Gods of Want: Stories

by K-Ming Chang

Genres: Asian American; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

Startling stories center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women in “a voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice)—from the National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree and author of Bestiary

“Wise, energetic, funny, and wild, Gods of Want displays a boundless imagination anchored by the weight of ancestors and history.”—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina and Woman of Light

WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Them, Book Riot

In “Auntland,” a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughters “Dog.” In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” ghost-cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live-cousin, wife to a storm chaser. In “Xífù,” a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to rid the house of her. In “Mariela,” two girls explore one another’s bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark, while in “Virginia Slims,” a woman from a cigarette ad comes to life. And in “Resident Aliens,” a former slaughterhouse serves as a residence to a series of widows, each harboring her own calamitous secrets. 

With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.

Release date: July 12, 2022

Publisher: One World

Print pages: 205

Sample

The Chorus of Dead Cousins

I warned my wife about them. They volunteered as our bridesmaids and came dressed in nets, fishhooks in their eyes, alive. They glued thorns into all the flower arrangements and stepped on my wife’s dress until it tore, baring her ass, and then they used the veil to run around outside and catch hairy moths in its gauze. They knotted my tie into a noose and hung it from the church ceiling like a chandelier, but I didn’t know how to kick them out once they were there. They brought gifts, fistfuls of worms and a downed telephone pole. They ate the cake and told us it was dry and asphalt-like. They farted in the minister’s face and shattered a stained-glass window depicting a nativity scene and said it was our fault Mary was beheaded and baby Jesus was crushed into an anthill of sand. They stole the cutlery, and I later found all the salad forks stabbed into the trees along the street, sap rusting on the trunks. When the ceremony moved outside, some of them attempted to straddle clouds and deliver a speech, but then it started to rain, a rain that fell thick as unpinned hair, tangling everywhere.

My wife said she’d never known I had so many dead family members, that when I’d mentioned my cousins she’d thought I meant a few, and I said you should see how many are still living. 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.

It was only a week after the wedding that my wife threatened to leave me, claiming that the chorus of dead cousins was straining her sleep, dicing her dreams fine with their fingers like pocketknives. It was true they were intrusive, carving out our windows and replacing them with panes of molten sugar that the raccoons came to lick at night, waking us with the drumbeat of their tongues. It was true that they liked to get into bed with us, six of their bodies sardined between us, and that most of my cousins kicked under the sheets as if trying to surface from sleep. We woke with black shins and rubber ribs. Sometimes I woke up with my lungs hung upside down in my chest, and my cousins were in the closet laughing as I tried to breathe while doing a headstand. But still, I told my wife, they were family, they didn’t have bodies to go back to, and so she let me keep kitty-litter boxes in the corner of the room so they wouldn’t wet our bed, and she let me teach them how to change our lightbulbs so at least they were helpful: Because they could ascend and descend at will, it was easy for them to reach the ceiling.

For a while I thought I had finally tamed them, and though they occasionally chased the mailman or tore out our plumbing, unrolling a flood as proudly as a flag, they knew not to do anything truly deranged, like removing their entrails and playing lasso-the-cowboy with them, or trying to flush one another down the toilet, or plucking daddy longlegs off our walls and training them to wrestle each other. I was proud of their restraint and of how well they dressed in death, sewing their own skirts from grass clippings and stolen curtains, and at least now they were odorless and clean, not like when they were living and smelled like gasoline and wet knives and lotto scratchers.

Then one day my wife got up and looked in the mirror and saw that one of the dead cousins had swapped all her teeth for the red-dyed shells of melon seeds. Okay, I said finally, I’ll get rid of them.

We need an exterminator, my wife said, but all the ones I called were men who said they didn’t deal with what was already dead. I explained that I didn’t need them killed, I just needed them to go on vacation for a little while, to stalk another surname for a month or two, to reincarnate maybe. My call was cut off when the chorus of dead cousins severed the phone service by becoming brooms of wind, sweeping out all the telephone lines on our street.

That night in bed, with the chorus of dead cousins dog-curled at our feet, my wife said what we needed was an evacuation. She was always speaking in the vocabulary of storms, of evacuations and casualties and degrees of damage. She had the spine of a storm too: There was a stillness to her center, but her limbs churned the air, choreographing wreckage wherever she went. At night I liked to wake up and watch her wrestle with her own skin, snaking all over the bed, navigating the night into her mouth and eating it.

My wife is a professional storm chaser. When we met, there was a card pinned to her sleeve that said severe-weather photographer. I told her that was a white-woman thing to do, chasing storms on purpose. We were in the lobby of a dentist’s office and she was thumbing through a copy of National Geographic, an issue on the Tornado Alley of the Midwest, and without asking my name she turned to me and showed me the page with her photograph printed on it.

My photograph didn’t make the cover, she said, but they paid me eighty bucks. I looked down at the page, her wrists a silver frame. The photograph was a full page, and splayed across it was a tornado like a ringlet of black hair, almost too intentionally arranged. It tapered down to the width of a single hair, and at the base of it, in the distance, was a thumbprint-sized town. The tornado was either leaving it or heading toward it, but it was impossible to tell which, and already it seemed implausible that anyone had ever been born there, born in a city that could be distilled into a disaster.

I looked away from the woman’s hands, the fluorescence of that photograph. I didn’t remember seeing a sky in it, but there had to be a sky for there to be a storm: There had to be an origin for ruin. I was suddenly jealous of that tornado, the way it tangoed on the page, the way her hand ran down its length like a spine. The photo was taken from the perspective of someone who loved it, and I wanted to be captured that way, to be chased from my body.

Have you ever been near something like this? she asked. A typhoon, I told her, when I was little in Taiwan and all my cousins were still living. My ama was perpetually breathless and lived with only one lung, and my agong was a former soldier who slept with his gun, until one night we heard it go off in his mouth. My mother sent me to the island when I was four so she could stay in California and make money. ...