Reading with K-Ming Chang, author of “Bestiary,” at The Nassau Literary Review’s annual festival
BY STAFF WRITER ADITI DESAI ‘24
On April 17, 2021, The Nassau Literary Review launched its 8th annual Literary & Arts Festival, a five-day celebration of recent literary works, authors, and their resiliency during a year of change. Given the tumultuous alterations that many of us have experienced over the past year, the 2021 Festival was centered around all forms of metamorphosis—change in the way we live, write, and cultivate relationships. Kicking off the festival, K-Ming Chang, author of The New York Times Editors’ Choice novel Bestiary, read excerpts from three separate flash fiction pieces and discussed her journey to unraveling Asian-American voices in literary works.
In addition to authoring Bestiary, K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Additionally, her short story collection, Gods of Want, is forthcoming from One World on June 14, 2022.
Chang began the event by reading a flash fiction piece titled “Finger.” This piece, as Chang prefaced, explores the urban legend of finding a finger in Wendy’s chili—and the luck that comes with it. Her second piece, titled “Gloria,” straddles adolescent feelings of shame with faith and hope. The piece traces a narrator’s complicated relationship with Gloria, a girl who the narrator hates but also loves. As readers, we experience raw emotions as their relationship is affected by femininity and queerness. Chang’s final piece, “Nicknames,” which she read to an audience for the first time, follows an Asian-American family and their oral storytelling traditions. Thus, this piece traces multiple voices—all of which challenge, recognize, and address the stories that they have inherited from family.
While Chang read three shorter prose pieces during the event, she also spends time writing poetry. When asked about how she approaches writing different genres, Chang noted that her works tend to “blur the lines” of genre distinctions. In the spirit of metamorphosis, change, and transformation, Chang describes how “no matter what [she’s] writing, [she] finds that [her] approach is very similar—it’s a matter of negotiation with myself and breaking out of traditional boundaries.” In other words, Chang derives comfort from bringing poetic undertones to narrative writing and vice versa. This “bending of rules” helps to create more possibilities and, in the end, can “surprise you.”
As an Asian-American writer, Chang spoke about what it means to juggle the—at times—daunting space of writing in English all while incorporating Chinese culture and traditions. “For me, it is really important that nothing gets italicized—this instinct to italicize everything that seems foreign,” Chang noted. Rather than fall into the literary tradition of making foreignness “known,” Chang described how she chooses to not italicize Chinese words in her English writing. Rather, she elects to either keep Chinese words unitalicized or directly translate them into English, as opposed to choosing different words to preserve meaning in English. In fact, she noted that “some of [her] most generative words come out of the directly translated phrases.” Having this sort of “double lexicon” is something that fuels and generates her literary works.
Given that many of the attendees were undergraduate students, Chang commented on the challenges of being a writer and a student. She said that she has learned to appreciate writing in the present moment. Rather than thinking of writing for a class as a project or assignment, Chang, as a student, “tricked [herself] into thinking that it was practice.” Thus, instead of focusing on what the writing could eventually become or turn into, Chang savors the very process of writing. And, it’s important to note that this process looks and feels very different each day. While some days may entail wrestling with one sentence for hours on end, others days are marked by writing multiple pages. In other words, creative writing is unstructured in nature; growing comfortable with spontaneity and learning to transform thoughts into words is key.