thing I’ve ever done; I think that’s probably a much better sign than if I look back on something and think, That’s the best thing I’ll ever do. So embracing embarrassment, and acknowledging it, and putting it front-and-center in your mind in order to work through it, has been really helpful for me.
And then the other thing I do is give something a lot of space. Sometimes I write something and I think, Oh, this might be good! And I’m just like, I’m not going to look at it for two months, three months, six months, and that’s totally okay. Sometimes that spell just needs to hover over it for a while, and sometimes the more distance and emotional space you have from it, you’re able to kind of go back and see all of its flaws in a way that doesn’t feel so raw. So, Oh no, this is the only thing I’ve ever cared about, and it’s actually not great. It’s having that little bit of removal that helps me. And sometimes having a couple of trusted readers to read the thing can help, too! It’s such a cliche to say that we’re all our worst critics, but it’s completely true, and we all have extremely skewed visions of our writing. Sometimes having a couple of trusted readers who can see the bloody, pulsing heart of it can be beautiful—people who can tell you what that heart is. It brings more excitement, I think, when you’re just like, I’m so tired of this.
You mentioned how BESTIARY was very playful, and you felt like you didn’t have a lot of expectations that you might have now—and obviously from what you’ve said, you do feel at least some modicum of these expectations on you now. I was wondering what experience you have with successfully managing writing and those expectations, without letting those consume you. Pushing yourself without pushing yourself too much.
There’s a beauty to being away from certain spaces that are very capitalistic, be it competition spaces or even publishing. I think we tend to conflate the literary world with these capitalist systems that somehow the publishing world is the same thing as the writing world, and I really don’t want that to be true, and I really hope that that’s not true. And I have managed to find my writing group that’s really outside those spaces of production—those very utilitarian ways of looking at what success is, or looking at what progress is, and all of those things.
But managing expectations—most of it is things I place on myself, like Oh, I wrote a book, I need to write another one, or when’s a proper amount of time to do something, or this person’s career trajectory, how do I match my own to meet that? Or I always tell myself that BESTIARY’s a bit of an unconventional book in terms of structure and aesthetic, so I have to prove that I can write something that’s a little more conventional. But the things I always write are in the opposite direction: they’re getting weirder, less novel-y, after I wrote a very not novel-y novel.
So I think it’s realizing that where my passion is, and where I’m most excited and just really want to dive in, are not the same as those expectations at all. They’re actually reining me in, in some way, and I really need to let go of them. I had a writing professor who always told me the way to get out of the anxiety, all the anxiety of thinking about writing and thinking about publication—he told me the only thing that can really get you out of that is returning to the page, and I find that really true. The moment I’m in a sentence, or in a paragraph, all of that just goes away for a little while. So it’s almost like writing is my respite from the writing world. I think all those things kind of disappear, fray away, when I’m really focused on the language, so I try to take refuge in that.
I love the subversion of that, like writing as your refuge away from the writing world. So who and/or what would you say have been the biggest influences in your writing, if any? And this can be other writers, or specific works, which I know you’ve touched on in past interviews, but also broader themes, experiences, motivations, or aspects of your identity.
I’m a huge comic book reader. I read a lot of comics growing up, specifically Wonder Woman comics, and I think, out of everything, Wonder Woman has had the biggest influence on my storytelling. And I think the reason why is because Wonder Woman was my introduction into a matriarchal form of storytelling, because the myth of Wonder Woman is that she was crafted from clay by her mother on an island, and her world is only women. I didn’t realize why I was so drawn to that and interested in that as a kid, and now I’m like, Oh yeah, it’s an island full of lesbians, so of course I’m into that. I’m like, That makes so much sense. But I think her mythology, and that she comes from such a strong mythological background, in that she is the embodiment of the gods, is something that really influenced me, and all kinds of mythology I grew up hearing as well kind of all fed into my obsession with myth. I have to give credit. I have so much Wonder Woman paraphernalia collected over the years, it’s embarrassing. My keys are Wonder Woman, I have a shirt, it’s everywhere.
Mythology is so with me—and, in a weird way, also sitcoms. There are so many sitcoms I ended up watching in middle school, and the structure of the sitcom was so interesting to me, because it’s so episodic but there’s also broader, overarching plotlines as well. And I think that very, very episodic nature of storytelling is also something that resonated with me, and I knew when I was writing BESTIARY, that I wanted it to both feel like a collection—in that there are these microstories within them like episodes—while also feeling like a whole, and that’s a very television-esque way of storytelling. And, in terms of my literary influences… I’m staring at my bookshelf, there are so many writers! Jessica Hagedorn I love— Jenny Zhang— I recently read this book called Eartheater, by Dolores Reyes, and I really wish I had read that book sooner— well, it just came out now, so I couldn’t have, and I know I just read her book, but I’m going to call her a literary pillar of mine, because it’s just so strange and poetic and gross and beautiful. So those are my cobbled-together different influences.
