K-Ming Chang Invites Us to Remake the Rules of the World

K-Ming Chang keeps redefining what we consider “reality.” Her latest three books—which she views as a “mythic triptych” (Bestiary, Gods of Want, and Organ Meats)—all inhabit surreal worlds where temporalities, species, and folkloric myths collide. In Bestiary, a Taiwanese American daughter wakes up with a tiger tail and finds herself swept into folktales and family histories that traverse generations and continents. In Gods of Want, short stories explore a constellation of different Asian women—ghostly, bestial, and hungry with myriad desires. And in Organ Meats, two childhood friends morph into dogs, as their intense relationship illuminates the intimacies between life and death.

Chang’s prose balances both the lyrical and the fleshy, navigating queer desire alongside decay. Threading together collective histories and futures, the mythic triptych opens the door to reimagining our relationships to the dead, to the bestial and the elemental, and to our own bodies. (For those who have read all three books and still want more: Chang has a new novella, Cecilia, which she frames as being in the same world as the triptych.)

This was the first collective interview that any of us had done, three Asian women drawn together by our interest in Chang’s books. It seemed fitting, considering how Chang’s work is always imbued with the plural, the collective, the literary lineages we seek out and horizontal connections we create. In a group Zoom conversation before Lunar New Year, Chang talked about rethinking the novel form as a quilt, writing about climate justice, and believing in queer futurity.

Jaeyeon Yoo: Your publicist mentioned you view these books as a “triptych.” Could you speak more about that?

K-Ming Chang: I joke that I missed the opportunity to call it the “fecal trio” instead of the mythic triptych, which would have been an even better name. I think of the three books almost like doors in a hallway. I realized they were a trio not just aesthetically or thematically, but in the way that they were oriented. The narrators are people who have the future at their back and are looking into the past in a very speculative way. In thinking about speculative histories—what it means to patchwork or cobble together one’s own lineage or to have chosen ancestry—I’m interested in poet Safia Elhillo’s idea that you can find a sense of origin, lineage, and ancestry in those who are “horizontal” to you. In the case of Organ Meats, this is very much a friendship. They are both children, and yet they are each other’s ancestors. I was interested in the idea of chosen lineage, and in some ways, I think these books were also reaching for a literary lineage—especially the works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Marilyn Chin.

Sophia Li: I love that idea of horizontal ancestry and a rhizomatic past. Maxine Hong Kingston has described herself in interviews as a kind of “rational link” between legends and reality, but I think you actually go in a different direction. Could you talk about how you position yourself—as a writer and a person—between the mythical and the real?

KC: I’m really interested in folklore as a kind of futurity. I’ve talked about speculative history and writing into the past, thinking of a fabulist past or a form of collective history that is able to pull from all kinds of realities, but I also think there’s something very futuristic about mythology and retelling stories. To me, it feels like the cutting edge of speculative fiction. For me, mythology is inseparable from morality. It’s inseparable from the social rules of the world and intergenerational relationships. So much of folklore are stories that you hear as children, from elders or peers, and mythmaking, too, is this collective intergenerational activity. If folklore and mythology are ways of making the rules of your world, what would it mean to remake the rules of this world through that form? I’m fascinated by the infinite and cosmic possibilities of rewriting those stories, of mutating them or alchemizing them out towards a kind of liberation—and what that could look like.

SL: Can you speak to the process of character-making and world building for each of your books?

KC: I actually wrote Bestiary as a book of essays and was considering it as nonfiction when I was first drafting it. I think that gave me permission to think about Bestiary as a quilt. My grandmother was very into quilting, and the first piece of writing that I created was a quilt that I made when I was seven. Rather than thinking about a linear narrative that I wanted to follow, I was thinking of building out this landscape, this horizon. I was also thinking a lot about rivers in terms of structure, because there is a central river that runs through that book. I wanted to create this aesthetic of digressions—for the story to not get to its point, and for that to be the point. I allowed each sentence to be a micro-myth if I needed it to be.

For the second book, Gods of Want, I was thinking about story collections as a neighborhood and a community, and the short story form presenting that possibility of containing many collective voices. I’m always interested in the collective first person. I feel like in literary circles, it’s like, “first person is so indulgent, it’s so myopic, it’s so narrow and contained.” But I actually think first person can be beautifully collective and gesture toward a “we” or an “us”—opening outwards, in a kind of cone shape that then widens and touches upon a collective experience. Again, a kind of quilting metaphor there!

