21 Jun / Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Relationships between women – familial, beloved, strange, imagined – dominate queer Taiwanese American K-Ming Chang’s (Bestiary, 2020) explosive and bizarre first story collection. Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections – “Mothers,” “Myths,” “Moths” – which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and diasporic identity, confront inequity and dysfunction.
“Auntland” opens “Mothers” with an aunt, among countless aunts, who demands that a dentist remove her tongue, which she flushes down a toilet, only to have it reappear years later on the evening news after being caught by a fisherman. “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” relentlessly harasses a bride and groom, farting in the minister’s face and shattering a stained-glass window during the wedding. A mother-in-law repeatedly attempts suicide, a tactic to drive away her Xífù (daughter-in-law). In “The La-La Store,” a daughter tries on various monikers via dollar-store key chains that will never match her own name.
The fantastical “Myths” section showcases an eighth-grader whose “talent is [she] can eat anything,” two sushi-restaurant employees tasked with injecting dye into the fish to intimate freshness (in a desert!), and a woman determined to sleep her way through the calendar with month-named lovers.
In “Moths,” the standout is “Resident Aliens,” in which the narrator’s family rents their basement to a series of 26 widows.
Chang glides effortlessly between the shocking and quotidian, demanding attention, deserving applause.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, June 1, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2022