A CONVERSATION WITH K-MING CHANG
By ANDREW ZHOU
K-Ming Chang is a Lambda Literary Award winner, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a Kundiman Fellow, and an O. Henry Prize Winner. She is the author of Bestiary, Gods of Want, Organ Meats, and a novella titled Cecilia. Her most recent works include a YA romance titled Straight to the Source and the novel Needlemouth. Her writing is most frequently described as “not for everybody” and occasionally described as “for the freaks.” More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.
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Andrew Zhou: Needlemouth as a figure is part vampire, part ghost, part demon, even part wicked stepmother, and certain passages in the story take on a fairy-tale quality. Was this your way in for this story? Were you consciously looking to mix various images from myth and folklore?
K-Ming Chang: Needlemouth was definitely inspired by my love of vampires. That was very overt. I jokingly call myself a vampire ethnographer, but it’s not really a joke, because I do consider myself to be a vampire ethnographer.
For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out an entry point into that mythology, because I feel like we’ve had every iteration of the vampire, so what could I possibly say? I realized I wanted to write about a vampire as something more ingrained, specifically thinking of blood as hegemony, blood as patriarchy, blood as patrilineage. In mythology, vampires have a way to create more vampires that isn’t through what we consider to be reproduction, usually through some kind of queer, erotic act, so I was interested in the vampire as disruptive of bloodline and patriline through that. I combined that with the idea of the Buddhist hungry ghost, a creature who becomes monstrous because their descendants forget them or because they have refused to reproduce the patriline in some way. Those two figures became so inseparable in my mind that it made sense to produce a new creature, which is exciting, because I was trying to find my entry point into something that felt so enormous and intimidating, and I instead ended up creating my own little world outside of that. Still in conversation with that canon, but ultimately outside of it.
AZ: There are a couple things there. First of all, you’re talking about lineage, and I was struck by the way you don’t treat it as a completely linear process. Cause and effect is bent in strange ways here, and Needlemouth talks about vengeance going beyond time itself. It’s a break from how we generally think of history.
KC: Lineage, in the more hegemonic way, is about verticality. It’s about these vertical relationships where someone has power over someone else, which are embedded within nuclear and patriarchal family structures. There’s always a sense of hierarchy. I think I’m so drawn to the supernatural because they can be these figures of disruption. They can come in like wrecking balls on the page and obliterate the logic of the world. You see the ways in which these girls are marginalized and lacking agency, and Needlemouth arrives as this explosive force to intervene in their lives. She mothers these girls into revolt and riot. So I wanted to show that lineage is not about getting away from past generations or putting distance. When we think of linearity, we usually think of progressing from one place to another place, and you end up somewhere different. I was thinking more about cycles, the idea of replicating and making the same thing over and over again. It’s not going anywhere. Those power dynamics continue to reproduce until this moment of time-defying, logic-defying, will-defying force, which in this case is Needlemouth.
AZ: Going off that mother-daughter relationship you mentioned, this book focuses on women who are marginalized under patriarchy, but for the most part, men aren’t even in the picture. The most visceral, painful material here is in seeing the ways that women hurt each other, the ways mothers and daughters fail each other and themselves. Can you talk about foregrounding this kind of betrayal where fathers and sons aren’t even depicted?
KC: I’m really glad you brought that up, because something I want the reader to notice is the absence of men, but the presence of patriarchy. You don’t actually need men to be present in order for patriarchy to function. I think that’s very true of lived experience. Oftentimes the people who are propagating these patriarchal ideas of who you should be and what you can expect of your life are women. Rather than solidarity, there’s hierarchy among them. It’s very much a result of the positions that they’ve been placed in, the roles that they’re expected to enforce. The women are oftentimes perpetuating harmful messages to women and girls who are less powerful than them or who in some way represent their younger selves. They have killed a part of themselves to assume that power, and then they have to kill it in other people.
Especially in Confucian patriarchy, there’s this idea of worthwhile sacrifice, the idea that suffering makes you good and is part of your role as a mother or wife. The women in this book are so deeply invested in that myth because they might have suffered or sacrificed without having been given a choice, and they are trying to recoup some sense of value. I think the idea that you can reject sacrifice and decide that it’s actually meaningless, that it doesn’t actually make you more virtuous to suffer, is something quite radical and painful to confront, because it’s a confrontation of loss. To me, this book is largely about the casualties of how you choose to survive. Because I think sometimes the greatest casualty is yourself. What are the parts of yourself that you kill in order to survive?
