Conversation: K-Ming Chang
Written by Yue Chen
This interview was originally published in sinθ #16 “VERTEX 角”. Order a copy now on BLURB.
“You’re my mother,” says Bestiary’s daughter, “and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future.” “But who,” asks the mother, “can prepare you for the past?” In a world cross-stitched by geopolitical and intergenerational borders, K-Ming Chang is redefining “home.” From the confines of the human body and the waters that hold us, to the histories binding us to our pasts and futures, Chang deftly severs and restitutes the places and people we call ours.
K-Ming Chang, 22, is the author of the novel Bestiary, due in September 2020 from One World, a Penguin Random House imprint. Chang is a Kundiman fellow, the program manager of New York Chinatown bastion Wing on Wo & Co., and the once-bearer of a nickname meaning “really strong intestines” because of her inhumanely large poops as an infant at which her whole neighborhood marveled. Chang has been nominated for and received numerous accolades, including the Lambda Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Her poetry and prose wrangle with family, trauma, queerness, and the body, all at once. Chang was the prose winner of sinθ’s 2019 summer writing contest, and her winning short story “Auntland” was published in Issue #12 “THUNDER 雷.” Three of Chang’s poems — ‘流血,’ ‘流汗,’ and ‘流口水’ — were featured in sinθ #5 “FLOW 流” in 2017.
Chang and I connect over Skype in early June. We are each quarantined in a better half of California. The world is currently deteriorating, I think, at an unusually rapid pace. Over two hours, we talk about water; queerness as deviance unbounded by discipline; the trickiness of the contronym “cleave;” K-Ming’s obsessive journaling habits; myths about snakes masquerading as women; stories about women who claim and channel everything animal about them.
Chang’s foray into writing began years ago through carefully-maintained diaries chock-full of stories her family shared. She hoped to lend some sort of canonical permanence to a Taiwanese aborigines heritage that has been passed down largely by tongue and sharpened with memory. Chang grew up moving around California, though she lends Montebello, CA, a grounding weight. In Bestiary, this Gateway City just east of Los Angeles proper serves as the family’s home. Chang spent summers in Montebello with multiple generations of her family, and it is where her mother first began telling her stories — including the story of Hu Gu Po, the tiger woman whose myth defines Bestiary. As a child, Chang begged her mother to tell and retell Hu Gu Po’s tale in bed. When Chang told her mother that her debut novel would invoke that childhood staple, her mother laughed, rolled her eyes, and said, “not that stupid story again.”
Chang entered the burgeoning arena of spoken word and poetry through online literary communities, in which she remains active today and which she credits with jumpstarting her writing career. She denotes this as a “reckoning,” increasingly aware of her self and body’s intrinsic politicization. An upshot of our generation coming to age on and with the Internet is the scattered selves we digitize into: Chang and I, through the illustrative example of having “secret Tumblrs” that represented our illicit identities away from home and school, hooked on the idea that writing through and for cyberspace distanced ourselves from our work. Chang realized, however, as she hoarded Tumblr URLs and pushed out nascent poem scraps on Twitter, that her writing was much closer to her “real life” than she had imagined it to be.
She found a home in poetry — writing exclusively in this genre for years about family, queerness, trauma, and mythology. Her first publication was in Word Riot, an online magazine which has since ceased publication, in 2014. In 2018, she released her debut chapbook Past Lives, Future Bodies, wrapping everything vulnerable and violent into powerful imagery and form. That same year, I first met Chang at Kearny Street Workshop’s “Mourn You Better: Feelings from the Queer Taiwanese & Chinese Diaspora” event in San Francisco, where she read poems about coins thrown in creeks as wishes, peaches beheading themselves from trees, and knives birthing boys. Notable poems by Chang include ‘Yilan,’ which won a 2018 Pushcart Prize; ‘Tonight on TV,’ which was selected for the 2018 Bettering Poetry anthology; and ‘Letter to My Grandmother in Tsingtao’ and ‘Lone wolf narrative,’ which both featured in the 2019 Best of the Net anthology.
