If K-Ming Chang’s short story collection “Gods of Want” were a pop-up book, it would feature cigarette-ad models springing to life, ghost-cousins, shape-shifting daughters making love to each other, nameless widows and nine-headed birds.
If you’re into the kind of fabulist grotesque that blurs the line between rot and beauty, the ordinary and absurd, Chang’s stories are for you. Her writing redefines reality, inhabiting surreal worlds and subverting folkloric conventions. It’s theatrical, comical, off-kilter and serious all at once.
Chang masterfully blurs the line between realism and surrealism, collective memory and pure imagination, which makes her work feel generative and wholly her own. I stumbled across Chang when my first-year roommate and close friend Zoe Dorado recommended her books to me. I remember one of the first things that struck me was the number of references made to piss, feces and snot. One user on Goodreads even goes as far as to note, “The author seemed to be trying as hard as they could to be disgusting and turn off the reader.” But this is what I love so much about her work: She doesn’t shy away from what’s naturally occurring; instead, she zooms in.
“Gods of Want” was published in 2022 and is divided into three sections: “Mothers,” “Myths” and “Moths,” which together encompass 16 stories. Each weaves together narratives of womanhood, Asian American identity, family lineage and queerness.
While this collection is often described as fairy tale-like, operating under dream logic, Chang clearly rejects the notion of a fairy-tale ending for immigrants. During a panel I attended earlier in the summer, Chang described her work as “inauthentic storytelling” — the idea that fiction shouldn’t have to function as authentic testimony.
It made me think: How do we even define the Asian American experience? Or, for that matter, the queer experience? If there’s anything we can take away from Chang’s writing, it’s that Asian American stories can be as much bodily fluids, haunted basements, lesbian sex and playful nonsense as they are intergenerational trauma, various ethnic foods and a diasporic longing for the homeland.
“If there’s anything we can take away from Chang’s writing, it’s that Asian American stories can be as much bodily fluids, haunted basements, lesbian sex and playful nonsense as they are intergenerational trauma, various ethnic foods and a diasporic longing for the homeland.”
Asian American stories are often expected to follow formulaic narratives that deal with trauma and triumph for a certain Western audience. This isn’t to say writers like Amy Tan — author of canonical books like “The Joy Luck Club,” a realistic, conventional depiction of Asian American experiences and struggles — don’t capture complex lived experiences in their own right. These stories are illuminating and wonderful, but what Chang does is simply different. She turns the immigrant story on its head, reinventing its possibilities in her signature style.
In the opening story, “Auntland,” Chang recounts tales of her aunts through a list poem — aunts who coexist in reality and imagination. The narrator recalls an aunt who “went to the dentist and asked to get her tongue pulled”; an aunt who “failed her immigration test because she named Colonel Sanders as one of the founding fathers”; an aunt who cut people’s earlobes and wiped her ass with her birth certificate. This is one of my favorite stories in the collection because of how campy and bizarre it reads, and yet it’s still a family story meant to be taken at least somewhat seriously.
A defining element of this collection is Chang’s creation of women and girls as messy, contradictory embodiments of desire and power — as are the relationships they have with each other. Her mythmaking is deeply matriarchal and matrilineal; men are always secondary to the story, and I often forget they exist on the page. Yet she doesn’t seek to sanctify or immortalize women — they are friends, lovers, enemies, bullies, strangers, kind, detestable, smart, brutal, funny, destructive, charming. In “Mariela,” for example, two childhood friends swap body parts, and the story comes to a point of tension when the narrator’s friend wants her to shuck off her teeth and give them to her. In “Xifu,” the narrator’s difficult mother-in-law thinks about all the ways she could kill her.
The stories in this collection insist on the inheritance of memory. Chang’s writing is embodied, blending corporeality with very matter-of-fact judgment, observation and proclamation. The story “Mandarin Speakers” opens with the line, “When the aliens come, they will speak Chinese. Abu says it’s because one in five people speak Chinese. In “Nuwa,” the narrator’s mother tells her, “Don’t whistle at night … The snakes will arrive and wreathe you. They don’t remember us anymore.” In “Virginia Slims,” the narrator recalls her late aunt saying over the phone, “telling lies will hollow out your bones, and if you tell enough of them you’ll float.”
During the panel I attended, Chang described a reversal of the literary cliché, “show, don’t tell,” as a fundamental function of mythmaking: “tell, don’t show.” She explained that when you tell a story to friends and family, you don’t describe what the room was like, what color the walls were. You just tell the story how it is, from start to finish. You go on wild tangents and fish out bizarre details, and a story is formed. Chang discusses mythmaking as shared storytelling rather than belonging to one person, introducing infinite possibilities, beginnings, and endings. It forfeits singular authority, as written work often does, refusing to be copyrighted or claimed. Chang invents worlds where suddenly everything seems permeable and alive. Where, as one of the characters in the stories says, “every word is strung with want.”
Corina Yi PO ’28 lives between SoCal and Korea. She prefers paperback over hardcover books.
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