Coffee: The Pudding of Our Past

SH: We’re discussing K-Ming Chang’s Cecilia in three ways: over coffee, CBD, and drinks. First, coffee! I’m drinking a chai latte with two shots of espresso. 

SC: Supercharged! I’m drinking a dirty matcha latte.

Alright, so, Cecilia follows Seven, our 24-year-old protagonist, who works as a cleaner in a chiropractor’s office and lives with her mother, Ma, and grandmother, Ama. Childhood friend Cecilia shows up at Seven’s workplace, reigniting Seven’s obsession with her. When they get on a bus home together, the novella dissolves and warps time and space, interrogating desire, boundaries, and queer childhood friendships.

I’m excited to talk about Cecilia with you because it embodies a number of our shared interests, namely, the porousness of boundaries – in connection with others and one’s own history – and how queer desires often encapsulate consumptive qualities.

SH: Totally, and how that porousness between oneself and others, or the consumptive quality of queer desire – do I want you or want to be you? – is primarily found in formative queer friendships, especially before we read them as queer, or as related to desire.  

Also, as people who studied poetry together and are especially invested in poets-as-novelists, Cecilia is perfect to discuss. We’ve talked before about reading K-Ming Chang as primarily a poet despite her extensive novel-and-short-story publication history – how even her prose feels written in verse. 

Not only that, but I also think we have varied thematic interests and investments in this novella, which, speaking of, I’d love to hear what you think of the beginning. The first third of Cecilia sets up Seven’s relationship with her job and family, which feels consistent with the rest of Chang’s work – her interest in lineage, inherited stories, and the body. I’m curious about your read on that, and how it shapes this narrative in particular. 

SC: Seven’s inheritances and familial stories … they’re often so, I don't know, they're twisted, right? The familial system is so siloed. And Seven moves from that into the social world, which feels completely filtered through her interiority. We’re mired in her mind.

SH: Yeah, well, her family shapes that kind of rigorous interior world. Ama regularly implies – or Seven feels she implies – that Seven was born “unclean” or a “predator,” which is reflected in her perception of how she relates to Cecilia. There’s this inherited concept of herself.

And while her interiority has been shaped by her family and growing up with Cecilia, anything that happens in the present of the novel doesn’t exist outside her mind. All the dialog, for example, is in italics, so it feels like we're moving into a dream space or a memory of conversation. Even if it's happening in the action of the moment, it feels telepathic. The novella's about formative experiences, but it also doesn't feel like it exists outside of Seven at all.

SC: Chang’s craft choice with tenses also creates this multiplicity of timelines. It feels like everything's happening at once – there’s this overload or overwhelm that displaces Seven, unrooting her from both time and place.

SH: At the start of the novella, we’re in the present action, not going back into memories. Chang writes in past tense, like most novels. But as it goes on, anytime Seven delves into a memory with Cecilia, Chang switches to present tense. So the present is in past tense, and the past is in present tense. Additionally, the novella’s in first person – very interior – but the memories are directly addressed to Cecilia, as ‘you’. The italicized dialog, and tense, distort time and reliability.

SC: The novella avoids immediacy in a lot of ways.

SH: Do you mean that in terms of urgency, or in terms of feeling like we’re in the action?

SC: Both. Chang’s language is visceral, which makes us feel present, but Seven’s dissociation distances us – this simultaneous border yet borderlessness between Seven and everything around her. I think Chang straddles that simultaneity.

SH: It replicates, for me, the experience Seven has with Cecilia, being overidentified, “want[ing] any way inside of [her].” – this young, queer sensibility that we’re both interested in. But also, there’s this removal from Cecilia and feeling that Seven’s always at the outskirts of whatever Cecilia is experiencing. Cecilia is wrapped up in myth.

SC: Chang also avoids immediacy through a lack of locality. The setting seems urban-ish – there’s a bus system, big highways – and it seems like it’s all in English, so my immediate thought was that it’s a metropolitan American city, but it’s never explicitly stated. We never get situated anywhere.