Despite emerging as a poet, Chang has not written a poem in two and a half years. Recently, she has concentrated on short stories and her full-length novel, Bestiary. She hadn’t expected this pivot due to preconceptions about prose as literally prosaic, rectilinear and straight as an arrow, though now she recognizes that “you can also break language and form with it.” Chang and I blame the rigidity of the Western scholastic canon, with her singing the praises of authors such as Sandra Cisneros and Marilyn Chin who subvert orthodoxy for prose that is experimental, playful, and ever-changing. Chang enthuses about the experimental prose work of many renowned Asian American writers — Maxine Hong Kingston a recurring favorite — as “wild,” and it is quite easy to say Bestiary is “wild” as well. Not only because it is about wild things, but because it takes what a novel can be to new heights and depths. It leaves you breathless and racing to catch up to where it is, where you want to be.
Bestiary is a nonlinear multigenerational narrative challenging rote concepts of origin, matriline, choice, and agency through storytelling. A father and son careen into the sky as kites and a daughter unearths stories instead of gold from holes in the backyard that are more mouth than pit. Told through potent images and queered legends, Bestiary is voiced by the interlocked and interchanging perspectives of grandmother, mother, and daughter. Nothing about Bestiary is easy — Chang’s style is ripe with metaphors, fleshly imagery, and narrative voice that eats itself and spits the bones of its letters back out. What you need to know is the daughter grows a weapon that hunts her shadow, her best friend inherits the ghosts of caged birds, and a river gathers itself into a woman and rebirths a child. All three narrating characters are anonymous, defined by their relations with one another — though of course, a mother is still a daughter and a grandmother is still a mother, and all relational names, in the end, situate the named in power dynamics. Chang and I laugh about how we grew up not knowing our relatives’ and friends’ parents’ names, calling them by the appropriate iteration of aunt or uncle depending on their order of birth and whose blood they shared.
Chang’s own nicknames change frequently, about twice a year, she thinks. She was once known for the size of her poops, while her brother was revered as a god envisioned walking on air — a nod to where the power dynamics of naming bleed into those of patriarchy. Of names, Chang tells me, “I was just really interested in names as this relational thing, and as this fluid thing…” And this mobility, the reliance on factors and family that themselves change, is portrayed in the river that winds its way through geographies and generations of Bestiary. After all, it is not only people that bear and endow themselves with names.
Bestiary’s epigraph includes a quote by Li-Young Lee: “The name of the river is what it says.” And in the book, there is a river that exits its riverbed at night in the shape of a woman (much as, Chang notes, a woman would leave her bed at night) to be with another woman (as a woman would meet her lover for a moonlit tryst — everything’s gay if you squint). “The land and river are actually living, breathing,” Chang says. “Why don’t we listen to what the river actually wants us to call her? What her own will and desires are?” There is something “powerful and subversive” about granting human autonomy to what appears to simply be a picket of water. The river chooses who it loves and who it saves — it is bodily in that it is and contains and births body upon body.
While the river channels agency through divining its own named personhood, the three matrilineal protagonists telling and retelling Bestiary go unnamed. Chang brings up American missionaries christening Taiwanese aboriginal people and God denominating the world’s fauna, concluding, “names are just so entrenched in power and who has power.” Chang surmises, “there is a kind of power in not naming something or refusing to give them a proper name.” She acknowledges that this runs antithetical to familiar concepts of “individuality” and personal identity, but confirms, “I just want the power to name them to just be removed for a second. Even if it’s a little disorienting to talk about, because you just talk about them as Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, I want it to feel maybe even a little bit jarring, where it’s like, suddenly, I don’t know what to summon.” When women in a family share the same relational names — everyone is a ma or a meimei or an ayi — “we have a shared history even if we’re literally timelines apart.”
Diasporic writers often contend with water imagery, illustrating seas and lakes as transitional spaces or sites of memory and separation. The water is what breaks us from the motherland. It laps against opposite shores all too foreign for us. For K-Ming, however, water is a body of origin rather than a body of distance. From gay pirates to the river that draws its skirts into a woman at night, water holds unmatched creative and biosynthetic prowess.
