“I really wanted to write towards playfulness and to allow things to come apart at the seams.”
K-Ming Chang is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary, published in 2020 by One World/Random House and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her chapbook Bone House was published in 2021 by Bull City Press. Her story collection Gods of Want is forthcoming from One World, as well as a new novel titled Organ Meats.
In this interview, Chang discusses her novel Bestiary, mythology, poetry and prose, family relationships, and the human body and landscapes in her works.
Yia Lee: K-Ming, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. I’m eager to discuss your works with you. One thing that gave me little surprises from time to time is the humor in Bestiary — sometimes morbid, sarcastic, self-effacing — within a work that is deeply moving and haunting. How important is humor as an element of storytelling to you?
K-Ming Chang: Thank you so much for pointing that out, because I think I was really afraid that the humor wouldn’t come through. The humor, as you said, is very morbid, very dark, very bodily — and so I was worried that the tone of it wouldn’t necessarily come through, but that makes me really happy to hear that it did for you.
I think humor isn’t something that I consciously think about as I write, but it is very much embedded in so many oral storytelling forms that I inherited. I feel like humor is kind of one of my inheritances in a way. In all of the oral stories or histories that have been passed down in my family, all contain an element of absurdity and humor and surrealism. I think that there’s something humorous about extremes as well. And oftentimes the humor comes from that place of making a metaphor literal, or wanting to go in the direction of the absurd. And also being very sincere or earnest can also be very humorous as well. So it’s definitely really important and it’s something I’m kind of leaning into more in my writing, or trying to.
And I also really love that you brought up the word self-effacing as well. I’m a huge fan of effaced narrators. I think it’s another thing that I inherited in mythological storytelling and oral storytelling. The proximity of things that are really beautiful and then really morbid, really sacred, and the profane — that contrast also creates a humor that I’m really interested in.
The physical act of laughing is also similar to crying. In the body, laughter and grief and sorrow coexist. They come from similar places and manifest really similarly through the body, so I think the proximity of those two things is also really interesting to me.
Lee: You are a poet, novelist, short-story writer. I’m curious as to which one was your first love, and how you grew as an artist from one genre to the other. Do you find writing multiple genres a challenge? Does one inform the other?
Chang: I really love that phrasing of, which one is my first love. I feel like all of these genres are like a series of loves that I have, that kind of come and go in my life — but the memory and the presence of them are always there.
I definitely was drawn to poetry first, in that I took writing poetry seriously out of all of those genres. Poetry was really liberating because it allowed me to trust the language, allowed the language to lead me rather than thinking about plot and narrative and character. I can really follow that tether of language. It was also liberating because formally there were so many ways to innovate with poetry; grammatically, I felt like you couldn’t really do anything wrong with language, and I think that it was really permission giving.
That kind of ended up trickling into how I approach short stories and fiction. I really enjoy feeling like an amateur and feeling like a beginner. So I think the reason why I’m so drawn to prose is because I don’t really have a formal training in prose — I just know things vaguely. And because I don’t really think much about structure and how to construct things, it feels like I can just be this beginner amateur just playing on the page. It feels very low stakes. That’s what I love about approaching prose — just that feeling of, “Oh you can’t do anything wrong because you don't know what’s correct or not.”
And do I find writing multiple genres a challenge? I think not so much. Actually, if I try to think about it like, “Oh I'm going to write a short story in this particular tradition,” or “I’m going to write in this particular way,” it actually feels very difficult. I think I struggle a lot with feeling like I have to do something correctly or do something right. I find that if I let go of the conception of genres, it helps me free up my writing, and also frees me to follow the language.
Lee: I’m also curious because you mentioned oral storytelling. One of your characters learns their alphabet through missionaries; she came from an oral storytelling culture, obviously. So I wonder: oral storytelling and the written word, how do they co-exist or combine in your storytelling?