SH: It says that they travel between cities, but not what cities.

SC: I was trying to track the lineages of Cecilia and Seven, which are also obscured. Like, Seven’s named Seven because her mother drank 7-Up at 7-Eleven. And 7-Eleven is interesting because it reinforces this lack of locality. Obviously, 7-Eleven is such an American thing, but 7-Eleven is even bigger in Asia. They’re the best fucking convenience stores.

SH: I’ve seen the TikToks! Influencers are always like, “Look at me walking to 7-Eleven. In the middle of the night.”

SC: (laughs) But the 7-Eleven adds to the lack of locality because they’re so ubiquitous. Seven also seems heritage-languageless. She calls her mother, Ma, and her grandmother, Ama, but everything they say is rendered in English.

SH: It’s the italics. You don’t know if it’s relayed, translated, or direct.

On first look, it seems like Chang doesn’t use italics when the dialog isn’t direct – like when Seven is making an assumption or summarizing a story she was told. And yet, the function of the italics feels fluid. One example is when Ama asks Seven to assist her suicide and “separate [her] from [her] life,” when the time calls for it. Ama’s demand is ostensibly distinguished from Seven’s interpretation of it, here: “When I refused to hang her, Ama would just smile and say, Don’t worry, you could do it. You have the capacity to lift me. You have the hands to help me. She never said explicitly that my species was predator, but the evidence was damning. She trusted me to truss her up.” It’s almost like, because the leap from what Ama says to how Seven reads her is so big, you also begin to wonder what was actually said. Seven attempts to differentiate what she hears from what she thinks, but it still bleeds through. What she understands someone to be saying infiltrates what they are saying. 

SC: So much of Chang’s craft is of obfuscation. She doesn’t allow us into this world, and I think that reflects Seven’s inability to access her world psychically. Tracing Cecilia’s identity, she’s named after a Hong Kong celebrity and speaks Cantonese, but her family’s from Taipei. So, inherently, there’s immigration and displacement embedded within her familial history. It’s interesting to think about dislocation in terms of culture, locality, inheritance, and immigration history.

SH: There’s a good portion where we’re in static, located places – Seven’s workplace, home, school – but the majority of the narrative happens on the bus. Most everyone is familiar with a bus to some extent. The familiarity creates a sense of liminality – it doesn’t allow for specifics, which makes the emotional life of the piece come into focus. Seven wants to do that with Cecilia, I think – remove her presence and details to make Seven’s feelings about her come into focus. There’s a kind of endless displacement of the present moment, of reality, of typical narrative details, which is also reflected in the fact that this book is overloaded with simile. They’re fresh, but incessant. 

SC: Almost every sentence is a simile or a metaphor. 

SH: While reading, I started feeling like I do when I read Woolf’s The Waves, where it’s more about the rhythm and texture and visual experience of the book, rather than pure narrative.

We’re weighed down with visceral images – all the similes have to do with bodies and guts – but because they’re similes, you’re at a distance, which is kind of what you were talking about before.

In that way, it reminded me of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. He theorized an experience of theater unlike the movies or circus, where spectacle happens separate from the audience. He wanted to drag the audience into an experience of themselves, their lives. It’s not theater or cruelty in their traditional senses, but theater as a symbiotic relationship between audience, performer, and stage, and cruelty as an overwhelming sensory experience. Artaud talks about how theater is between thought and gesture, and to release it from language, he employs sounds and guttural moans, clashing symbolic resonances. I think that Chang’s overload of metaphorical language creates that same effect.

I’m interested in the bus as the ‘stage’ of this theater. When theorizing the technical elements of the Theatre of Cruelty, how to create that stage or atmosphere, Artaud writes, “we abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it. This envelopment results, in part, from the very configuration of the room itself” (1).