Chang laughs about an “obsession with umbilical cords that just comes up in the book a lot.” I immediately ask for clarification, and she tells me about the recurrence of a winding, wandering shape in her life — always tied to something somatic: intestines, umbilical cords, rivers; a course with an entrance that could be mistaken for an exit, a searching furl that threatens to burst past its banks. Bestiary is much like that. Chang talks about a critical review that said the book “meandered” too much. To an extent, I agree; though there is a clear progression of storyline, a beginning that circles back to its end, constant movement among generational thresholds pitches the reader between the lands of the dammed and damned. Bestiary twists past linearity with the skill of a reel, and Chang confirms that the book’s structure was inspired by a river’s silhouette.
At face value, Bestiary’s oddest plot point is the appearance and reappearance of supernatural trans-species events. Daughter grows a tiger tail that lashes and leashes the world she stalks through; Dayi gives birth to a blood-red goose that is part-bird, part-sacrificial lamb; and Ama has a coil of snakes corded to her groin, at the ready. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that these messy inter-species instances are a surfacing of mythologies.
Specifically, on the legend of Hu Gu Po — a woman inhabited by a tiger spirit who must eat children to retain her mortal form — Chang likens that animal-human relationship to “being a tenant in your body … it’s about agency and gender, and women’s agency in their bodies.” Rather than invoking Hu Gu Po’s animality to further dehumanize her, Chang “wanted to think of this animal spiritualism, [these] trans-species interactions, as a way of drawing upon power that isn’t perceived in the world as being real or valid.” She comments on the uniquely intense relationships women bear to land, water, indigenous identity, and the natural world. As such, trans-species events trigger them “to understand and go back and uproot, uproot, uproot, and, like, more deeply understand themselves and the lineage they come from.” Deploying animalness as a path rather than a pain, Chang sought to take “this idea that this woman is actually possessed by this animal spirit and think of it less as a possession — like she’s being taken over — and more like she’s harnessing it.”
When asked what differentiates mythology and history, Chang brings up that regimes and dominant systems dictate what history is, dismissing subversive accounts as illicit. “Not that mythologies at all detach from power because I think, like, all forms of storytelling are attached to power,” she adds. “But there’s something about mythology that really defies logic that I think creates room and possibility to just imagine new things and new futures.” While mythology is frequently characterized as bygone or primeval, Chang sees infinite possibility in it, as it “just breaks in logic. It allows people to fly.”
Womanhood’s potency manifests in Chang’s style. Part of it is a simple middle finger to donnish Western canons that sanctify and sanitize the human body. In Chang’s writing, piss and shit are adjectives and prayers in turn, whereas penises and heterosexual intercourse are an afterthought. Just as women found themselves planted in nature, Chang believes “women had this really intense bodily connection to everything that we did and in a way that other people were kind of spared of.” Chang does not shy away from this intercourse. She talks about Edward Louis and Jenny Zhang, two authors who deal with death and anatomy in the abstract and in spades (Chang’s pretty sure Zhang “pioneered poop-related literature in the Asian American diaspora … Like, she’s the reigning queen of writing about bodily fluid, right?”). Another influence for Chang is Chinese literature, in which writing about people in their most physical embodiments is not considered lowbrow — Mo Yan and his fascination with castration come to mind. Bestiary is not Chang’s first venture into bodily functions, either. For instance, ‘Prayer in the Position of the Asian Squat,’ published in Diagram in 2019, reads: “Let the sky diaper itself / in another shit-stained night. Let him not shit / himself when the plane skims the milk / off the river & lands despite god / goading gravity.”
Bruises and holes and shit aside, a woman’s body does cradle tenderness as well. Chang tells me, “queerness in queer sex to me represents possibility.” In Bestiary, a man symbolizes a “vehicle of mobility through the world,” meaning marriage was never a choice but an escape. Queerness, then, is a deviance: it is an exit that is not a wound. “What I think that the queer characters in the book are looking for, seeking, and desiring,” Chang says, “is something outside of that system of choicelessness, of having no choice, having no agency, of this compulsive heterosexuality that actually is just violence.” Of course, queerness is not a romantic utopia devoid of systemic violence or the reality of the body — Chang expresses, “I want to write about sex as joy and also consumption and hunger and all these things, and how it’s tied to all the corporeal processes and functions, but at the same time, contending with violence, too.” Sex as something real and touchable and celebratory and agonizing “feels akin to speculative fiction because you’re inventing this entire vocabulary of intimacy.”