With my third book, I began with these accounts from Dutch missionaries who were colonizing Taiwan at the time, which were discussing indigeneity and indigenous people. I was fascinated with diving into these archives, using them as a leaping off point to think about land and water as an animate force possessing its own voice, its own subjectivity, its own agency. From there, I ended up with this chorus of dogs that was narrating a collective history. And then I was like, “I can’t just write about dogs for 200 pages.” I mean, I kind of did.

Jae-Min Yoo: I love the dogs, and these fuzzy divisions you have between humans, animals, plants, and also technology. You mentioned earlier how you’re interested in remaking the rules of this world. I think these blurred boundaries are a moment when you really do that. Why is the bestial such an important figure in your work?

KC: I love the bestial, I could talk about it forever! Part of it is the mythological and folkloric kind of pantheon that I’m constantly drawing from, which contains a lot of animal imagery and metaphysical transformation. There’s an inherent playfulness to myth and folklore that I love. Part of my obsession with animals is the way that I saw other people responding to animals with such wonder, like, “that’s so incredible what their bodies are capable of.” And yet, we view human bodies as the exact opposite of that wonder; it’s so full of shame and subjugation and degradation. So I wondered what it would be like for me to look with wonder and turn that gaze onto the human-animal body. I was also interested in collapsing hierarchies of the animal and the human—that is something we inherit, the human being supreme and master of all creatures. I was interested in what it would mean to subvert that and see human-animal transformation, a symbiotic relationship.

JMY: I noticed that animality comes to the fore most prominently with moments of strong desire in the books, and I’m curious how queer desire plays into what you just talked about?

KC: For me, queer desires are always inseparable from the collective and from the preservation of matrilineal stories and history. This desire to resist patriarchal forms of storytelling and story-keeping in lineage is always deeply embedded within queer mythology and mythmaking. I remember in reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Pu Songling) and hearing children’s stories growing up, that the indicator of someone being strange or monstrous is their turning into an animal—a fox spirit, a snake. I thought that was such an interesting form of othering. What makes them strange or destructive to the fabric of society is this transformative potential. They’re slippery or illegible in some way. And I thought, what if I could harness or channel that very intentionally, and see the liberating possibilities of that otherness? What if I made that otherness a home for oneself rather than having them excluded from society?

SL: I especially want to thank you for writing these Asian American queer sexuality stories that aren’t necessarily partitioned off from the family, where navigating queerness can exist in the same spaces as issues of family.

KC: That was something I had a revelation about when I was writing Bestiary, because I’d thought that those two things had to be separate. There’s the family story, and there’s the queer story. I remember taking a writing class with Jenny Zhang and feeling so freed by that. She was talking about the Western coming-of-age story being about leaving the home as much as possible and finding your identity by throwing off the shackles of one’s family. I’m very interested in the domestic as a place that’s as interesting as the public, as interesting as going off on a hero’s journey where you leave home and come back. I want to tunnel backwards and burrow into the family as a form of queer coming of age.

SL: In all three books, but especially in Organ Meats and Gods of Want, I thought there were some complex and beautiful relationships between the supernatural, the real/living, and the dead. Could you speak about how these themes play out together?

KC: I find that oftentimes, in my writing, whenever a birth occurs, a death occurs, and whenever a death occurs at birth occurs. Whether that’s metaphorical in the language itself or a literal pairing of a death and a birth, those things are constantly emerging for me in the same space, sometimes even in the same sentence. And then between the supernatural and real; I think in Western literature, it’s common to other the supernatural. Even naming it the “supernatural” is a form of othering it, of establishing the boundaries of what reality is or should be. “Who gets to say what’s real,” and “for whom is it real?” are always questions that I’m asking. I’m fascinated by the idea of ghosts being a last resort. The living won’t fight for us, and the living have failed us in so many ways. But the dead, the dead won’t. This collective history that we draw upon won’t fail us, and it’s the one thing that won’t if you’re surrounded by failure and apocalypse and collapse. That’s something I remember the elders in my family telling me: don’t pray to some deity or some higher being, pray to your dead because they’re the only ones who will listen. We don’t have the ability to summon these kinds of deities in any way. But we have this shared history, this tapestry of voices and stories that we’re constantly weaving. That’s one thing that you can always have.

JMY: You talked earlier about wanting to capture land and water as an animate force in your writings. How do you see your writing interfacing with conversations around climate change?