As a queer Asian writer, have you ever thought about heritage, or more specifically, about building your own lineage? For example, I know that I often struggle, as a queer Asian-American writer, with finding a history that parallels mine, or sometimes feeling very alone and very unrooted. So what was your journey towards finding queer ancestors, and was that reflected in your protagonist’s journey in BESTIARY?
Completely, I think that this sense of loneliness—this feeling of... I’ve heard it described as trying to invent your own language, that there isn’t a language for desire in the way that it feels real or true, so you’re inventing your own language, and that sense really drove me while I was writing. And I always joke that BESTIARY is like family fan-fiction, because it’s all about this daughter who discovers all these queer lineages within her family. Her great-great grandparents, her great-great-great grandparents—they all have these queer creation myths, and that was something I invented for myself, in a way. And it was also kind of a strangely healing thing, to create your own origin story, and your own origin myths, which I guess is very superhero-y, and I’m bringing it back to comics.
That kind of self-invention is very queer: this idea that, in some ways, it feels like you have to make your own myths, you have to create your own self. But also that it can be deeply braided and rooted in familial histories, in cultural histories, so I wanted it to be that. So in some ways it is a fantasy—I always call it a fantasy novel. Because it’s about fantasizing. For me, the writing process was about fantasizing what queer ancestry could look like. And then, for the narrator, it’s her actual, embodied reality. I always talk about this quote that Maxine Hong Kingston said, which is that she wrote a grandfather figure in her books that could love her as a granddaughter, and how she wrote it for herself. It was a revelation to read something like that, because I realized I kind of did that too—I wrote this great-great grandfather, this great-great grandmother, who are pirates and gay and magical, and having all kinds of adventures, and also saying ‘f- you’ to these colonizers. That feel both true to familial histories that I’m familiar with, but that also are in this speculative space, this space of imagination and self-authorship. It was really joyful at the same time it has all these dark elements to them as well.
There’s a lot in BESTIARY that revolves around this generational porosity, or as you described it in a past interview, this symmetry between you and your mother, a porousness and sameness. So, in that vein, how has this generational porosity acted as a benefit, or potentially a detriment, in navigating your own identity?
It’s very complicated, because I feel like I was raised in a way I do deeply appreciate, and maybe it might be unconventional in that I always felt this feeling that I was raised by women who wanted me to understand they were women first before they were mothers, grandmothers, aunties. That they were cast in these roles, but that they had lives that were kind of encompassing everything, and that, you know, they were girls, they’re people, they’re not just these self-sacrificial figures. In literature, we tend to really romanticize the role of a self-sacrificing mother, especially a self-sacrificing immigrant mother, and I think we consider it beautiful, to sacrifice, and that’s what makes a good mother, and someone who’s worthy of paying tribute to. What if I paid tribute to these women who are just wild? And who are ready to tell you all these things, and want you to know as a very young child, that they exist as more than just caregiving figures? I was really interested in that, and I think that’s why I was very interested in revisiting the girlhood of the grandmother and the mother figures in the book.
And where that porosity comes through, too, because each of the perspectives—like the mother’s perspective. To the daughter, that’s her mother, but she’s narrating the time when she was fourteen and fifteen, and so she is also living in her girlhood as well, at the same time. That’s a thing I was really fascinated by. Hearing my mother and I share a name within our families made me realize we share a role, like she is my mother but she is also a daughter, and I am also forever going to be a daughter as well, and so there’s this resonant thread that I was really interested in understanding.
I think we have a very hierarchical understanding of generations, and that hierarchy is definitely something that’s enforced, so it feels very real, but I was also interested in collapsing that. Again, maybe in a really speculative way, because in the mother’s portion, she’s fourteen and fifteen, and she’s addressing the daughter as you, but obviously the daughter doesn’t exist yet, so there’s a bit of a kind of sci-fi-esque feeling to that, of this fourteen/fifteen-year-old recalling this childhood and then having this speculative child in the future that she’s narrating to, that does later exist. So it’s a little bit of a mind-bend, but that’s what I was really, really fascinated with: these kind of generational relationships that I think in some way violate what we define as a generational relationship, which is always one generation must teach the other, or one generation must flee the other in order to find themselves. And I’m like, Oh, let’s kind of not do that. Let’s kind of violate those rules, or norms, a little bit, and see what it means—because it’s also really difficult to grapple with people who have been cast in roles that minimizes their humanity, in some ways, and for the daughter, wrapping her mind around the ways in which she feels deeply treasured but also at the same time has also derailed other people’s lives in a way, in the process. So it’s always a mixed thing.