Chang: Before I wrote this book, I didn’t realize how much oral storytelling was part of my inheritance. I was so surrounded by it that I didn’t notice it. It was just the water that I was in. When I was doing more research into the grandmother in the book, her language is a purely oral language. There’s no written equivalent. There is an English alphabet, a way to Romanize the language. But it isn’t something that was inherent or indigenous to the language, which for generations existed as a purely oral language.
I really love thinking about storytelling as embodied. I think text is something that can feel very authoritative, rigid, and canonical. Whereas with oral storytelling, there are versions of stories and there are ways that people like to tell these things. There’s something that’s porous about oral storytelling and very embodied that I love so much. I love this idea of everyone in the family of this novel having wildly different versions of different stories and that being a form of truth. And that is more true than a rigid, authoritative version of their story and their mythology.
Lee: The writing itself — from parables to letters to footnotes — also shifts, as does the language of the narrative, particularly at the end point. In the book there is the quote: “This story is just surgery, sewing together what is already belonging.” But really, how did the construction of the various forms come about?
Chang: It came from so many inspirations.
I definitely owe a lot of the formal innovations to a book that I really love. When I drafted this book I was reading Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. That book has footnotes at the end of the chapters, and it also has this grandmother who hijacks the granddaughter’s narrative. So it’ll be in the granddaughter’s point of view, and then the grandmother just suddenly takes over the narrative. I love that so much; there was something irreverent and alive and just playful about it. I really wanted to write towards playfulness and to allow things to come apart at the seams.
And that felt true to storytelling that I grew up with as well. Someone’s telling a story, someone else hijacks the story, someone else adds 17 details, someone else says, “No, that’s incorrect.” There’s something more alive and really interesting about that kind of storytelling.
I was also at the time taking an Asian American history class and a lot of the academic texts we were reading had footnotes. I was really interested in how the footnotes were like this forensic science of, “Here’s what we think the source says but we’re not sure, and here’s this one other source that says another thing.” I loved the idea that footnotes contain uncertainty. I thought to myself, “Oh, what if the text itself also contains uncertainty, is also doubting itself as it’s being written.” So I think that was another inspiration: all the found forms in my environment.
Lee: I was also moved by the troubled relationship between Daughter’s father and brother — every bit as complex as the mother-daughter relationships. Was writing a father-son relationship very different (or not?) compared to writing the mother-daughter relationships?
Chang: Thank you so much. I actually never have been asked about the father-son relationship, so I’m really thrilled that you did. It’s something that haunts me as well. I write so much about matrilineal storytelling and matriarchs, and relationships between daughters and mothers and also sons and mothers.
It was actually really challenging to write about a father-son relationship, and to think about this relationship that’s so entrenched in the patrilineage. In the world of the book, it’s supposed to be the kind of defining relationship that makes history. It’s interesting to write about vulnerability and violence and weakness in that patrilineage, rather than thinking about it as this rigid, defined, canonical thing. I was again really interested in — similar to ripping things apart at the seam — looking at the frame of that relationship and about what is being inherited and what is being rejected. I think for both the son and the daughter, those are really important questions. For the daughter she’s also thinking, can you choose what you inherit? Is that even possible, and what do you do with an inheritance that is kind of a double-edged sword? For the father-son relationship, I was thinking about similar themes.
Lee: Do you have a favorite animal myth?
Chang: Oh, I have so many! One that is included in my next novel is this Taiwanese creation myth about how humans were created from dog feces.
So this woman who is a goddess had this laundry basket, and she noticed there was dog poop in it. She went to clean it in the river and the poop wasn’t getting washed away. It stayed there and it was multiplying; she saw more and more dogs poop; and then eventually she molded the dog poop into humans. And that’s the origin of people. I just love that myth so much because it’s gross and delightful and funny. It’s all of the things that I want to embody in my writing. I also love this idea that dog poop can be this living clay.
Lee: Your novel is so rich and layered. How much research did you do for Bestiary?
