queer literature

Despite being only 23 years of age, K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is already making waves on the literary scene. Her debut novel, Bestiary, was written whilst she was still an undergraduate and picked up by One World/Random House in the US in 2020. Shortly after it was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has also been Lambda Literary Award finalist and National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.

Shortly after the February 2021 UK release date of Bestiary, Lyonesse editor Sam Young and K-Ming Chang chatted across time zones via the marvels of video call, where in aptly serendipitous fashion, their interview coincided with Chinese Lunar New Year Spring celebrations which were unfolding outside K-Ming’s Chinatown apartment in New York City. As lionesses and lions beat their drums to ward off the multitude of 2020’s demons, K-Ming spoke freely about her queer literary inspirations, Taiwanese and Chinese mythology and folklore, and how her experiences as a member of the Taiwanese American diaspora informed the novel.

In Lyonesse we give thanks to the women writers who paved the way for women’s literature and champion contemporary women writers who are pushing the limits of women’s literature today. Who are some of the women writers (past and present) whose work you particularly admire?

Definitely the writers who made me want to write were Marilyn Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dorothy Allison, Qiu Maojin and Emily Bronte. Another writer I particularly admire is Venita Blackburn, who wrote Black Jesus and Other Superheroes. Every time I read that book I feel like it creates new forms of possibility and a whole new language which is full of humour and tenderness. It also contains several fascinating relationships. I also really love Vi Khi Nao, who wrote a book called Fish in Exile. Her writing style is so intoxicating and disorientating in the best possible way!

What is your favourite woman-centered story?

It’s such a joy for me to talk about women-centred stories because they are so important to me. I would say that Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen by Marilyn Chin has had the most profound impact on me as a writer, because it completely transformed my conception of what a novel could be and what storytelling could look like. It’s a retelling of Buddhist fables told through a Chinese restaurant family in America and I loved the mythologizing of this family’s history – something which has obviously shaped my work deeply. It’s so irreverent, funny and gross, but also has a sense of reverence at the same time. There are also two sisters in the book who I really love and I also particularly love this character named Moon, who wreaks vengeance and havoc on those who have wronged her.

You belong to a wonderfully diverse and thriving community of queer women writers publishing today. How essential is it to identify the queerness of your writing? Or should we resist the urge to compartmentalise writers into categories?

For me it is definitely very important to name the queerness of my work and draw attention to the fact that I’m often writing about lesbian women. I have a very strong root with a lot of lesbian literature which includes books such as Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin and Trash By Dorothy Allison and these lesbian writer foremothers are extremely important to me. I definitely think that this book would not exist without lesbian literature. I also believe that there is something about queer literature and its lineages which is really important to cite. As a literary genre, it is such a diverse spectrum and there’s so much inventiveness and form breaking. By talking about the queerness of text, it automatically includes all these other texts, which is both community forming and subversive. I love the idea that often with queer writing you can feel like you are very much inventing a language either for things that don’t yet exist or that have deliberately been withheld, distorted or which don’t fully belong to you – I felt that a lot when I began writing stories about queer girls – that I was grasping at ghosts. I think that’s why the characters in my stories are very inventive and playful with language. I want them to have a deeply creative sense of language, in the way that they create themselves and their own mythologies and desires through new language. There’s a power in that which is magical.

Bestiary is a complex and multifaceted novel with so many layers. How would you best define the book?

I would say its part family saga, part queer love story, part mythology and also part speculative history. Often when we talk about speculative literature, we usually talk about futurity (dystopian sci-fi for example) but I’m really interested in the idea of speculative past which means applying certain tropes from the genre of speculative fiction in order to reinvent or reimagine history and to also reconsider what is possible in telling the story in a different way.

Women very much take centre stage in the novel which primarily focuses on the grandmother, mother and daughter of the family. You said that your intention was to “subvert the static idea of a canonical history” by allowing the women in the family to embody their stories. How does this process of retelling stories, in particular, myths, enable the characters to become empowered?

