INTERVIEW: K-Ming Chang by Laurel McCaull
Cecilia
K-Ming Chang
Algonquin Books
Interview by Laurel McCaull
I have been a member of the K-Ming Chang fan club since I read her first novel, Bestiary. Told from the perspective of three generations of Taiwanese American women, each with their own mythology and hidden secrets, this book disrupted my expectations at every turn. Chang's style feels like the future, even as she writes about the long-buried past.
When I heard that Chang wrote a novella, I knew I was in for a wild ride. I don’t think anything could have prepared me for Cecilia. Through a series of flashbacks, Chang tells the story of Seven and Cecilia, childhood friends who grow up in a world of their own making, responding to their fierce desires as one does the weather–urgently, instinctually, without judgment. But as they start to grow apart, Seven struggles to define herself without Cecilia. Suddenly she is cast into a world that sees her desires as dangerous and her identity unnatural. When she and Cecilia meet again as adults, Seven must reckon with their childhood and the different choices they’ve made since.
They say never meet your heroes. But after Chang and I met over Zoom to discuss Cecilia, I’m happy to report she did not disappoint. Witty and warm, with an intellect that could cut glass, Chang is a force on the literary scene—and, in my opinion, the only answer to the question, “Who should I read next?”
Laurel McCaull: How did the idea for this book first come about?
K-Ming Chang: There was a really fun reverse process with this book in that Coffee House Press has this novella series they were curating, and they reached out to me about submitting to them directly. This invitation freed me to be my weirdest, wildest, most repulsive self, which is incredibly exciting and such a gift as a writer.
Because of that, I was able to return to a short story that I’d written quite a few years prior called “Cecilia.” I continued to think about the characters in that story, and they still felt alive to me. I wasn’t quite sure how to return to those characters, and I think they actually led me and guided me. I knew that that story was not necessarily unresolved but that there was more beneath the surface that I wanted to explore.
LM: I’m glad you were able to be unleashed! This novella includes a frame story in which the adult Seven and Cecilia share a bus ride. Was that part of the initial short story, or did you add that in later?
KMC: The short story was basically just what is now the book’s climactic moment, which is the flashback that reveals the contentious memory that created a rupture in Seven and Cecilia’s relationship. I wrote that story in the present tense, so the idea of the adult Cecilia and Seven reuniting became the scaffolding for the book.
It’s interesting because I was reuniting with these characters as a writer who had grown past that story, and these two characters were meeting again after also having grown apart in a way. So there was a mirroring between the characters and me, and it became a story about a story. I always find that I’m drawn to that genre—even with Bestiary, which was a story about storytelling, and in the same way, I feel like this book has that kind of doubled gaze on it.
Then, during the pandemic, I wrote what I thought, at the time, was just a really long short story. But a year or so later, I revisited these two pieces and realized, “These stories have kind of a similar voice and feel. I think I can make them connect.”
LM: It’s very layered, plus the short story is now being told as a memory, with the added filter of the years and the self-understanding they bring. When you were writing the flashbacks, were you conscious of the fact that you were telling this story from the perspective of an adult remembering their childhood, or were you very much still in the child’s mind?
KMC: I wanted the flashbacks to be more immediate and vivid. Part of that choice was to have the past be in the present tense and have the present be in the past tense and have the past use the direct address, the “you,” so there's that kind of scalding immediacy. I wanted to show how the adult Seven is distanced from herself.
Now that she's grown up, she constantly analyzes herself and creates this form of mental and emotional distance. She thinks a lot about propriety: “What does it mean to have made the choices I’ve made? What does it mean that Cecilia’s made the choices she's made?” Whereas when she was a child, she felt that intense closeness, so close it was almost like a fusing, so close that she didn't even have a sense of self.
LM: The female gaze and female desire in this book are so intense and visceral—it’s something you don't see very often in any kind of literature or film. Writing about female sexuality is already a difficult thing, but writing it from a child’s perspective is an added challenge. How did you approach that?
