So Deeply Late-2000s in Every Way Possible: An Interview with K-Ming Chang by Paula Mirando

For this week’s installment of our tenth anniversary series, I had the joy of interviewing K-Ming Chang! K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel, Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her most recent book is Gods of Want (One World/Random House, 2022). Her next book is a novel titled Organ Meats. As a child, her favorite Baskin Robbins flavor was rainbow sherbet.

Recently, K-Ming published a flash about the American Girl doll Kirsten and “peeing like a boy” in Triangle House! She and I spoke via email about fifth-grade talent shows, low-rise pants, staple 2000s cinematic masterpiece Aquamarine, and other 2000s cultural touchstones.

Paula Mirando: In honor of SLM’s tenth anniversary: can you share a memory from when you were ten years old?

K-Ming Chang: One of my most distinct (and humiliating) memories from when I was ten: we had a fifth-grade talent show that took place inside our classroom, and parents were invited. My friend and I prepared an acrobatics routine set to Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music,” and the entire class was also required (why required? A mystery to this day) to participate in a choral arrangement of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” in which I had a very brief two-line solo (this talent show was so deeply late-2000s in every way possible). But, after weeks and weeks of practicing our somersaults, falls-to-bridge, and various splits, I messed up majorly on the actual day of the show, accidentally kicking my friend in the face during a flip. It led to a very intense confrontation later, and to this day I wish I could do it over (if I could regain that level of flexibility). The choral version of “Unwritten” went by smoothly, though I think I definitely over-sold my solo lines.

PM: Absolutely love this mash-up of 2000s staples at the fifth-grade talent show! What was your favorite book, movie, or TV show at this age? Have these works influenced the way you tell stories at all?

KC: My favorite movie at ten years old was the classic film Aquamarine (shell phones! T-shirt dresses! water towers!) It has really influenced the kinds of genres I’m interested in, which always involve magical creatures, bodily transformations, “romantasy,” coming-of-age, and paranormal romance. And Aquamarine was one of the few rom-coms and teen movies of the era that was centered on the relationship between girls, and exploring those relationships is still the gravitational center of all my writing. (The man was refreshingly used as a plot device!)

PM: OMG, yes, I totally see echoes of Aquamarine in your short story “Dykes” from your collection! On the subject of writing, are there any words or descriptions that you often tend to reach for? Not necessarily images, but descriptive words too. For example, a classmate once pointed out that a book we were assigned overused the word “desultory” to the point that it was reeeeally noticeable. Are there any words or phrases you find yourself returning to?

KC: Yes! I tend to repeat teeth, mouth, darkness, birds, and body. Also, spit and salt. I have a terrible habit of loading every sentence with multiple clashing similes or metaphors (lots and lots of “likes”), and I’m never sure which to choose or prioritize. I tend to err on the side of “too much,” which sometimes pays off (but oftentimes doesn’t!)

PM: Ooooh, spit is a good one! And I’m a huge fan of jamming as much into a sentence as it can carry, too, metaphors or otherwise. Another description that I’ve noticed recurring in your work is the mention of currency. Dimes make an appearance in “Homophone”—“Every morning after we fucked, I awoke to church bells, the sound salt-white as her eyes when she rolled them back, when I entered her again and again, when my spit sutured her fingers into silver lace, when she sucked a rusted dime into my neck”—which I guess is a sentence jam-packed with metaphor and a lot of your other favorite descriptors. When I read those lines in your collection, they reminded me of the description of Gloria in the piece you published with Split Lip—“Gloria was a church girl. She thought she was better than us because she had dime-sized nipples and an almost-new navy Honda.”

KC: OMG, yes, true. I just realized that “coin” is one of my favorite words, and I do like to describe things as shiny or dull as dimes, haha.

PM: Other than local landmarks/legends/lore like Raging Waters and the Wendy’s finger, in what ways do the places you grew up make their way into your writing? Or do they?

KC: I grew up in a lot of kitchens and cluttered domestic spaces, and those objects (a suitcase of McDonald’s happy meal toys, popcorn ceilings and beige carpeting, plastic flowers) always manage to emerge in my writing. I think that I grew up in very maximalist spaces as well, filled with collected and accumulated objects and reinvented waste, so that cluttered maximalism has influenced my aesthetic. I want to cram as much as possible into a single sentence, and I’m drawn to language that feels excessive, clashing, and overflowing.

PM: Cluttered maximalism is so much fun, too, in that it provides so many opportunities to splinter off and revel in the intersecting realities that exist within a space. But speaking of clutter, excess, and things that clash—what’s your worst fashion crime? e.g. socks with sandals, a fedora, etc.

KC: My worst fashion crime is that I wear sweatpants in any weather (including 100-degree summers) and under any circumstance. I believe non-elasticized waistbands are a travesty. I was also a fan of the 2000s low-rise trend and could never really get into high-waisted anything (I still don’t own anything high-waisted), which is probably deeply shameful to admit!

PM: 2000s trends are coming back though, including low-rise! Gen Z is turning all of our middle-school fashion crimes into uber-comfy oversized puffy sweater elasticized waistband retro chic—but now with inflated prices!

While we’re throwing it back to the 2000s, my last question for you (and perhaps the most important question in this series): What is your favorite childhood snack food?

KC: My favorite childhood snack is Hot Cheetos, always and forever—I could wax poetic about Hot Cheetos, and I always manage to find a way to insert it into my writing (most recently, there was an entire section of a short story in my collection that I subtitled Hot Cheetos, and I got to highlight the phenomenon of Hot Cheeto Fingers, which was a purely selfish way for me to insert my obsessions into the narrative). 

PM: Yes, Hot Cheetos are a classic! Do you dip them in cream cheese though? 👀

KC: I actually have never tried to dip them in cream cheese! I’ll have to try that next time!

Paula Mirando is a queer Pinay writer from the Bay Area. Her writing has been supported by the Kearny Street Workshop Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Philippine American Writers and Artists. Her fiction appears in Waxwing, and she is currently working on a collection of linked short stories. She occasionally tweets @paulamirando and always dips Hot Cheetos in cream cheese.