An intense desire to talk about matrilineal lineage is the reason I write. I’m very interested in stories which are passed down by women, the stories they tell to each other and how they create their own lineage and histories – stories which they carry within them that are not in any way ritualised or respected because they are not part of official historical or family records. When I was taking a Chinese history class in college, my professor pointed out the fact that you can only track the men because they are the only ones officially written down in official records. My mom also told me this saying, “A daughter that you marry away is water that you throw out” so there’s this real sense in Chinese culture that daughters are not only never part of official lineage but also that they inherit severance or are born to be discarded. I grew up hearing that and I myself also never had family records growing up so it’s deeply important for me to write about these women because although they are the centre of my life, they are very much invisible from history.

Bestiary has been repeatedly praised for its visceral style of writing. There’s a real sense that the stories the women tell literally become written on their bodies, transforming their identities. Was this embodied response to stories and the act of storytelling a conscious intention?

The visceral quality of the writing isn’t something that I fully realized I was doing until afterwards although it also made a lot of sense because I’m very interested in oral history, and I think there is nothing more visceral than that because you’re physically embodying the story. In order to tell a story, it literally has to pass through your entire body and out through your mouth. It is also very dependent on who is telling the story so consequently becomes very subjective. It’s very much a story about storytelling, and how telling stories can become a vehicle for survival, reinvention or transformation but also enable the inheritance of trauma.

Themes of transnationality and cultural hybridity run throughout the novel and you capture very well both the feeling of being displaced and the fusion of different cultural identities which occur as a result of migration. How did your own personal experiences of being a member of the Taiwanese American diaspora influence the women’s narratives?

I certainly think that my past shaped the book immensely. There’s a certain kind of assimilation narrative that is really common in a lot of Asian American literature and media. There seems to be this belief that you have this point of origin which gets lost and consequently you spend your whole life grieving that. However, that really wasn’t my own experience and so I wanted to resist that idea a little. I also wanted to portray a different kind of narrative where the desire for whiteness or Americanness wasn’t the main driving force. One where the characters felt like they were at the centre of their own stories, rather than on the margins of some bigger story.

The novel has been described as a ‘transnational fairy tale,’ due to the fact that you fuse together Taiwanese and Chinese mythology with aspects of American culture. What does the term fairy tale mean to you? And what makes us keep being drawn to retell them?

To me the term fairy tale is a very Western thing. You would rarely call the Chinese tales that I grew up with (such as the Butterfly Lovers or the Legend of the White Snake) fairy tales per se, they would be referred to as folk tales or myths and would be considered to be more ethnic or marginal. Yet there’s definitely something about the term “fairy tale” in our vocabulary that sounds fanciful or whimsical. The term also feels a little more universal and of course, more child centered too, which is actually so ironic because fairy tales can be so brutal! They are often extremely violent, devastating and tragic and so to call them “fairy” tales feels very soft, paradoxical even. One thing that I’m really interested in is the fact that so many different cultures’ fairy tales and folklore have very common archetypes and themes. The ones we are drawn to tell again and again reveal a lot about what is at the root of our societies and beliefs, on this very grand, even cosmic scale. Yet there also seems to be a bridging of cosmic grand scale ideas with the more interpersonal scale things like intimate relationships. I think that when someone decides to write in that space it is always very much about defining the rules and the expectations of a world, or indeed challenging those preexisting ideas.

The stories you weave into Bestiary are a mixture of Taiwanese, Chinese and Fujianese folk tales. Are there any specific tropes or motifs that define them?

In terms of mythology, the myths from these particular regions have a lot of deities in common which appear to have migrated, like the goddess of the sea Mazu (there’s actually a chapter in the book named after her). She’s one of the biggest deities when it comes to the Taiwanese diaspora, which I suppose makes sense because she’s goddess of the sea and therefore also the goddess of migration and immigration. Given that Taiwan itself is a nation which is a combination of so many diasporas, this also makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m also really fascinated by that.