Chang: This is an interesting question. I was taking a class during the summer on Asian American history. After taking this class and learning about coolie labor, that definitely bled into the pirates chapter. But I think more than facts or research, I was starting to understand why I was drawn to writing about certain things. That encouraged me to continue pursuing those obsessions. I was really interested in writing about the ocean and the sea and pirates. There’s something very threatening to the nation about these pirates, and this idea of finding belonging that’s not on land and on less enforceable borders. That bled thematically into my writing.
I also retrospectively did research on some of the myths. When I was writing the novel, I didn’t want to do too much research on the myths and the stories. I wanted to validate my own versions and allow my own versions to manifest on the page. But afterwards I did some research and I was surprised to find out that a lot of details that I thought were very personal and specific to my family were also actually just broader, more collective details that everybody knew. And I love that. I thought it was amazing.
Like the tiger spirit, she eats toes and she calls them peanuts. I remember when I googled it, I did find this version that calls the toes of children peanuts. And I was like, “Oh, I thought it was just because my family really likes peanuts.” But it turns out that peanuts are part of the collective consciousness of this children’s story, and I love that so much. I thought, “Oh, how much do I share with other people because of the shared details of this story?” So I did research, and then also avoided research, it’s a little bit of both.
Lee: Bestiary is rich with beauty, the strange, and the grotesque — particularly when it comes to the human body. From pissing bodies to kite-flying bodies — how did you make choices about the depiction of physical/bodily presence in the novel? For example, we have characters bleeding and pooping, yet we also do not have many descriptions of physical appearances such as what they wear.
Chang: Oh, you are so perceptive. This is something that recently, when I was working on this other manuscript, my agent said: “Oh, we don’t really get descriptions of what they’re wearing,” and it blew my mind. I never thought about that before.
I feel like it sounds strange or grotesque to say things like “the meatiness of the body” and “the porousness of the body,” but I’m really interested in that.
I’m also interested in writing about things that might typically be seen as inanimate or nonliving and writing them as living bodies. Whether it’s the dirt that’s breathing and pooping, along with human bodies — there’s this kind of very rooted relationship to things like land and other forms of life I’m also really interested in. So I think it all kind of flows together.
I try to think of the landscape as this living body interacting with the human bodies. I try to think about that relationship and that often shapes and molds how I write — so there’s a lot of expelling gasses and liquids, because those are also things I associate with the landscape.
I think part of writing into myth and folklore is that there’s this kind of cosmic presence, this feeling that people are people, but they’re also more than people in a way. There’s something about them that is incredibly ancient and powerful. That ends up blending into what I do or don’t write, in terms of how I describe their bodies and the details.
I just really love descriptions of deities and mythological characters. She has the body of the snake, or he’s a fish with the face of a scholar, or something like that. I find that when I write characters, I often like to play with elements of the nonhuman or superhuman. Oftentimes it gives them a more mythological presence on the page rather than if I were describing something like hair in a ponytail or what the eyebrows look like.
I think there’s something really that can be really playful and joyous about describing people in a mythological way or in a supernatural way. I just love reading mythology so much, and love encountering it, and hearing it and seeing it, that my writing soaks it up because I’m so drawn to that in my own environment.
Lee: What can you tell us about your upcoming works?
Chang: With One World, the same publisher as my first novel, I’m working on a novel called Organ Meats.
It’s kind of what the title implies. It has a lot of organ meats, to be grotesque. But it’s essentially about these two girls who are descended from wild dogs from Taiwan. And one of them falls into a very deep sleep that lasts a decade. The other girl has to try to revive her, and also build her a new body that she can come back to. It is playing with fabulism and mythology and animals and humans, and the kind of porousness between different species.
I realized that I have my own obsessions, and I’m probably going to circle them for a long time and it’s okay to do that. I feel like as writers, it can be really scary to continue pursuing the same questions. But I really like the idea that I can just continue writing the same story over and over again. As long as it’s surprising to me each time, I’m going to continue and try to do that.
K-Ming Chang was born in the year of the tiger and raised in California. She is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere.
Yia Lee is a Fresno State MFA alumna.