K-Ming Chang is a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and a Kundiman fellow. Her first novel, Bestiary, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel and was longlisted for the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize. Bestiary also received the PEN/ Faulkner Award. In advance of her new short story collection, Kundiman Programs Intern Yeenon Yu spoke to K-Ming Chang about Bestiary and her journey to becoming a novelist.
Gods of Want tells stories of Asian American women and their relationships with bodies, memories, and myths. Gods of Want was released on July 12th, 2022, and is available for purchase now!
Can you talk about your experience writing different genres and the journey of writing your first novel as a poet?
Before I wrote Bestiary, I only thought I would be writing poetry. That was the only thing that I was interested in. But I noticed that in my poetry I really enjoyed thinking about narrative. I wanted to be more expansive on the page and not thinking too much about genre and form. For me, poetry and prose come from similar places. It is often the metaphor or the image that leads me and guides me through the story, rather than the plot, character, and narrative. While I am drafting, I love for the language to guide me through and for the sonnet quality of the sentences to be the light that I follow in my writing. I am interested less in the meaning of the words than how they sound, and how they can be surprising. Sometimes it leads me astray because sentences I write will just mean nothing but they sound interesting. It leads me again to these places of surprise as a writer, where I am discovering something or exploring something new because the language between two words has led me toward a new meaning and a completely new place that I would have never expected when I was starting. That feeling is always so delightful and playful for me.
You included one of Maxine Hong Kingston’s quotes as an epigraph at the beginning of Bestiary: “There is a lot of detailed doubt here”. Did you take inspiration from her while writing your first novel?
I was thinking about China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior and China Men are often paired together in a really interesting way. What I loved about China Men was that it was so experimental with form and so playful. I love that she has these mythical sections. There are these histories that feel embodied, tactical, and lovingly written. It was interesting to think about history in a speculative way. Often when you talk about speculative fiction we mean to speculate about the future, to imagine the future. Speculative elements have a sort of future-facing feel to them. I was interested in the speculative history and kind of speculating about the absences and the losses that have occurred in the past. They can be transformed in the present or the future, and express what it means to invent history or to invent your own history. We need to think of history not as this sacred fixed truth, but as something to manipulate in the present, as something to make into a narrative. I thought a lot about how in China Men's history and myth were so entwined.
There was an exciting contrast between gold (something perceived as valuable) and bodily fluids (something that is perceived as invaluable) found in Bestiary. What was the meaning of the inclusion of that contrast?
In one instance, bodily fluids and gold come from the same body part. I remember hearing stories and reading stories about how dung and human feces can be fertilizer. In the book, there are a lot of bodily fluids that fertilize the ground. Growing up, I heard a lot that pee was a fertilizer. There was always something precious about waste and making use of waste and turning waste into something precious. Whether that happens with bodily fluids or scrap fabric or things that should be garbage are remade into something valuable, like tupperware. Here is the act of turning something that is waste and useless into something new and useful. Then, I was thinking about the way gold is buried in the book, and that gold isn’t really there to nourish anything. It is there because it has this value that the family relies on it. The parallel between bodily fluids in the ground and gold in the ground was really fascinating to me because I’m intrigued by the juxtaposition between the sacred and the profane. This idea that there are certain things that are profane, and should not have a place in society, in comparison to things that are sacred. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the family is considering something profane to be sacred? That is why there are so many bodily fluids! They are often not treated with disgust, instead they are to be looked at.
Balancing the sacred and the profane can subvert what is thought to be valuable.
Why is intergenerational struggle intertwined with oppression and love?
I was interested in a narrative where rather than running away, the daughter wants to bury herself and root herself in this family history and what she has inherited. This is a double edged sword, like the way her tail is a weapon that she loves. She earns to carry this dual inheritance, both loving and also violent. Oftentimes, love and violence are inseparable. Love for this family has been experienced in violent ways or violence expressed in loving ways, so there is this kind of blurriness between those things. It is hard for the narrator to decide what she wants to carry and how she wants to live based on that mass inheritance, where so many things cannot be separated and where so many things are opposites. They are two sides of the same coin. All of these stories that are based on the narrator are a way of conveying the history of violence that has run through this family, but also how much is imbued into these stories. It is both a gift and a warning wrapped up in one, like the way the tail is. The tail, stories, and intergenerational themes are wrapped up in each other. I think the narrator will always carry a lot and may not be able to parse between different forms of love and violence. To her, even just accepting that that is what she carries and accepting that those are the realities she holds within herself was important in and of itself.
Even though the book may not conclude anything truly solid about intergenerational violence and intergenerational love, it does confront the narrator with what it means to carry so many of these contradictions.