Chinese mythology is very interesting because it predates people like Confucius in some ways. And Confucian was extremely patrilineal – he certainly had a lot of things to say about women! I think much of mythology predates a lot of constructions of patriarchy to a certain degree, at least Chinese mythology. Every one originates from a snake goddess and there’s a certain kind of power in that. However, at the same time, with many of the Buddhist deities that featured in the myths I grew up with, such as the Goddess of Mercy, it seems that there’s this very particular kind of woman to be worshipped, one that is either extremely virginal or motherly, I suppose in a similar way to the Virgin Mary in Christianity. They all share a common saintliness which is very much rooted in the fact that they have either never married or refused to marry, have sacrificed themselves on behalf of the patriarch or have taken a disavowal.

I would also definitely say that in a lot of Chinese myths and folktales, and even in modern soap operas today for that matter, the character of the evil stepmother, mother in law or an evil maternal figure is also very present and I enjoy unravelling that. Why must sacrifice be the one thing that makes you good? I think that too often that is the message conveyed about motherhood, this notion that the more selfless you are as a mother, the better you are. That’s also definitely something I like to push against in my writing.

The Female tiger spirit, Hú Gu Pó is one of the magical women who features in Bestiary. Can you tell me more about the original Taiwanese folktale which you based this character upon?

The majority of Taiwanese people trace their ancestry to Fujian and consequently many tales emigrated from that province to Taiwan. As a result, the Hú Gu Pó Tiger tale which is the main folktale within Bestiary, is originally of Fujianese origin. And it’s so strange because there are actually no tigers on Taiwan – they would literally have had to swim across the ocean to end up there! And so whilst this idea of tigers living on an island is very strange in itself, it’s simply the product of this story having migrated and settled. Today it’s a Taiwanese children’s folktale which tells the story of a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. It depicts a sort of Little Red Riding Hood style scenario, where the spirit impersonates these children’s grandmother’s and ends up eating their toes. In the original ending of the story, she gets killed by the oldest child who forces her to jump into a vat of boiling hot oil but I prefer an alternative ending to that story – one where she actually survives. I think it’s important to examine this story in the context of the lessons we tell children about what it means to be a good woman and a good mother, and what it means to lack maternal instinct, because I think that this villainous grandmother figure is supposed to symbolize this idea. I’m really fascinated by women who refuse traditional roles, like being a wife or a mother and instead follow their own desires. In this particular story, it is a very literal desire which manifests itself as an intense hunger.

Bestiary borrows its name from the Latin bestiary vocabulum, meaning compendium of beasts and the novel embodies this idea, combining both fabulous creatures with real species and frequently blurring the lines between the two. Traditional Medieval bestiaries typically used non-human species as stand-ins to represent human morals and values with each of the animals being heavily imbued with religious symbolism. To what extent do you feel that Bestiary follows this pattern or did you aim to represent animals and nature from a more subjective stance?

Another common thread of Taiwanese and Chinese mythology and folklore is to feature elements of human animal transformation. I grew up with a story book on Chinese mythology which featured Gods who were fusions of snakes and snails and wild Goddesses with snake tails and where evil women were turned into snakes and foxes. Those are definitely part of my pantheon of stories but asides from these influences, in general I’m really interested in bodily transformation of all kinds, be it those types which are more grounded in reality, or the more fantastical ones. I really enjoyed researching the book’s title and finding out what a Bestiary really was because it made me see certain similarities, for example, telling stories about animals as a kind of way of making moral statements about the world which many fairy tales and myths do. But at the same time, I also loved the fact that there were so many dissimilarities between what I was doing and a traditional bestiary. Traditional bestiaries emerged from the Western Christian tradition, a place in which animals are considered to be lower than humans in the hierarchy and humans are seen as supreme beings, situated at the top of the pyramid whilst animals are things to maneuver or control. Similarly, environment and land are regarded as passive entities there for humans to mine or control. In contrast, in indigenous storytelling, the land is living, and there’s a more respectful relationship with animals.

Nature and the elements are heavily present throughout the novel and there is a sense that everything is interconnected. Bodies literally become the land or are consumed by the elements and even inanimate objects adopt human or natural characteristics. Can you tell me a little about the presence of nature in your writing?