KMC: It’s an interesting thing to experience at a very young age not to have this calcified idea of who you are—that this is what you're anxious about, what you're interested in, and how you behave. Because Seven’s past is this experience of firsts, in every sense of the word, her identity is entirely tethered to this other person, and this idea of being individuated is completely foreign to her. In a way, that desire is her identity, and I wanted the reader to feel engulfed and overtaken by the past while the present felt a little more alien, a little more distant, a little more self-conscious. Seven is able to reflect on her sense of grief and loss when she realizes there was a time when she and Cecilia were the same or could have been the same, but that they’ve splintered in these directions and can never reconcile that split.
That emotional arc was really important, and I wanted Seven to feel like, because of her queerness she was in some way stuck or mired in the past, that she wasn't able to progress along the heterosexual timeline. I wanted there to be this reckoning at the end and this sense of shame for her that Cecilia grew up. Cecilia moved past her, but Seven was never able to move past their shared history and will never be able to live this normative woman’s life centered around a husband and a family.
LM: There are moments throughout the book when the normalization and minimization of that kind of loss are taught. When Seven realizes that none of her peers are still in touch with their childhood friends, she says, “It was a loss so mundane it didn’t even have a name. It was expected, they told me, inevitable. You were going to go to different schools eventually. Your mother was going to switch jobs. You were going to get married, feed a family…The future was grammatically a man, a flock of fingertips arriving from every direction.”
And then, at another point, she notes that “structurally a daughter cannot belong to her family, she can only be discarded by it.” I’m interested in your gendered treatment of time—the future as this masculine force and how a woman’s fate is to separate, to be separated. Can you talk about that a little bit?
KMC: Honestly, I didn’t know until the book was published how much I was writing about time. But yes, it is about heteropatriarchy as a kind of temporal regime. Seven’s mother tells her, “eventually you’re going to leave this family and you're not going to belong to us anymore.” Seven responds by asking why—why does it have to be this way, why are these losses considered forms of celebration rather than the loss that they are?
In a lot of narratives, friendship between women is like a midwife relationship, allowing one woman to be self-actualized through some form of a romantic relationship. Or it’s expected that at some point you will grow up, and that “growing up” often means either discarding or minimizing your friendship in favor of family or “true romance.” I was interested in someone who felt strangled by those systems. I don't think I necessarily offer a solution because Seven is constantly encountering people who are enforcing that narrative. But the sense of dedication and loyalty, however complicated, that she felt in her childhood relationship with Cecilia, gave her a glimpse into this other possibility, this other life. The possibility that they could be the center of each other’s lives, with this love that is not quite defined—kind of platonic, kind of romantic, kind of sexual, kind of all of those things combined—and not compartmentalized or hierarchical in the way that different forms of love are divided in the heteropatriarchal system.
LM: I thought the parallel between Seven and crows was really fascinating. Seven’s grandmother teaches her that you’re either a predator or prey, one or the other. But then she seems to feel this affinity with crows, which she realizes are neither predator nor prey, but scavengers. She sees a crow playing on a dumpster, and she’s shocked because she never thought birds could play like that. It seems like crows offer her this alternative lifestyle in a way. How do you understand the relationship between Seven and crows?
KMC: One of the big motivating forces of this book was the trope of the predatory lesbian. Seven’s grandmother tells her that she’s a predator, and Seven doesn't really know why her grandmother is able to sense this, but it confirms what she suspects about herself and what she fears in herself—that she is a predator, that she is this imposter among other girls, that she poses a danger to the ones that she loves, and also to herself. So I wanted to think about that trope as something that's not just imposed on her but also something that she has deeply, deeply internalized and nourished within herself. She’s constantly fertilizing that myth, and every one of her experiences is filtered through this perception of herself as a predator.