KC: I recently got solicited to write for Orion Magazine, which is a climate justice magazine. I never considered myself a writer who engaged with climate change, because I always had this impression that you have to be qualified. You have to somehow be formally knighted into writing about the climate, about ecology. That, to me, seemed terrifying. But I got to talk with the editor, and I was like, oh, the human and nonhuman, collective narratives are questions of ecological justice. I’m always writing about the destructive forces of capitalism and national patriarchy, and all of these things are what is destroying the climate. I find that I write a lot about land and water as possessing a voice and also being inseparable from the voice of the people that it’s in relationship to. It’s all one world. I definitely now see myself in that literary lineage as well.

SL: Speaking of literary lineages, I wanted to go back to Jenny Zhang because I’m a big fan of dirty realism, this kind of grittiness from a child’s perspective. Could you talk about what appeals to you about child narrators?

KC: I love how much Jenny Zhang’s characters feel. Their feelings are always such big feelings. I remember listening to an interview with her, where she was talking about how everyone always talks about the economy of language, but she wants to be wasteful with language. That blew my mind because I feel like child narrators are that space where the sacred and the profane can come together in the writing. Childhood is such a space of mythmaking and ritual making. It’s being deeply serious and everything feels apocalyptically important and, at the same time, there’s always this sense of playfulness and humor.

JMY: We’ve talked so much about collectivity, and working through that in your writing. One thing that strikes me is that there are still gaps within collectivity, whether it’s different generations, language, geographic location, experiences of war. How do you think about bridging them—or not?

KC: I find that oftentimes, that gap can’t really be filled. I’m not so much interested in bridging that gap so much as finding a way for the characters to acknowledge those gaps. I always think of someone turning inward, trying to find a way to live that is inclusive of those gaps in some way, or tending to them. [The gap] is typically like a void or dead space or dead air, but I try to think of it more as this space to tend, to examine, to explore, to think about, to nurture, to watch it grow—what can be fruitful about those gaps? What can sprout from them, what can take root in them: I’m trying to think of the gap as fertile ground.

JMY: That reminds me of the holes in Bestiary. Which makes me think of letters, a form that you use both in Bestiary and Organ Meats. What does the epistolary form do for you?

KC: Besides the fact that it’s a form that’s very familiar to me, I’m interested in what can’t be spoken, but what can be written or deliberated over in that way. The “you” in that form can be very direct, and that is also as much about the narrator—the one who’s writing—as it is about that “you.” What does it mean to address something to someone, but really write it for yourself? I didn’t grow up with written archives; within my family, everything was oral, everything was spoken, everything was transmitted in various non-written forms. I’m fascinated by using the letter form to create something on the page that feels like it could be read out loud, to combine the written form and the oral form.

JY: To wrap up this conversation—you talked about liberation earlier in this interview; aside from liberatory writing, do you think liberatory futures are possible?

KC: In José Muñoz’s book, Cruising Utopia, he has this beautiful sentiment that I’m always talking about. He says that queerness is always in the future. It’s never here. It’s never located in the present. That’s what queerness is. It’s the future that has not yet arrived. That kind of blew my mind because I was like, oh, that is how I experience queerness. He talks about it as glimpses of utopia in the present, gesturing toward a utopic future. And I definitely feel that way. Queerness does feel like these glimpses of what is possible, and the ever-dawning future. I feel like that is what I’m writing towards. When I write, in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about that idea of glimpsing utopic bonds in the present and gesturing to a future that has not yet arrived.

I think that comes with a lot of grief. It sounds wonderful. It’s like, oh, yes, utopia is possible. But if it’s always perpetually in the future, there’s also a tremendous amount of pain and grief. In some ways that makes the present even worse, because you can see what’s possible. It’s like this double gaze: you can see what’s possible, but you also know what is. I think the discrepancy between that can be deeply painful to live with. I’m interested in characters who are able to see those two things or straddle those two things. I’m interested in the void as in the sense of deep and utter hopelessness and the desire to destroy oneself and destroy the world, this place of annihilation. But I’m also interested in emerging from that void, or tunneling into it so deeply that you emerge into this utopic future that I think queerness is always gesturing toward—or is.

Something I’ve also been thinking about is grief as this fertile ground for rage. Grief being a kind of anger and a refusal to accept. But these acts of refusal—whether it’s refusing to forget, refusing to move on, and refusing to accept reality as it is—I think that fuels the magical intervention, or the desire to remake the rules of the world.