Chang uses the bus as a stage to wrap us up into this liminal space, this space between sites, where we, alongside Seven and Cecilia, get dissolved into memory and time.

SC: As the bus scene progressed and the boundaries in Seven’s mind between her memories and the present moment became more blurred, she felt even less reliable as a narrator. I found myself questioning her perspective, like, is this an exaggerated interpretation of actual events, or just fantasy?

SH: Yeah, yeah. Is it the thing itself or something like it? Chang’s the King of Metaphor.

SC: (laughs) The King?

SH: Well, she is! Absurd metaphors, too: “I knew that I had to slap it dead before it laid eggs in the lake of her pupil. I knew flies fed on rot, and that inside the pouch of her left under-eye was a pudding of our past.” (laughs) It’s just, like, oh? Uh, okay!

There’s such incredible poetry … like, let’s talk about the crows. Seven encounters crows at various points in the novella, in the dumpster behind her job, in her backyard, etc. Chang writes, “what I admired most about [the crows] was that no matter how scattered they were [...] their calls synced together until they sounded like a single body.”

What did you make of the crows?

SC: They’re the most convoluted metaphor-simile-symbol-motif.

SH: Yeah, they function as everything. Instead of mixing metaphors, metaphor is overplayed.

SC: The crows are Cecilia, Seven, predators, prey, human instinct, animal instinct ... Interestingly though, Seven’s vampiric desire to consume or embody everything doesn’t work on the crows. They always remain separate from her, uncontainable.

There’s this moment when Seven recognizes the agency and personal lives of the crows: “I thought playing was the privilege of the domesticated[...] I was suddenly aware that I had no idea what crows, or any animals, were doing to their days. I’d only ever felt safe because I assumed they were eating, hunting, being hunted, shitting, scenting. Adhering to an order I understood[…] Now I realized that these creatures could do anything outside my imagining, do things for illegible reasons.”

And I don’t think she ever comes to that realization with Cecilia, or maybe to a limited degree by the end. But this recognition of other lives as complex and desireful as her own – that reality hits her for a moment.

SH: Weird, because the crows are often a metaphor for Cecilia. Seven says, “I stood in front of the caged dumpster where crows collided into each other, so eager to escape me, knowing my face as a shorthand for hurt, remembering. Did she remember?” Seven feels this guilt, but I don’t know if we’re ever told how Seven hurt Cecilia. 

SC: Well, Seven, at least subconsciously, is ashamed of how she reduces Cecilia to an object. Seven oscillates between debasing herself and feeling powerful and predatory. There’s this cognitive dissonance. And it also possibly ties into Seven’s own misinterpretations of class – she sees Cecilia as glamorous. Cecilia’s named after a Hong Kong celebrity, she speaks Cantonese, which Seven’s only heard on TV, but in reality, it seems like Cecilia’s, class-wise …

SH: … in a similar situation. What do you think of that?

SC: I think Seven’s distorted perception ties into Eng and Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation. They talk about two psychic mechanisms that racialized, immigrant subjects use to process discrimination and grief: “We use the term ‘racial melancholia’ to refer to histories of racial loss that are condensed into a forfeited object whose significance must be deciphered and unraveled for its social meanings. ‘Racial dissociation,’ in contrast, refers to histories of racial loss that are dispersed across a wide social terrain, histories whose social origins and implications remain insistently diffuse and obscure” (2). Seven oscillates between dissociation and melancholia. The melancholia gets imposed onto Cecilia, like: you are the object of my loss, of my longing. And the racial dissociation presents itself through its omission; though race is always present in the subtext, Seven never directly addresses race, but rather class when assessing her social standing.

I’m interested in the connection between racial dissociation and the lack of locality I was talking about, this “psychic nowhere”-ness that Eng and Han talk about: “‘Psychic nowhere,’ a condition often correlated with the absence of a clear geographic, belonging or destination.” They talk about it in terms of parachute children who don’t understand the racial hierarchies and structures in their communities, making it impossible to integrate. Racial melancholia and dissociation both surface within the novella in distorted ways – even Cecilia being the object of Seven’s melancholia could be a displacement of Seven’s internalized racial melancholia.

