Review of Cecilia by K-Ming Chang – teenage kicks | Fiction

K-Ming Chang's oppressive, sensual and thrilling short story about queer love and intimate obsession is narrated by Seven, who is 24 and works as a cleaner in a chiropractor's office. She works in near isolation, only seeing the chiropractor and receptionist when they pass through the laundry room to go to the bathroom; she listens “enchanted” to their contrasting urinations. Seven's tasks include filling the soap dispenser, “which was dripping like a nosebleed”, collecting patients' “clumps of black hair” into the vacuum cleaner, and folding aging towels which were “hanging like skin of pork on my forearm, clinging directly to my meat, lactating.” on my heat.” She works in a windowless room, where “it was always hot, and the dank fluorescent light gave me a lick on my earlobes.” This corporeal world is a knot of disgust and desire.

Seven is summoned to clean a treatment room where she discovers that the patient has remained behind, and she sees “a face that I had dusted off so many times in my memory that seeing it now, in the present, made me stop.” ask if this one wasn't a bootleg. , if the original had been destroyed to prevent me from corrupting it”. It's about Cecilia, a childhood friend and the object of his lifelong obsession. After this first meeting, Cecilia waits for Seven at the bus stop and they board a bus together, prompting the narrative to unfold into vivid memories of their childhood, the stories they told each other, and their awakening sexual. Their tangled attraction and repulsion come out, reaching a climax of shame.

Cecilia is Chang's fifth book. An American writer of Taiwanese origin, she was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” winner for her debut novel Bestiary in 2020, and followed with three highly acclaimed works: Bone House, a micro-chapbook retelling Wuthering Heights ; short story collection Gods of Want; and the novel Organ Meats. Chang describes the Bestiary, the Gods of Need and Organ Meats as a “mythical triptych”; Cecilia inhabits this same surreal world.

Alongside Seven and Cecilia's queer desire, Chang explores mythologies, some created by the two friends and others passed down matrilineally. As girls, Cecilia and Seven told each other stories to understand their own bodies: “You once told me that every girl is born with a baby in each limb, but only the one in the womb survives, because only this one is fed.” And later: “You say babies are born floating, and that's why umbilical cords are attached to them. You're supposed to hang on to the strings of their balloons, roll them up and fill their bellies of slugs so that they are heavy enough to sit on their own butts. Chang pollutes girls' innocence with stories and images that are both repulsive and creative, frightening and empowering.

Seven inherits the mythologies of her grandmother and mother. Her mother's stories, told at night because “they have lived so long in the darkness of your womb that they can never survive the light outside”, are full of threats: “heavy son, light daughter” , her mother muses as she recounts how her own unwanted sister was abandoned. These dark stories rustle through the pages like the omnipresent carrion crows, which – according to Seven’s grandmother – bring bad luck.

“I let language guide me and then hope that ideas will follow,” Chang said in an interview with the Guardian in 2022. In this author's highly original voice, language transforms into new, ultra-sensual imaginaries and takes us into a strange world where the familiar becomes strange.