What are your thoughts on the relationship between the body and writing? There are a lot of themes regarding the body in your writing, in your poetry especially.
I never realized that I wrote that much about the body—I thought this was just how everybody wrote. And then other people would point out that there are really grotesque moments, and I was like, Oh, really? Everyone has different definitions of realism and what it means to represent a certain kind of reality, and the kind of reality I was interested in representing is one where you’re having to think about where you’re going to poop, and having to think about what you’re going to eat and to be consumed in constantly living in that—never being able to forget your body and its material conditions, and more abstract things like desire and hunger. That kind of reality, to me, feels the most real and urgent, so I’ve always been consumed by that. And I think that storytelling and the body feel very entwined as well, because I’m very used to the oral storytelling tradition, which is obviously very embodied and theatrical, and very much about embodying the language, and having it come out of your mouth, and be acted out. For me, storytelling is not this super abstract thing. I’ve always envisioned what it’s like to act out something, or say it out loud, so that act of storytelling is really important to me.
Building off of that, if there is something that you want to add (if not, that’s totally fine), your other pieces deal a lot with ideas of consumption and ejection, and I was wondering if there were anything specifically geared towards why you focus on that—which you definitely touched on, with storytelling and its physical embodiment.
I really think it is as simple as—at least for me!—I feel like 90% of my life is I’m eating something, or I’m expelling it. In between that, I do some stuff, but it’s not as important as where the toilet is, where can I go to the bathroom, so these kinds of immediate bodily needs are at the forefront. In literature, there’s a tendency to shy away from that, or that’s not worthy of literary-ness, and I’m like, It could be though. And I think there are many writers who make it that way, like Jenny Zhang writes in a very literary way in the very first page of her book about breaking up poop in a toilet with a pair of chopsticks. She’s creating literature of excretion, in a way, but on a more metaphorical level, I’m really interested in hunger and consumption and desire as being all tied together: the bodily, the erotic, and how that ties into sexuality as well. All those things. I also think the body is this whole battleground of shame and power dynamics: how we carry our body, and how we navigate ourselves. I just feel like everything kind of plays out within the body, so I tend to hyper-focus and zoom in on that as I’m writing.
BESTIARY often straddles the line between poetry and prose, which is so gorgeous, so I was wondering what it was like to transition between poetry and prose—not only in BESTIARY as a single work, but also in your career as a whole.
All of the forms come out of a really similar place for me, and don’t feel super super separate and distinct. Though process-wise, they’re a little bit different—so I think that everything I do is driven by language first, which definitely usually means that most of what I write is a flop, but it’s where that sense of urgency comes from for me, and everyone has different places and different ways of navigating their writing, and for me, language is that thread that I keep pulling on, and it keeps unraveling and unraveling and leading me to something. And that has been consistent in both poetry and prose, and something that I learned a lot as a poet as well. It’s thinking about language in a non-utilitarian way, which I think we tend to do in our daily lives, like language must communicate a very precise and clear meaning. There’s grammar, so there’s a right way to use language and there’s a wrong way, so there’s a very punitive relationship we have with it, like bad grammar, bad blah-blah-blah, et cetera et cetera, and poetry completely breaks apart all those things, like grammar, convention—all those things go out the window. It’s a very liberating space to write in, and I want to carry that into prose—and, again, because I’m not always focused on meaning, sometimes I just like how the words sound, it means a lot of what I produce is terrible, but I think that’s part of the process, and part of the fun and play of it, and I hope to preserve that.
As a non-Eurocentric writer, how do you view genre and form?
I think genre is mostly something that’s externally applied to the work, and it’s usually a marketing tool—it’s just something you use to sell the thing, and you want to sell the thing, most of the time, because you have to make a living. We have to live in this capitalist world. Usually it doesn’t come from this internal place because it is just an arbitrary, or sometimes arbitrary, definition. Thinking about Maxine Hong Kingston’s work, and the way in which people called it a memoir—but that wasn’t something that came from her, it was something that the publishers thought they could market this as. People only want to know the “authenticity,” and all these kinds of words they just slapped onto the work, so it didn’t really come from her, necessarily, and I think genre is often like that. It’s really hard to think, Oh, I’m going to write a novel, and then it comes out, so genre is something I try not to think about because it can be really anxiety-inducing, and something that reduces a work to where to shelve it. And form is something that’s a lot more playful and fun—there’s just so many possibilities in the form, and I wish I experimented more with the form. I think in poetry, again, that world is so conducive to play and gives you so much permission to do so, and in prose sometimes things can be a little bit more rigid and tied to capital, and things like that. But it’s always something I try to think about, even if it’s just in the back of my mind.
I’m curious as to the research process in creating BESTIARY, specifically the myths—how much of the magical realism was based on myth, and how do you yourself define myth, and how much was passed down generationally and how much did you originate yourself?