Within her life and within all the narratives that she and Cecilia are told, there's this idea that you serve a purpose, that your purpose in life is to get married and have children and continue your lineage. It's this atmospheric horror that is constantly surrounding them, and I think that moment when she sees the crow playing has always felt so important to me. It’s complicated because she’s actually very disturbed by what she sees. To her, a crow plucking apart a piece of roadkill and eating it is not gross or scary at all, but the idea of a crow being playful is somehow more horrifying and more terrifying than seeing it eat raw meat. This crow is totally subverting her gaze and being free in a way that she has never felt free, and her first response to that possibility of freedom is aversion and fear.
I wanted to explore how these narratives become so internalized and how, in the end, it's not just about the ability to imagine other possibilities but also about imagining yourself embracing, exploring, or even being tempted by those possibilities.
LM: I want to ask about the names in this book. Cecilia is named after a Hong Kong actress, and Seven is named after Seven-Up. What is the significance of their names to you?
KMC: This kind of goes along with the predator and prey idea—that you’re ordained to be one or the other. I was thinking a lot about names as a form of fate, and Seven describes a name as “a blade that is held to your throat, all your life.” Their names reflect this idea that they were born into worlds where their identities and their fates have been crafted for them, and that shapes how they see themselves and the power dynamics between them.
Cecilia descended from those who are watched and admired, while Seven is named after this ordinary, mundane thing. That informs how she sees herself within that relationship. But in the broader world of the book, I was thinking about these preordained identities and roles that come to form who and what you should desire and how you should behave within those roles.
LM: Let’s talk about the moment when Seven internalizes this idea that she’s “wrong,” at least in Cecilia’s eyes. I don't want to spoil too much, but Cecilia tells Seven, “We shouldn't be doing this,” to which Seven responds: “I grip your words in my fist, make them work on me like a whip. We see that precise moment when Seven takes that pain and turns it in on herself, the cycle of harm in action. It’s almost like she’s being cast out of Eden. Whereas before they were basically one person, suddenly Seven is cleaved from her friend and becomes self-aware. I don’t know if there's a question in that, but it's such a powerful moment.
KMC: I love what you're saying about being cast out of Eden because you're right; it is like they had this world together that they were nourishing and feeding, and it was growing into this lush, at times out of control, maybe wild and troubling world that they were building together, but also this place where they could be themselves in their most ugly forms. In some ways, even though the book is described as a complicated friendship between them, what I think is fascinating is it’s also a place where they get to choose their own danger. They get to choose the source of peril within each other, and the ways that they are constantly challenging each other, and pushing each other’s boundaries, is an interesting form of choice and agency. They've created this garden, and then in that moment, it's like the rest of the world is consuming and breaking apart that smaller world that they've sustained.
I wanted it to be really, really jarring for Seven—she didn’t necessarily choose for that to happen, and she now has to choose how she will respond, how she will proceed, and how she will live with the knowledge of that world. She has the choice to assign meaning to what that relationship was or what that world was, or what that moment was. And moving forward, she has a very contentious relationship with that memory. It engenders a lot of shame and self-punishment.
A moment of revelation for me when I was writing that was unexpected was when Seven felt like, in some ways, she was being unfair to Cecilia. She basically says, “I expected someone to hold up the other half of this world and to be this deviant with me, and if she could have been that, then I would have chosen it too, but I was in some ways waiting for her to choose it. Like, oh, if she’s willing to leave the world behind to be this queer, time-defying, gender-defying person, I will too. But since she bowed out, I'm going to bow out, and maybe that's unfair to have wanted Cecilia to make that decision for the both of them.” I find that to be a really tragic moment—there's a part of me that wants to rattle Seven and tell her, “you could have been that for yourself,” but I think the loneliness that she feels, the sense of isolation and alienation is really true to her and really important to depict. I think there's tragedy in the DNA of their relationship. They were two girls against the world, and even though their world ultimately failed, hopefully out of those ashes and out of those ruins, there is still something to recover and something that could possibly change the world.