Chang is fascinated by the revision of histories and possibilities to render them kinder and closer to marginalized lived experiences — “speculative history.” She and I easily agree that everything can be queered, that the exact parameters of science or medicine or winners’ versions of history are less integral than the unsung, parenthetical prospects. When talking about the frequent crossing of sexuality and family in her writing, Chang admits, “I was really just, I guess, trying to create a space or a home for myself.” In a recent New Yorker profile, Maxine Hong Kingston said she wrote about a grandfather because her own did not value daughters — so she wrote a version of him she deserved, someone who would have cherished her (Chang: “Wow, it’s like fanfiction. For your family.”). For Chang, settling in the familial sphere was important — as much as coming of age stories, particularly queer accounts, are about liberation from the family, she asks, “Why not have this, like, super lesbian origin story where everyone lives happily ever after?” She adds, “What would a queer novel look like if it was about not fleeing the domestic space but kind of rooting yourself more deeply in domestic space? What would it look like if queerness came from within the family and it wasn’t about leaving or breaking away? Or running away? If it was about, like, burrowing yourself deeper, uncovering more and more of your history?”
Without excising queerness, migration, or loss from their narratives, Chang aims to “mine the mythology of this family and create a queer lineage.” So, in a stark pivot from the fixed immigration parable, the family in Bestiary originates from two gay pirates set adrift because their ethnic minority background forestalled them from docking anywhere in the Sinosphere.
The creation of a new lineage is reflected in Chang’s writing style — when considering the fulcrum between poetry and prose, she says, “I always want to be in the space of language.” Bestiary is punctuated by letters, intergenerational correspondences themselves punctured by blank spaces, absences that are hardly empty. Chang recalls being surprised at an editorial note asking about distinctions between the three protagonist voices, because she had wanted to marry them. Ruminating on “broken lineage and fractured lineage, and, like, what it means to kind of assemble your own lineage together” brought her to the “impossibility of translation” — “not just language to language, but from generation to generation as well.” So when Daughter and Ama write to each other, their words must be splintered by dynamic gaps, much like the holes that swallow and retch their letters and sacrifices. The omissions are not nothing, per se — Chang equates them with loss, contending that “loss isn’t just emptiness. It’s this living, breathing thing — this wound.” For the rebellious grandmother character, in particular, Chang sought to create a new vocabulary rather than using the breaks as censorship: the gaps are meant as fomenting “sense of newness and possibility rather than subtracting something from the language or the prose.”
The letters stand in stark contrast to the rest of Bestiary. A written and parsed novel reliant on stories enshrined by tongue, it is a testament to Chang’s own upbringing in a household colored by lively, loud storytelling. For her, “the ultimate embodiment of storytelling is kind of body to body, told through tongue.” Though oral storytelling is often delegitimized as unauthoritative, Chang argues there is a certain violence in necessitating traceable documentation for everything. She instead wanted to spotlight the intimacy of storytelling, saying, “I wanted to reclaim that as something that was not just valid, but kind of like the heartbeat of this entire family and this community lineage.”
A particular quote from Bestiary struck me — “the verb cleave has two meanings: to split from and stick to.” The training and trading of violence between genders and within a family is prominent in Bestiary, where altercations and brutality foreground relations. Chang is no stranger to this tricky, violent contronym of a verb. In ‘Poem for my mother’s cleaver,’ published in Past Lives, Future Bodies, a mother:
“plants her knife
in a pitcher of blood & grows it
the length of my life…
…Before burial, she stabs airholes
into my chest, carves out my eyes
& replaces them with bullets
or river rocks, anything to look
less like my father.”
Poet Eloisa Amezcua’s blurb for Chang’s chapbook reads, “These meditations on family, pain, and the ways we communicate untangle the threads of what it means to love those who have hurt us.” This confusion, this careful, protected hurt needles at Chang’s logical mind (and features prominently in her journal entries). It would require surgical precision and clarity to cleave love from hurt, as they are cleaved fast, and we here are writers, not doctors of mind or matter.
