K-Ming Chang’s origins as a writer can be traced back to when she was approximately eight years old. At school in California, she would amuse herself by eliciting the latest rumours from other pupils, crafting tabloid articles based on her findings.
Now 24, Chang, chosen in 2020 as one of the US National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for her valiant debut novel Bestiary, has swapped classroom gossip for the language of myth, invention and the vagaries of human connection. Her days as a childhood columnist, though, helped her to find her place as a poet, novelist and short story writer, she thinks.
It made her consider how to “transform memory into something else”, and because writing was her “secret life” (she used to hide her scrap paper and pencil beneath her bed) it was exciting and “kind of illicit”. It became “a way for me to kind of commune with myself”, Chang says.
The Taiwanese-American writer has always felt drawn to writing about memory, and her first short story collection Gods of Want, published later this month, is no exception. Alert to the ways reality can buckle and contort, Chang conjures fiction that is almost fairytale-like, mythical, unsettling – yet at the same time blisteringly alive and unapologetically queer.
“I loved how easy its history was rewritten, forged into fiction,” she writes in one story, Nine-headed birds. “How easy it was to convert currency into memory.”
The concept of memory is complicated and contradictory, Chang believes, since it can be both harmful and nourishing. It’s that complexity, she says, that she finds so fascinating: it’s a feeling she can encircle without ever quite landing on what memory means.
“There’s this sense that the truth is this kind of elusive thing and that it’s not singular, it’s always plural, and it belongs to everybody”, says Chang. “And we all have our different ways of carrying it, interpreting it, being in conflict with it”.
Exploring the ways people remember and redefine experience through writing makes for “such a living, breathing, moving way of telling stories”, she says.
Growing up in California in a Mandarin-speaking household, Chang was surrounded by enchanting familial stories and myths. A touchstone story throughout her childhood was the tale of Hǔ Gū Pó, a tiger spirit from Taiwanese folklore who wished to live inside the body of a woman. Each time the young Chang pestered her mother to tell her the story, the details would shift like sand, teaching her from an early age that stories themselves can be living beasts. Chang went on to write Hǔ Gū Pó’s story into Bestiary, whose protagonist is told the story by her own mother, and who goes on to grow a tiger tail of her own.
In Gods of Want too, the lives of humans, animals, spirits and even objects intersect and morph together. In one tale, The Chorus of Dead Cousins, ghost-cousins haunt a living relative and her storm-chasing wife. Meanwhile in Nüwa, two sisters learn that a train passing through their village is oozing the blood of the local girls it devours.
Writing the collection was challenging at first, short stories being unfamiliar territory to Chang. But she approached them the way she always does with her writing: unusually, Chang is a writer for whom language comes first, and then ideas.
She recognises it’s an unconventional process: “I don’t even necessarily know what story I’m trying to tell. But I allow the language to lead me and then I hope that ideas will follow”. Of course, she admits, “sometimes it doesn’t happen”.
Thankfully, in the case of Gods of Want, the ideas did indeed follow, helped along by two key influences: the queer erotica in Dorothy Allison’s Trash, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina. Chang felt these works gave her a kind of “permission” to centre women’s – particularly queer women’s – stories, an approach she’s found freeing. It “allows me to feel like the page is this low-stakes place and that anything is possible”.
The collection’s compendiums of memories and myth are rife with consumption and desire, lifted by Chang’s poetic sensibility. Blood doesn’t merely drip but hangs from a nose “like a rain-swollen earthworm”. In a misinterpretation, a character mistakes “savoring” for “sabering”. For Chang, the body has utility but is not simply functional: lips, tongues and teeth choreograph stories.
But these are not necessarily stories she would write today, Chang confesses, noting an undercurrent of uncertainty she felt while completing them.
“I feel like every book is me discovering how to write it,” she admits. “Doubt and uncertainty lead us to so many important places, for our characters and for ourselves as writers. So I think I’m trying to learn how to embrace that uncertainty.”
• Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang (Vintage £14.99) will be published on 18 August. To support The Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