AZ: Hearing you talk so directly about these complicated intergenerational relationships, I’m curious about how writing so extensively on this subject in such a public way interacts with your real-life relationships with the women around you, like your ayis or your mother. I’m wondering if writing Needlemouth and the act of publishing it illuminates something in your real world.
KC: I think writing is part of how I’ve chosen to survive. I think a lot about The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. The first line of that book is so iconic: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’” You could have a writing career on that sentence alone.
AZ: Yes. Yes.
KC: It’s the best first line of any book ever, and then a whole book follows. To me, it’s a miracle.
I feel the same way, where I get to the page, and nothing is really taboo. It’s probably the place where I experience the most amount of freedom in my life. What can I tell that I’ve been told not to say? I was asked one time what writing represents to me. Is it my public life, my private life, or my secret life? Logically, it’s my public life, because it’s all out there. But to me, writing is my secret life. It’s the part of me that doesn’t have a space in either the public or private. It’s me speaking to myself, me speaking to an empty room. It’s a strange contradiction, but no matter what, I try to maintain it as my secret life. That keeps the writing alive for me, because I always have that need. It’s not something that can ever run out. In a weird way, I think Needlemouth is the girls’ secret self. It’s that part that doesn’t fit in privacy or in the public. It’s this secret need to speak, to confront the self.
AZ: That’s so interesting because, getting a little meta here, the book is playing with the act of storytelling itself. There are epistolary chapters, and then these extended accounts of family history, some of which are secondhand stories or stories within stories, all leading to this point where memory itself becomes something separate from the self. Where does your interest in exploring the relationship between storytelling, memory, and identity come from?
KC: I love what you’re saying about the metafictional quality here, because I do feel like every book I’ve ever written has been a story about storytelling. Bestiary is a book about storytelling. Organ Meats was also a book about storytelling. And then Cecilia is a book about memory, which is the same thing as a book about storytelling. Maybe I find memory and storytelling so fascinating because I am so interested in the ways that people survive and cope, which to me, is all about the myths of the self, the mythologies we build in order to sustain ourselves. You know how people say you are what you eat? Semi-jokingly, I say that I feel like I am the stories that I’m told. I don’t really feel a sense of individual identity. I don’t really feel like I’m a coherent self. I’ve never really felt that. I’ve always felt like this quilt-like compilation of stories I’ve been told, and maybe of stories I tell about myself and the world around me. That to me feels like a much truer self, if that’s even a self.
Maybe my own personal image seeps into the writing. I’m so interested in that quilt-like construction of a story, a horizon of language. I wanted to resist that sense of verticality we talked about with a sense of the horizontal in the landscape. I want to cultivate a garden where you walk in, and everything is weighted the same. I’ve gotten a lot of criticism for that, especially on a sentence level. A lot of times people ask me, what is the hierarchy of the important elements here? What do you want readers to glean from this, and how can you shape and structure the writing around that? That was always so curious to me, because I write with an opposite impulse and instinct. I am not necessarily thinking about having to convey information to you. I am interested in being disoriented and overwhelmed. It’s something I have to prune a little through the editorial process. I’m like, things should probably mean something. But then it’s also part of my natural impulses, so I try not to curb it too much.
AZ: This is also essentially a revenge story, but one that doesn’t quite take either of the two paths we often see in that genre, which is either this very easy catharsis of violence, or a more finger-wagging rejection of it wholesale. Here, we end up somewhere a little more uneasy and in-between, somewhere maybe even transgressive.
KC: I love that you mentioned a different path, because I wrestled a lot with that. It’s a revenge mission, but I flip-flopped between those exact two paths that you’re talking about, which is either the higher road of forgiveness or the darker, but more obvious path of walking away victorious. Especially in Western storytelling, I feel like we’re so used to those being the two options. The girls are continually set on these different paths, these different fates, and I think they needed to forge something that was entirely their own, that was different even from what I envisioned for them. There was a bit of magic in following the characters and letting them speak in a way that was beyond even my own imagination and expectations as someone constructing the narrative.
Another thing I was explicitly thinking about is the idea of the collective. There’s this idea of the personal revenge story, and then there’s a collective story, an intergenerational story that I wanted to come from the margin to eat the page and become the center. I wanted this feeling that whatever Needlemouth had put into motion was going to continue beyond these girls and would start to seep into the boundaries of other domestic worlds, other spaces—the private. What are the crises that we consider behind closed doors, separate from us, and not really a public concern? And what are the crises or forms of violence that we consider public, that we consider all of our problems?
