Review: K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want Is Driven by New and Strange Hungers

Gods of Want resists words like “magical” and “mythical” and “dreamlike” because it takes magic, myth, and dreams so seriously.

Gods of WantLike her debut novel, 2020’s Bestiary, K-Ming Chang’s first story collection, Gods of Want, resists words like “magical” and “mythical” and “dreamlike” because it takes magic, myth, and dreams so seriously. Given that so many new books include those words or others (from “fabulous” to “innovative”) on their covers and in their blurbs, when new fiction arrives that really demands them, clarification is needed. No, no…this is the real deal. For better and worse, Gods of Want actually tries to be new, to see what a short story can hold. The collection is, refreshingly, very strange.

The 24-year-old Chang’s career might seem familiar, even typical. A poet turns her hand to fiction and writes a first novel that combines a poetic approach to language with a concern for her own identity categories: Taiwanese Americans, queer folks, daughters and granddaughters of complex women. Even so, Bestiary, which was nominated for a bundle of awards and made Chang a Lambda Literary Award finalist and National Book Award “5 Under 35” member, is not autofiction. Calling to mind Maxine Hong Kingston and Helen Oyeyemi rather than Ben Lerner, Chang’s work is more magical than confessional. In Bestiary and Gods of Want, characters (of various genders) give birth and are reborn, grow tails and cocoons, haunt and are haunted by ghosts—and, simultaneously, eat and fart and leak and bleed.

In fact, to call Chang’s work magical might be less than totally accurate, if “magical” suggests the presence of an everyday, unmagical background world that makes the magic interesting, unusual—something called, in other words, magic. This is not the magic of some other kinds of literary fiction, which points to beautiful but commonplace things (sunsets, friendship, art) and turns them metaphorically “magical” by way of enchanting, lyrical description.

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Because Chang’s fiction doesn’t really recognize a distinction between the magical and nonmagical, the invisible lines between familiar categories—natural and supernatural, or dangerous and loving—smear and run like watercolors. To write out “magical realism,” one word following the other, doesn’t quite capture what Chang’s work is like. “Magical realism” applies only if it’s written as a palimpsest, one word scribbled over the other, the two at once.

Despite Bestiary’s success, Gods of Want’s 16 stories suggest that the short story is the form best suited to Chang’s fiction. Divided into three sections—“Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths”—the book carries over Chang’s style (skewed images of bodies doing messy and magical things) and her large- and small-scale obsessions (generational attachment, queerness, birthing, meat). She prefers first-person narrators and page counts below 20. The line-to-line pleasures are too frequent to categorize. Turning to any arbitrary page will reveal some compelling image or slimy, lush description: “Meimei stepped forward and reached out her hands to stroke the coming train, a coppered mouth, a snake sliding forward on its greased-up belly.”

Chang takes so well to the short story because its compression intensifies the effect of her style. The short story’s limitations of size and scope allow things we might consider smaller than plot and character (like voice, setting, or tone) to be a story’s engine, its featured attraction. In other words, the boundedness of the short story works as the taut wire for Chang’s acrobatics of language and image. Like a stage or a playing field, the form of the short story establishes the limited space where things occur. Where Bestiary occasionally sprawls through generations, countries, and magical incarnations, Gods of Want’s best stories narrow their apertures. In “Anchor,” a boy’s decision to fulfill mandatory military service leaves an absence his mother and cousin must confront. In “Nüwa” and “Dykes” and “Homophone,” young women fall in love. Even the stories like “Meals for Mourners” and “Xífù” that return to intergenerational families do so with a focus sharper than anything in Bestiary.

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But narrowness doesn’t mean the end of mystery. Chang’s work rebuts trends in contemporary storytelling (whether in novels, stories, movies, or streaming miniseries) toward worldbuilding, backstory, endless explanation. When stories are (primarily) franchises, intellectual property, every detail might be a spinoff; every unfilled gap is an area beyond official control. But it’s those gaps that make mystery mysterious, and Chang feels no need to explain herself, to rigorously lay out how, in Bestiary, a girl can grow a tail and send letters through holes in the ground. In similar fashion, Gods of Want sees a widow illuminated by the lightbulbs she eats, a cousin hounded by a raincloud that drenches only him, a missing girl rebirthed apocalyptically by a runaway train. To ask how is to wonder about the wrong things.

The best word for Chang’s images is “stubborn.” Like the families that populate her fiction, Chang’s objects and their descriptions hold us at a distance even as they demand our attention. They’re irresistible, not inviting. This tension also generates humor, and Gods of Want is generally funnier than Bestiary. The not exactly scatological bodily humor found in the novel remains, but the stories find room for one-liners, for zaniness alongside the uncanny: “The floating widow’s pigeon-feet are very politically active and shit only on gentrifiers in the neighborhood, such as the man who goes jogging when it rains.”

In some places Gods of Want works less well, and these moments point to the difficulty of Chang’s highwire act. The stories almost always end the same, with mysterious rituals and shadowy images, everything suspended. Sometimes these endings, their lack of closure, feel appropriate; sometimes they feel a little generic, interchangeable. Occasionally Chang lingers too long, makes one move too many. At one point, a woman writes on walls: “a hundred synonyms for husband, all of them meaning missing.” Moments later, when the narrator asks why her husband is missing, the woman replies, “Beating me, and when I asked her if she loved him and why, she turned away and continued writing on the walls.” One consequence of Chang’s maximalism is apparent here: a single situation with two descriptions, one stronger than the other. To declare “husband” and “missing” synonyms feels too easy. But to put the narrator and the woman in conversation, to answer the narrator’s question with the silent, strange image of wall-writing—this makes it clear that intricate relationships exist between the narrator and the woman, the wall-writing and traumatic history, love and abjection.

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Buried in the book’s most formally experimental story is this line: “the organization here is hunger.” This is true of the whole collection if we understand its hunger like we understand its magic: so literally that it becomes new and strange again. Chang’s characters, like all her stories in Gods of Want, are hungry for meat and blood—and for love, identity, a world. None of these hungers is metaphorical. Each is simply, magically, another kind of wanting.

K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want is now available from One World.

Ryan Lackey

Ryan Lackey is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing appears in Public Books, Kenyon Review, Commonweal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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