« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
September 8, 2020
K-Ming Chang's Playlist for Her Novel "Bestiary"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
K-Ming Chang's novel Bestiary is a vivid and breathtaking debut, one of the year's best books.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"From the beginning, the story is one of internalized violence ... the daughter navigates both the demands of her American community to assimilate and the need of her immigrant family to preserve the cultural memories of a place she has never known. The magic of these origin myths is very much present ... A visceral book that promises a major new literary voice."
In her own words, here is K-Ming Chang's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Bestiary:
Bestiary is a novel that first began as a cycle of fabulist essays, so in the beginning, it was structured more like an album than like a traditional novel. As the manuscript evolved into its final form, I tried to preserve a sonic quality and to lean into the musicality of the language. Writing poetry is what forged me as a writer, and I think of music and poetry as intertwined – the irony is that I’m notoriously bad at remembering lyrics or listening to them.
When I think about the ways music in which has influenced and shaped this book, I immediately remember writing the road trip portions of the novel. Before I was born, my family embarked on a road trip from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where they originally immigrated, all the way to Montebello, California, on the eastside of Los Angeles. I was motivated by curiosity: what had that trip been like? What did they listen to or talk about, if anything? I once joked to my friends that a symptom of growing up in California is that all your epiphanies, groundbreaking conversations, and generally important events happen while driving on a highway, or while driving in general. There’s something about being trapped inside a vehicle with someone for hours at a time – while not facing them – that allows for the hardest conversations to happen. Many family secrets and confrontations have emerged from sitting side by side in a car, not looking at each other, but stuck nonetheless on the same journey. I did some research on popular radio songs in the early 1980s in order to figure out what my family might have been listening to on that road trip, but in the end I decided to write about what existed between the songs: silence, storytelling, revelations. Each of the songs I’ve selected below resonates in some way with the fables and migration histories I’ve tried to reconstruct and tell slant.
1) Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors
One of my aunts always tells me that she learned English by listening to Dolly Parton songs. This is the first one we listened to together, and I remember hearing the couplet, “I recall a box of rags that someone gave us / And how my momma put the rags to use.” It reminded me immediately of my grandmother, who taught my mother to sew (who in turn taught me to sew). They kept bags and bags of scraps, some that they had collected themselves and some that were gifted to them, and spent hours sewing them into new things that seemed impossible, incredible. I remember a baby blanket with a complex set of constellations on one side of it, and rabbits on the other (there’s a myth that the moon is a rabbit). My mother said she used to go out just to look at what kinds of skirts other women were wearing so that she could draw their patterns on newspaper. When I wrote the road trip scenes in the novel, I immediately thought of Dolly Parton songs and my family’s enduring love and sense of kinship with them.
2) My Tamako, My Sookee by Jo Yeong-Wook (The Handmaiden movie soundtrack)
The Handmaiden was a revolutionary movie for me – I had never seen a film or read a book that so beautifully and brutally depicted the violence of men and the possibility for queer women to navigate and/or escape that violence. In particular, the depiction of Japanese imperialism in this film was also deeply gutting for me – queerness, colonialism, and (resistance to) patriarchy are all themes that feel personal to me. This movie made it feel possible to write at all these intersections and to imagine myself and my work beyond the gaze of men. The soundtrack is gorgeous, and I returned to these songs and to this movie while writing about the central queer romance in Bestiary.
3) Mountain Girl by Lily Chao
Lily Chao was a Taiwanese folk singer of the late 60s. Her nickname was the Ice Queen, and I loved the idea of a woman who seemed unapproachable, whose voice coaxes you in and who simultaneously tells you to stay away. In my grandmother’s house in Montebello, there was a plastic rack of cassette tapes in Chinese. I played with them like Legos, stacking and disassembling them, pulling out all the tape like a length of ribbon and winding the plastic around my wrist. I remember my brother scolding me and telling me that what I was wearing around my wrists was music. I couldn’t believe that those patties of plastic contained sound. I knocked them against the table and tried to force them to speak, but the only sound they made was breaking. I don’t remember what my punishment was, but I do remember thinking, years later, that I wish I hadn’t played with those tapes and instead had taken care of them, archived them. Lily Chao’s songs remind me of all the songs I heard in that house, and all the songs I’ve lost. But I’ve also recently remembered that music and oral stories, including the ones I included in my novel, are passed along body-to-body, and that I still sing fragments of the songs I heard once in the kitchen.
4) Thursday Girl by Mitski
Bestiary, in some way, is my version of an origin story. The book contains many women’s myths and origin stories, layered and folded onto each other. It was my attempt to give us a new beginning, an alternate history. I wanted to understand the cycle of intergenerational trauma and intervene/interrupt it. Everyone in my family enjoys telling the stories of each other’s births: the mundane details, like the day of the week, and the fabulist legends too. I was born on a Thursday, and for a while my nickname was Thursday. When I first heard Thursday Girl, I wrote these lyrics down in my notes: “Glory, glory, glory to the night that shows me what I am.” I loved the prayer-like cadence, the depth of Mitski’s voice, and the primordial presence of night. Bestiary is about nocturnal creatures, tiger spirits, and asking to be “shown what you are.” I was deeply inspired by Mitski’s lyricism, subtlety, and ability to create an atmosphere of foreboding and pain and want. Her songs feel like magic, incantation, and transformation, and I wanted to channel that beauty as much as possible.
K-Ming Chang was born in the year of the tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist in poetry. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
