Gods of Want: Stories

by K-Ming Chang

I didn’t remember seeing a sky in it, but there had to be a sky for there to be a storm: There had to be an origin for ruin. I was suddenly jealous of that tornado, the way it tangoed on the page, the way her hand ran down its length like a spine. The photo was taken from the perspective of someone who loved it, and I wanted to be captured that way, to be chased from my body.

You can’t take a picture of an earthquake, she said, still not looking at me. You can only take a picture of the aftermath.

I’m a better mother to her son than she is. That’s what marriage is, motherhood, except the man doesn’t do you the courtesy of growing up.

She’s learning Mandarin offscreen, staying up all night to watch soap operas where the actresses get hit by cars and develop amnesia, unable to remember the men they love, and I ask her if that’s why Baba’s not here, because she got hit by a car and forgot him. Abu sucks on red melon seeds, spits the shells into the conch of my palm. No, Abu says, I remember everything. That’s worse.

Abu says burning something is not the same as throwing it away: It’s not the same as a landfill, not like sending something away to be forgotten. Fire is a form of memory, she says: Smoke is what survives after loss, what is inhaled by the sky and recycled into night.

Until they were twelve, Sylvia and Baiyang had never seen a white person except on TV. For years they thought that all white people were actors. How terrible, they said, to be born to play someone else, to never be your own body. They thought it was sad to live onscreen like that, never known by your own name. There were a few in their seventh-grade class, but Sylvia assumed they were just rehearsing for their future roles, practicing the characters they’d soon appear as.

My jiujiu always said I would be stolen by a nine-headed bird. The kind of bird that spurred the sky into night, looking for girls to kidnap from their beds. Technically, all nine-headed birds are born with ten heads, but one of the heads is severed, its neck hailing blood onto houses below, lashing the morning red. That’s what rust is: blood born from the tenth neck.

DVD box sets of pirated Jackie Chan movies that were so shaky I thought all Chinese movies took place during earthquakes.

Men are like catheters, my mother said: They drain you, but someday you’ll need to rely on one.

The thing about nine-headed birds, Jiujiu always said, is that they bleed. They fight each other featherless. After they kill their prey, they retrieve each other’s eyes and try to steal the meat from each other’s beaks, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because everything they swallow ends up in the same belly. It doesn’t matter who eats or who starves, because they share a stomach, and it’s only because they forget this that they fight.

I thought of the story about the woman who turned to salt when she looked back at a city. The moral was either you shouldn’t look back or you shouldn’t be a woman.

I remembered a story my father told me, about fire-fishers in Taiwan and how they lured fish with only light. On the darkest nights of the year, when the moon was rumored dead, they went out in their fishing boats and lit sulfur torches, waving them over the water. Swarms of fish flew out of the sea, spearing into the net, flocking to eat the torchlight. I thought it was a merciful way to kill something, to forgo the hook in its throat and teach a fish to love what’s above, to die for light. But then he told me he cried watching the fire-fishers lift their torches over the water, all the fish disowning the dark they were born in. He prayed for the moon to roll in, dulling the light of the torches in comparison, confusing the fish so that they wouldn’t know which light to leap for, and then the fishermen would come home with nothing.

When she falls asleep with chicken bones piled like a pyre on her chest, my brothers and I carry her up the stairs. I hold her head. There are seven of us in total, not enough limbs to go around, so two of my brothers walk alongside us as we carry her swinging body. We love our mother most when she’s weightless, divided between our hands. When each of us holds a separate piece of her and thinks we still have time to trade. I know the stories about the miscarriages before us, First brother knows the ones about the zippered scar on her neck, Second brother knows where the gold is kept, Third brother knows why she won’t say the word funeral, Fourth brother knows exactly whose face is in her newspaper clippings, Fifth brother knows why she keeps the cabinet under the sink locked, and none of us know what exactly Sixth brother knows. To know everything all at once would drown us,

She comes every day after school to waitress at our restaurant, where Mama pays her below minimum wage and compensates by giving out unsolicited advice about her sons: Be careful around my second one. Marry the third one. Pray for my first.

The first time Melon kisses me, she tugs me behind someone’s parked car, a minivan with a dog in it. I watch the dog pawing the window, its tongue pulsing against the glass like the overcrowded fish at the grocery store, their scaled bodies thudding against the tank as they try to swim away from their kin. Afterward, when we return to the restaurant, Melon hums the rest of the day, a blank sound no one can name. I begin to suspect that Melon has stolen my breath and is singing with it.