I think it stems from a combination of mythology and me witnessing my own environment. The first myths I ever learned were the ones about how the sun and moon came to be, where there is the belief that the sun and the moon are living things which interact with heroes in animate ways and have an agency of their own. I became really fascinated by the idea of bodies of water also having agency of their own and the indigenous belief that they have inherent life. These elements really influenced the way that I wrote about the landscape in Bestiary. Added to these influences, the fact that I grew up near a landfill influenced me greatly. It’s this kind of alive place, which is the product of our own waste, stinking and burping gases. And so I became fascinated by the idea of the metabolism of the land, digesting all of these things.

The strong emphasis on women’s bodies is perhaps most strongly felt in your vivid descriptions of bodily excretions. How does this deep rooting of the characters’ within their bodies and their fluids relate specifically to their gender as well as the relationships they enjoy with those around them?

All of us are taught to feel so much shame around our bodies yet the people with whom I feel most intimate with and trust the most deeply are the people I’m most likely to talk to about my body and vice versa so it’s a beautiful sign of intimacy, this porousness about talking about your body in ways that we would never in other circumstances. I wanted everyone in the family to not only be very much rooted in their bodies but also know each other’s bodies intimately. They are taking care of each other in this very physical way because there’s no one else to do that. They also don’t have that luxury of being able to physically distance themselves from the body, for example, the mother works at a chicken factory and has to slaughter animals and literally take them apart. It wasn’t really a conscious thing, I didn’t even know I was writing about the body. I spend 90% of the day thinking about bodily functions, like eating or going to the bathroom so it’s strange that literature seems to be so empty of that.

The daughter’s metamorphosis,which sees her suddenly grow a tiger tail, coincides with both her transition from girl to woman and her process of sexual awakening as a young queer woman. How would you say the protagonist’s girl-tiger identity formation specifically relates to these two aspects of her transition?

I think that in terms of her gender identity and her sexuality, the implications of the tail are maybe not so much directly related to how she feels about gender and sexuality and more that the tail ends up being a part of her sexuality simply because it’s a part of her body. Honestly, I really had no idea what the tail meant when it first emerged. She just grew it and I was like, okay, this is going to be the beginning of something. However, it does essentially end up becoming this other limb or organ of desire but again, purely because it’s a part of her body. As a new part of her I was interested in exploring how she would relate to it. I also became interested in how she had these desires but also this history of hunger which consequently ended up becoming very entwined. I think there’s something really interesting in showing how desire can manifest in this really physical way and the fact that the tail also becomes a manifestation of her hunger is really fascinating given her lineage of the tiger spirit, who also represents this very intense hunger. The fact that the daughter’s own desires are burgeoning meant that the two things ended up running parallel to each other.

The process of acceptance of her new posthuman female-animal identity brings about both positive and negative consequences for the character. What do you feel that the posthuman female-animal body offers in contrast to binary identities?

I think the bodily transformation for me was really this way of centering their hunger and desires and their kind of magical abilities within their bodies. I’m not sure if her new body offers anything specific but I think there is definitely something about letting your desires lead you. I had an alternate ending to the novel where she severs the tail but I realized it didn’t feel quite right. As this tale is a legacy of her inheritance, which is very complicated and very multifaceted, for her to separate from that would just imply that there’s some way to sever yourself from your lineage, be wiped clean of that or even exorcised of it. I wanted it to have implications and for her life to be somewhat uncertain, because often when you inherit a lot of intergenerational trauma, you always carry it with you and there’s always an element of fear or doubt that remains.

K-Ming Chang’s / 張欣明 Bestiary is out now from One World/Random House. You can read more of her writing at kmingchang.com and also pre-order the limited edition micro chapbook, Bone House, a Taiwanese-American retelling of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, out in June 2021. Her short story collection, Resident Aliens, will be released by One World in 2022.

Lyonesse Journal

celebrating the technicoloured brilliance of women's literature, showcasing writers foregrounding women, magic & nature

In Conversation with author and poetess Jen Campbell

In Conversation with K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary