Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang (she/her) won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and was hailed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Described as “[v]isceral stories that center the bodies, memories, myth, and relationships of Asian American women” (back cover) and “unapologetically queer” (The Guardian), I was super excited to read it, but disappointed when I felt lost throughout most of the book.
At 203 pages, Gods of Want is a relatively quick read. It’s divided into three sections—Mothers, Myths, and Moths—each with several unique and often fantastical short stories.
In “Xìfú,” a daughter-in-law complains about her mother-in-law who has “pretended” to kill herself six times. As the daughter-in-law recounts each of the mother-in-law’s attempts, she reflects on her relationship with her own daughter, a lesbian who she admires for not being a mirror image of her.
In “Homophone,” the protagonist, Mei, describes how it’s the dream of NiNi, the woman she is sleeping with, to have sex with a woman named after every month of the year. Mei, a homophone for May, recognizes she is only “a chronological want” for Nini, but continues to sleep with her anyway.
In “Mariela,” the protagonist recounts some of her romantic/sexual experiences with her grade school classmate, Mariela. Mariela’s mother, who suffered the trauma of stillbirth and stopped speaking altogether, features prominently in the protagonist’s memories.
While I felt like I got the gist of the stories I highlighted, I felt confused by most of the other stories in the collection. “Episodes of Hoarders” was a punctuation-less stream of consciousness that I could not follow despite my best efforts. I felt like I understood “Dykes,” but then a catastrophic flood occurred, buildings began floating through the city, and the protagonist dove into the depths of the waters to reunite with her love interest. It was difficult for me to suspend my disbelief and adapt to this mid-story shift to fabulism.
I really wanted to like Gods of Want, but I didn’t enjoy reading it as much as I’d hoped. In all fairness to Chang, I had expected stories that were more grounded in reality and didn’t know how to process how nonsensical or difficult some of the stories were to follow. It felt like I was in someone else’s dream and I knew everything must have meaning and significance, but I was unable to make the connections to tie it all together. Nonetheless, I found the collection to be inventive and moving. I appreciated how Chang centered the voices of Taiwanese and Chinese women, with a focus on queer protagonists from these cultures. My advice to anyone who wants to pick up this collection is to expect the unexpected, and to accept from the outset that you may not always understand what is happening.
Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. She is also the author of Bestiary, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. You can find more of her work at KMingChang.com.
Trigger warnings for death, murder, suicide, sexual assault/abuse, homophobia, domestic violence, self-harm, animal abuse/death, mental and physical abuse.
Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey. She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.
