GODS OF WANT: Tales, by Okay-Ming Chang
The place novels are sometimes described as bold, and omnivorous, quick tales are hardly ever presumed to have appetites — to run rampant by means of the reader’s thoughts, ravenous, devouring, feral. The most typical metaphors that attempt to sum up the actual work a brief story can do are postcards and photograph albums, icebergs and thoroughly etched cameos: nonetheless, affected person objects placing themselves on calm show. Maybe that’s why the fierce little machines discovered within the Taiwanese American author Okay-Ming Chang’s first assortment, “Gods of Need” — the successor to her gutsy debut novel, “Bestiary” — really feel so surprising: Every one is possessed of a robust starvation, a drive to metabolize the recognizable options of a well-known world and remodel them into one thing wilder, and achingly alive.
Inside these tales, obsessive about the vagaries of emigration and adolescence and populated by ghosts and spirits, the stiff, regimented constructions of life in America dissolve right into a slipstream of folkloric fantasy. In “Nüwa,” two sisters assume the freight prepare that passes by means of their village every night time is bleeding, till they understand the blood is that of native women who’ve been swallowed up by the prepare, cocooned inside scaly carapaces. In “Dykes,” which follows two Chinese language women working at a strip-mall sushi restaurant in drought-stricken Las Vegas, the streets flood and the neighborhood raccoons evolve into agile, otter-like creatures that swim the Strip in faculties. Elsewhere, an aunt who by chance killed a younger lady throughout her obligatory army coaching negotiates a debt that have to be paid with life; the ladies from Virginia Slims journal adverts come to life. Severed braids of hair morph repeatedly into snakes and spines, transfiguration round a shared, preserved type. Ladies kiss women, style each other’s faces and blood, lapping each other up with an eerie eroticism that’s tinged by childhood intimacy, but additionally decidedly queer.
However these plots usually are not a lot the point of interest of Chang’s tales because the body inside which she rewrites the world as a spot of radical transformation, resisting the rigidities of each realism and cultural assimilation. Her characters — principally members of the East Asian diaspora — and the objects that encompass them work their means by means of a cascade of literal and figurative adjustments. One watches a prepare’s “eeled physique observe the tracks like a finger tracing a scar”; one other, taking a look at a Virginia Slims advert, “may odor the pleats of salt between the lady’s legs, the waves unfurling like tongues behind her, ready to lick her onto her again.” Chang pushes language into unusual, roiling reversals, eroding its given meanings: A personality named Ail (her useless mom spelled Ali mistaken on her start certificates) “rewired phrases” and tongues a strawberry throughout earlier than consuming it, an act she calls “sabering,” slightly than “savoring,” including layers of that means by means of inventive misreading.
At occasions, the rhythmic, idiosyncratic nature of those transformations can really feel considerably repetitive, however the insistent high quality of Chang’s aesthetic is a robust gesture in and of itself: If dominant tradition attracts its energy partially from continuous repetition and reassertion, the fluid logic of those tales calls for the identical unyielding presence. Emigration is a type of transformation, altering an individual in methods each chosen and compelled, and Chang channels the churn, the precarity, the ambient disquiet and risk of disappearance which might be a part of the émigré expertise into sinewy textual content that mirrors this deep fungibility. It’s a voracious, probing assortment, proof of how exhilarating the quick story will be within the arms of a author who, as one in all her narrators places it, “in some way … made each phrase sound like need.”
Alexandra Kleeman is the writer, most just lately, of “One thing New Beneath the Solar.”
GODS OF WANT: Tales, by Okay-Ming Chang | 206 pp. | One World | $27
Supply: NY Times