A raccoon ran across the clogged surface of the water, a glass bottle in its jaws, god of want.
I was entranced by K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary, and Gods of Want similarly highlights the author’s unique voice and sensibility; but as I often complain about short stories in general, their brevity prevents me from really connecting with characters before they disappear and I find myself missing that opportunity for emotional connection. Nevertheless, I found much to like in this collection — Chang is certainly never boring — and I will happily seek out whatever the author comes up with next. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Once again, Chang writes with a provoking and distinctive style: The publisher’s blurb calls this “feminist fabulism” and her themes center around otherness (queerness, immigration, sexism) and invoke the ghosts and myths of her Taiwanese heritage. Always from a female POV, girls and women work for low pay in massage parlours, hair and nail salons, and retirement homes; as cleaners and waitresses and sushi chefs. There are recurring, disturbing images — cracked teeth, hands plunging into toilets, the trash creek, things that are “scab-colored” — but there is also, frequently, redemption found through family ties, storytelling, and romantic love. The collection is separated into three sections, each centered around a theme (“Mothers” are family-centric stories, “Myths” are the most fabulist, “Moths” are ghost stories). And while most stories start with a simple, declarative sentence (She pronounces dollar like La-La, so I say it the same. or Her name was Pussy, but the rumor was she didn’t have one.), they often end on a poetic note: The widows never woke: They hung there in the dark, molting into wind, playing their bones like flutes. or: Melon fled the bed, opening every window for the smoke to migrate out and calcify in the sky, slender and white as a bone plucked alive from the hole of night. As with any collection, some stories suited my own tastes better than others, but I found this to be very strong overall and have no problem giving four stars. The stories:
Mothers
I had an aunt whose baby died in its sleep so soundlessly, she didn’t believe in its death. She dressed it, rocked it, petted its head, not letting us take the body away, until one night we tricked her, replacing the baby with a Costco frozen baked potato. She mothered the potato instead, wrapped it in a blanket, pretended it was safe in the custody of her touch. I had an aunt who died in a drunk-driving accident, in a sober-driving accident, in a suicide, in a typhoon, in the middle of the day while blow-drying her hair, in the evening while opening a window, in the morning while hiking to the family grave, in an attempt to get away from her husband, in an attempt to get away from her father, in an attempt to leave the country, in an attempt to get into another one, in an attempt to get her nose done, in an attempt to love a son, in an attempt to outrun a river, in an attempt to reincarnate as rain. ~Auntland
By turns satirical and serious, there are countless aunties and many ways for them to be, and to die.
My mother always used to joke: In this family, it’s one in the ground and a dozen more dangling from the trees, waiting to be plucked. It’s one buried and a hundred more begging to be born. ~The Chorus of Dead Cousins
A newlywed couple is haunted, not unwelcomely, by the dead cousins belonging to one of them
She’s one of those peasant women who’s so short she looks like a pack animal from afar, a body built to carry things. I’m a better mother to her son than she is. That’s what marriage is, motherhood, except the man doesn’t do you the courtesy of growing up. ~Xífù
A woman tells of the six times her mother-in-law has tried to kill herself in order to make her look like a bad daughter-in-law. Sounds funny until it’s not.
Fire is a form of memory, she says: Smoke is what survives after loss, what is inhaled by the sky and recycled into night. ~Mandarin Speakers
An immigrant mother and daughter are balanced between the desire to survive in America and live towards the presumed reality of a Mandarin-dominated future. Again, funny til it’s not.
She always said if our home was broken into, we should platter ourselves and play dead, foam a bit at the mouth. The way to win, she told us, is to live. ~Anchor
Not much funny in this story that shows the effects of militarism on Taiwanese children; karmic debts are the hardest to pay.
In the city where she grew up, they killed trees every few years, so that the roots didn’t grow too deep and puncture straight through the bottom of the island. The palms burned for days, and the air was so opaque you couldn’t see your own mother if you were nursing from her breast. ~The La-La Store
Short and sweet slice-of-life story.
Myths
Sometimes with a death there’s a delayed reaction, like sometimes it takes a long time for the blood to come back once it’s been cut loose. It doesn’t want to come back, to be bricked inside a body, to be shown a shape. It wants to snake away and breed with other red things. ~Nüwa
Dark and fable-like; the world is a dangerous place for girls.
All you have to do, she said, is eat me. Then you can throw me up somewhere backstage, after. ~Eating Pussy
Strange allegory about desire (this story also includes the title quote).
I could see his ribs through the fabric of his wifebeater, his chest rattling, his skin pimpled like something plucked. Hornets were buried inside his bones, and if you shook him at night, he woke up in the morning with a mouth full of wings. ~Nine-Headed Birds
Fabulous tale of a Taiwanese man who abandoned his wife back home, from the POV of his granddaughter.
Mrs. Tai called me a dyke sometimes, and I told her that was right. Born to withhold water, want. ~Dykes
In waves of mounting magical realism, a deluge follows when the dam against want is breached.
a vase of red-dyed peanuts you eat alone in the dark the nuts new as your teeth your grandmother said never eat alone or your mouth’s first language will be loneliness when she stopped eating you knew she was going to become a language when the body no longer needs itself to live it leaves it trees it grows into alone ~Episodes of Hoarders
A girl unpacks a hoarding of ephemera as she says goodbye to her grandmother.
I was another of her months, a chronological want, nothing like love. ~Homophone
A girl named “Mei” (homophone for “May”) would rather not just be a fling for someone going through the names in a calendar.
Moths
My mother once told me that every moth is the soul of someone lost and that’s why you’re not supposed to kill them. That’s why there are so many. ~Resident Aliens
The stories of twenty-six widows who rent rooms in the basement of a former meat plant, and their ultimate transformation.
He would die where he was born and live in one body his whole life. He would never become a ghost in a story. A ghost had no body to come back to. ~Virginia Slims
A girl imagines that her dead aunt has returned as the model in a Virginia Slims ad.
I tested how long I could go without speaking, how well I could thread silence down my own throat, but it ended as soon as my mother said my name. ~Mariela
A mother shuts down after the death of her small son, leaving her daughter confused and bitter.
Mama never thought of her voice as something to use, to wield: She thought of it as a guest, something that was housed in her, a ghost flown into her belly. It was a haunting she welcomed, the way her voice felt both foreign-born and native to her body. ~Meals for Mourners
More ghosts and moths in this story of a girl with six older brothers (oh why did her mother feel the need to ruin her “winning streak”, have a girl, and cause the death of her grandmother by heartbreak?)