There are a few myths that are more canonized—things like the story of the gourd girl, where she cried and part of the Great Wall collapsed. That’s a very popular story and kind of a folktale. There’s the tiger woman story, a woman in a tiger’s body, or the tiger spirit was in a woman’s body, who eats children’s toes. That’s a children’s story that I got told a lot as a kid, which is hilarious because it’s so not child-friendly. It’s so violent and disturbing, because the Tiger Woman is like, Oh, these toes are peanuts and delicious, and they’re severed toes and I’m going to call them peanuts. It’s disturbing but I love it—and so all those stories were things that were passed down to me, but I think things like growing the tiger tail, or the myth of the pirate, or the myth of the river that becomes a snake woman… those were things that were more from my own imagination, and for my own mythological world that I wanted to create for this family and their origin stories.
So it’s definitely a mix, and all the stories I definitely played with and manipulated around, but I felt that’s very true to the book, because it’s all about how there is no authoritative form of storytelling, there is no canon, there is no authentic version of the story. It’s all manipulated through a body, through a mouth, told through this very, very particular perspective, and I wanted the book to be kind of meta like that, to be a story about storytelling, and about subjectivity. And so all of the stories in it are very colored by the different lenses and motivations of the characters, and I wanted to really draw attention to that.
That’s so lovely. The last two questions I have are taking a step back from being as probing as we’ve been—so first is just what general advice you’d give to a beginning writer, or perhaps what advice do you wish you’d been given, when you yourself were starting out?
The most wonderful advice I’d been given was from my teacher at Kundiman, Jennifer Tseng. I walked in, I had all these poems, and she told me I had an inner teacher. Because all my life, I’d been searching for this kind of external approval, and external permission, and external accolades to validate me, like all forms of external validation—and to be told I had within myself I had an inner teacher, an inner mentor, and I didn’t necessarily need to seek that outside of myself, was powerful for me to hear. It released something in me. So that’s definitely advice I always remind myself of, and also wish that I’d heard earlier as well, so I wouldn’t have been so obsessed with thinking that I couldn’t write unless I had a mentor, I couldn’t write unless I had a teacher, all these things. But you have an inner teacher, and I love that.
Another thing is that we’re all so focused on becoming a master of something, on getting expertise in the craft—we all want to work on our own writing and our own craft, but I think what unlocked this flood of things that allowed BESTIARY to exist in the world was to kind of let go of this idea of mastering something or perfecting something. It was really just play, and no expectations, and it’s okay if it never coalesces into a project, and sometimes you have to trick yourself into thinking those things, and really believing in those things in order for stuff to come out, and that’s definitely how it was for me.
As a writer, and especially as a writer who touches on these themes of myth and storytelling, it’s easy to become a myth yourself. So I was wondering if there were anything about yourself that you want to be known, that you maybe haven’t had the space to mention before? Like the Wonder Woman mention—anything like that.
I love that idea, I would love to become a myth! I would love to become a goddess who just is chilling in a garden, or on top of a mountain eating peaches. And the monkey king can be my friend, and he can help me defeat my enemies. It’ll be great, we’ll achieve enlightenment together.
Yeah, I think my obsession with Wonder Woman needs to be put out there, that’s definitely something. And the fact that I was a Twihard! I don’t know if that’s important information, but I was really into Twilight, I was really into Percy Jackson, and I guess, in some ways, both of those come from mythologies of different kinds. Young adult fiction was definitely very formative for me, though Percy Jackson is more middle-grade.
I think there’s an illusion that I’m super prolific, but I’m actually not. I’m not at all—I’m actually quite slow, I just tend to accumulate things for a very long time so I have this long backlog of things. And, growing up, I felt this immense pressure that I had to be like these people writing two thousand words a day, and it’s like, No, it’s okay. With NaNoWriMo, I would only ever do like six thousand words, and then I was done. Funnily enough, the first time I ever did NaNoWriMo, I was in sixth grade, and the book was about a girl who could transform into a tiger, and she lives in a boarding school that was basically a rip-off of the Harry Potter houses, because I made them before and they each had an animal—and she transforms into a tiger, so maybe there was something about that, that embedded into my consciousness.
Because now, years later, I’m still writing about people transforming into tigers, and I think, in some way, we’re all writing the thing we wrote when we were thirteen or fourteen. And I think maybe that’s a good thing.
The highest compliment I can give anyone—as nothing more than a humble writer myself, unpublished and undecorated—is that they make me want to write. After talking with K-Ming, I itched to get my hands on a keyboard, an urge I hadn’t felt in months. Few things are able to return me to the raw, joyful catharsis of my early writing days, but K-Ming, and the obvious love she has for the craft, the “bloody, pulsing heart” of her works, did.