SH: Yes! I also want to talk about how a lot of internalized homophobia gets placed onto Cecilia, making her abject. The abject works in relation to racism, misogyny – discriminatory practices.

 
SC: Yeah, Cecilia is an object of longing that perpetuates suffering. Many of the subjects, relationships, and dynamics in Cecilia work on dual levels. Seven suffers psychically because she feels the loss of Cecilia, but then she negates Cecilia to a degree that Cecilia could never fulfill any greater significance in Seven’s life. There’s this quote from Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: “psychic suffering stems in no small part from the refusal to recognize our objects as subjects” – that’s the whole experience. And this quote from Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia: melancholia “may also manifest in the psychical erasure of one’s identity – a self-imposed exile and exclusion. The effacing of a particular racial, sexual, or gender identity marks the emergence of a precarious social and psychic life” (3).

SH: Well, that relates to Kristeva’s theory of the abject – something that is a part of the self at one point that’s cast off, rejected. That’s interesting in relation to what you’re talking about and also how Cecilia’s the physical, external manifestation of that. There’s this rejection of her presence in that Seven’s longing for her is actually a desire for her absence: “her absence could touch me anywhere, everywhere. It was pure.” 

SC: Yeah, Seven wants Cecilia gone, so she can release that rejected part of herself. It also relates to the idea of racial melancholia as a psychic splitting; Seven’s psyche is fractured into similes and metaphors …

SH: She makes things other things.

SC: Exactly. From Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: “the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually reproduce its slippage, its excess, its difference.” And that emerges in Seven’s relationship with Cecilia, but also Seven in connection to everything, right? Though Seven’s interiority is alive with emotion and desires, her ambivalence is in her passivity. She rarely acts on desire unless an opening or action is impressed upon her. Seven’s constantly trying to get close to an object but isn’t able to, or refuses to, capture it. It also lends itself to simile and metaphor as a mechanism. You’re trying to represent something, but it’s never the thing. The thing is the thing, you know?

I have this quote from Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: “the melancholic would have said something, if he or she could, but did not, and now believes in the sustaining power of the voice. Vainly, the melancholic now says what he or she would have said, addressed only to himself, as one who is already split off from himself, but whose power of self-address depends upon this self-forfeiture. The melancholic thus burrows in a direction opposite to that in which he might find a fresher trace of the lost other, attempting to resolve the loss through psychic substitutions and compounding the loss as he goes” (4). That explains Seven’s oscillation between obsession and love for Cecilia and this abjection.

SH: I love using Butler’s melancholic to describe Seven’s experience; the novella’s an address to herself in denying herself, right? There’s this ‘you’ addressed, ostensibly Cecilia (the cast off parts of herself), but even when they are physically together, Cecilia’s like ‘you’re not really talking to me’. There’s no “fresher trace of the lost other” – amazing phrase, by the way – and any attempts to “resolve the loss” happen through similes and a psychic substitution of Seven as a gendered, racialized, sexual being into Cecilia, which are ways of “compounding the loss.”

Similes are meant to illuminate what we know about one thing by connecting it to something interesting, surprising, fresh – and Chang’s similes are amazing. Nobody writes similes like her, but there are so many of them that we end up “burrow[ing] in a direction opposite” to meaning. The multiplicity of connections cancels the connections. 

SC: Chang’s stylistic choices can repel readers who want concrete moments. It recreates in the reader the same desire to solidify that Seven has: the desire to touch, which she’s incapable of.

