Xífù by K-Ming Chang, 2022
The magic trick:
Stacking three stories on top of one another
I think this is the record for youngest author ever featured on SSMT. Chang is still just 26 years old. Crazy for talent to show itself so completely so early on.
There is a manic energy to this story. The narration is relentlessly brilliant in its weirdness and aggression.
Much of it is funny. Some of it is so terrifying as to be funny. And then you feel sad that something so awful could make you laugh. Every sentence leads to a tangent. And if you do that for a paragraph, well, you can imagine, it’s not long before you’ve left the mainstream completely. Now consider what happens when you do that sentence after sentence for an entire story. It hardly seems sustainable, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not only sustainable, “Xífù” jumps tributary to tributary for all of its 3,500 words and somehow manages to cohere into a larger message about generations and gender roles.
And that’s quite a trick on Chang’s part.
The selection:
I ask my daughter how you even become a lesbian and she says, first, I have to reject the male gaze. So I tell her the story of my father, who couldn’t see except for the shadows of things. She says, I’m not talking about literal sight. But I am. I’m talking about literally being seen. Like the time before my daughter was born when my husband caught me dipping my finger into the toilet after I’d peed in it. I licked the finger clean. Thing is, I was told that that’s one way to make sure you have a daughter. A neighbor told me that, the same neighbor who got caught shoplifting eggplants. Told her, Eggplants aren’t even good. Anyway, I got a daughter, didn’t I?
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