AZ: That collective is interesting. Thinking about that in terms of craft, you have these individual POVs with voices that are individual, but also really the same, or at least merged by the end. I’m wondering how you approach voice in general, how consciously you have to think about that.
KC: In my previous books, I’ve also done different POVs, but I was often very deliberately not differentiating their voices because it wasn’t that important. It was about some kind of collective, choral narrative voice, and I wanted the different generations to sound like each other to show, like we were talking about, that circularity of time. This one was more complicated because I did try to differentiate their voices in the beginning, but I wanted those voices to unravel and become very similar by the end. I remember being asked by my editor, do you want Mandy’s epistolary form to continue? What is the form of her voice? And I realized that as the book progresses, the mediating form of the diary drops out. There’s something self-conscious about writing a diary or a letter. The character is trying to present themselves to themselves. What are they trying to say with that layer of artifice? I wanted to pull that away from her.
AZ: You also mentioned moving past a Western mode of storytelling. You speak Mandarin, if I’m not mistaken, and something I’ve been thinking about is writing in English about characters whose native language isn’t English, who maybe are literally not speaking English, but you’re performing an act of translation for them. I’m curious how being multilingual plays a role in your language, especially when writing characters who straddle those cultures.
KC: That’s a really exciting question to receive because I don’t get asked that very often, and I love to talk about translation. I do literally translate idioms and dialogue a lot. I think it’s enjoyable because I’m an awkward translator, and I’m very unschooled in the beautiful art that is translation. There’s something fun about feeling like an amateur, which is why I genre hop a lot, and it’s actually why I started writing prose in the first place. That’s how I feel about translation. I feel like I’m in a sandbox playing with language. I actually have an ongoing list in my notes app of Mandarin and Taiwanese idioms that I’ve literally translated in the worst way, with no real musicality, but I find myself using them all the time. A Taiwanese one that I love is “wading for clams while washing your pants,” which is like “killing two birds with one stone.” I was like, that’s going in. I don’t know where that’s going, but it’s going in. I do that constantly, and I don’t give myself pressure to explain it. I try to let it be a part of my language like everything else.
I love playing with English idioms as well, and I try to inject those into the text, either in subverted or badly translated ways, because that’s another thing: you can translate English to English. So I’m often thinking about misheard things. In the book, there’s a moment where one of them thinks “patricide” is “pesticide.” These mistranslations or subversive translations happen even when you’re speaking the same language as someone else because we all possess a different language. So any form, any amount of translation, I love. It’s like playing a game of telephone with your own text.
AZ: It’s an interesting way of getting to exciting language—opening new pathways in the sentence by going beyond immediate logic. Thinking of translation or misreading as tools to get to that place is really exciting.
As we’re getting to the end here, I see that you’ve been pretty busy, because you have a couple YA books that are also coming out soon. There’s Straight to the Source and then Girl Gods, which is described as a YA novel-in-verse. That’s such a perfect subtitle, because you were talking about purposely wanting to genre hop. What interests you about playing with genre, format, style, and even audience in this case? Do you find that these different modes speak to each other in an interesting way?
KC: YA is really delightful because it was accidental. My friend had been wanting me to write a YA novel for the longest time. We went to high school together, and I had a dream about the two of us back then, and when I woke up, I started writing. I wrote the first draft of that first YA book in eleven days.
AZ: Oh my god.
KC: I didn’t sleep; I didn’t eat; it was the worst. I cannot recommend it to anyone. I don’t know why I did that, but it was really lovely, because I think of genre as channeling different parts of yourself, and there is a kind of transgression that happens. In moving from one genre to the next, the shape of your world and the boundaries you’ve given yourself shift with you. And again, I love to feel like an amateur. You let go of expectations for yourself, and you get to meet yourself as you are. Writing YA specifically was this beautiful reunion with my past self. I was accessing a ghost of myself.
I used to joke with my writing friends that, no matter what you’re working on, you should always have a trapdoor project, this thing you get to work on that’s an escape from whatever it is you think you need to work on, and sometimes that trapdoor project ends up being the real thing. Sometimes that ends up becoming more urgent and precious than whatever it is you think you need to write. So I’m always trying to find my escape hatch. How can I run away from myself? I don’t know if that’s healthy, if it’s an indication of my psychological state that I need to run away from myself at all times, but I think it can be really joyful.
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Andrew Zhou is a queer Chinese writer and medical device engineer in the Boston area. He holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University. He is a prose editor for The Adroit Journal, and his work has appeared in Quarterly West, The Pinch, Massachusetts Review, Bourbon Penn, and elsewhere.
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