In some ways, Chang posits, it is violent to retrospectively examine a relationship and conclude there was categorically no love or tenderness tangled in it. Two sides of the same coin, each the dark side of a moon, she says, “even in moments that seem completely tender, there’s a shadow of violence, and with violence, too, there’s a shadow of tenderness.” Once this faceted trauma is accepted, the issue at hand is what to do with it. Chang has more questions than easy answers here — “How will Daughter — and also in general how will we — live carrying this without giving it back to the world?” she asks. Trauma is both “a tool of intimacy and a tool of tearing [family] apart at the same time.” For Daughter, the endless violence her matrilineal predecessors endure manifests in a whip of a tail, both a weapon and an umbilical cord, to protect and to injure. The ultimate question, then, is: “What do you do when we love each other, or are we just collectively traumatized together?”
When Daughter contemplates cutting her tail off after it thrashes out of turn to grave consequences, Ben, her bird friend-cum-first love, tells her she has a choice — she has the agency her mother and grandmother never did. There is no need for her to sever this part of herself, this symbol of lineage, in order to change the direction of violence. Though Chang is clear about not wanting to paint Daughter as completely fine and free, she wanted to offer hope — hope through Daughter’s fractured voice as she pieces together fragments of history never meant to be left behind, as she recontextualizes intergenerational trauma to more deeply understanding the love and grief forging her family. Hope that knowledge strengthens and informs the answer to the simple, loaded question: “How do we just live?”
Towards the end of the interview, Chang and I discuss a staggering scene in Bestiary in which father and son, embroiled in violent conflict, launch themselves from the rooftop of a building and become kites, flat and flailing in the air. Kite-fighting is now a sport, but kites were once weaponized — useful in that they could explore all heights of the sky while remaining firmly tethered to the earth, to hands that catch them against the belly of the wind. Chang says, “I was really fascinated by this conditional flight. It must be beautiful, but also really horribly tragic to be a kite.” In Bestiary, mother and daughter coax the brother down first, tugging the kite strings that sprouted from him mid-air. The abusive father is left to fall alone: “To have flight and captivity always in proximity, so it’s never just this image of flying… there’s always the string that’s connecting them to the hands of the people who love them and are hurt by them,” Chang reflects.
This idea of conditional flight, adventure that is firmly rooted, ties together much of what Chang and I have been talking about. For all its mythology and bodily exploration, Bestiary is caught by the hands of those who hold us closest. Be it to caress or to strike, these hands make us for the speculative futures we write ourselves into. And that is what Chang has done — taken those hands in hers and written a possibility in which the past strings itself to those settling the present, beckoning them home; and to stories and legacies that have resuscitated in the forthcoming. To all the names and traumas and bodies that have made us.
So, what’s next for K-Ming Chang? In 2021, she will be releasing the story Bone House — a part-romance, part-ghost tale queer Taiwanese American retelling of Wuthering Heights — through Bull City Press’s micro-chapbook series Inch. Chang is also currently working on a poetry collection, tentatively titled Daughter Dialect, in which she plans to explore similar themes as those of Bestiary through new forms and narrative arcs (“I don’t just want it to feel like I took everything [I’ve published] online and put it on the pages, which I really want to do. I’m so tempted, but I will not.”). Furthermore, she is in the midst of a new prose project called Organ Meats, a dissection of the human body and breasting of each organ (loosely defined — the tongue is an organ if K-Ming Chang says it is) in a story.
Chang is also continuing her work remotely with Wing on Wo, blending art with activism and anti-gentrification efforts to serve Manhattan Chinatown. Joining as a Resist Recycle Regenerate fellow with WoW in 2017 and later supporting WoW’s youth program, Chang now works with the entire organization through public program and residency coordination, grant writing, fundraising, and other internal functions. She speaks fondly of the tight-knit community she has found in WoW and looks forward to reuniting with them post-COVID.
We can be sure that everything K-Ming Chang brings to life will subvert science, form, and the faint of heart. After all, there are so many stories that remain to be told, and home is where the search for answers begins.
Original interview by Yue Chen. Print design and banner by Elisabeth Siegel. Medium article re-uploaded by Hayley Wu.
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