SH: A lot of the critical, societal elements we’re bringing in here aren’t grounded or contextualized in the novella. There’s all this shame, self-hatred, self-rejection, abjection, but these are presented as immaterial and disconnected from the events. We must bring in the source material of our own lives to understand why Seven would feel that way. That’s one of the most compelling things about Cecilia, to me. There are all these things that have to do with race, class, sexuality, gender – all these are felt, while the structures are buried beneath. 

SC: It feels very young, like, this is how things are – we’re unable to address, question, or find the source.

SH: Wait … okay, we have to smoke!

Joint: What You Keep Clean

SH: We’re smoking a CBD joint – a combination of Legendary OG and Pink Panther. We need to talk about the bus, the site of temporal collapse and dissolution into memory. Things pass and the landscape changes, but it’s also described at multiple points as unchanging.

SC: Yeah, it’s ominous. For me, the bus feels like a full culmination of the porousness Seven experiences with everything in her life. When she gets on the bus it starts to feel like she's encased and moving through this scenery of both nothingness and everything at the same time. Do you feel that way as well?

SH: That makes me think of, well, as children, Seven and Cecilia sit on the curb of the bus stop, place their legs into the street, and play chicken, basically, to see who’ll pull up their legs first as the bus approaches. So, the bus is immediately set up as a dangerous force and a physical representation of the perceived imbalance between them. Cecilia has agency – she leaves her legs out longer; she flirts with danger. Seven has this inferiority complex – she always pulls back first.

And the bus stop is where they officially, finally come back in contact, right? Cecilia waits for Seven there.

Seven describes the ride: “there were billboards staked along the freeway, and I swore they were just the same one repeating over and over: either the bus was sliding in place, reiterating the same piece of street, or a single person had purchased these billboards for miles, and I couldn't decide which was more horrifying. On each billboard was an ad for an exterminator, and though I couldn't read the details, I recognized the exterminator’s face.”

This extermination on the billboard reminded me of the scene in the bus when they’re children: “Cecilia and I were careful to touch very little. Our mothers warned us about the infectiousness of death. Even a safety railing or a bus strap could sicken us, so we pretended to be taxidermy, stiff and leaning against each other. I kept counting hands as they entered and exited, as they touched windows and green plastic seats and nostrils filled with moss and jean pockets and earlobes. There wasn't skin between anything.”

And yet, in the present, when the bus first arrives, Seven reaches her hand out to Cecilia to help her on the bus, and Cecilia drools in her hand. 

SC: (laughs) Yeah, what did you make of that? Cecilia’s so weird. You can’t get a grasp on her because of how she’s filtered through Seven.

SH: Well … this moment where Cecilia drools I read as partially metaphorical. As children on the bus, they tried to stay away from porousness with the world, touching each other to stay away from others. But the way they touch is “stiff” –  dead. Now that they’re reunited, Seven succumbs to all that – the drool, the porousness of bodies, with all their germs. And we fall into the porousness of time, temporal holes. 

SC: “Cecilia sat on the frosted bus-stop bench every morning and even ran around the dirt field at school without her shoes or socks on. Ma said only foreigners and country bumpkins went around without their shoes on. But Cecilia didn’t believe in a life curated by caution.”

SH: Ma has this interest in cleanliness, in maintaining the self’s borders. At many points Ma won't hug Seven because she's like we don't need to touch to love. Whereas Seven literally longs to be within Cecilia, in her womb, body, holes – she wants to shove herself in. Seven says, “to me, love was lodging yourself in the wall between two units, growing in the dark like a mushroom.” 

SC: There’s a lack of physical connection between Seven and her matriarchal line, despite their structural presence, and Seven transfers that lack and desire onto Cecilia. It’s paradoxical because Seven is haunted by this lack of touch, but it's almost like, if she doesn't touch a boundary, she doesn't need to establish it. Throughout Seven’s childhood, there’s obfuscation or distance from the real … like, I loved the couch in her house: “we never uncovered the sofa, and I asked Ma if it wasn’t defeating the point, covering something to keep it clean: if it was always sheathed, how would anyone know if it was clean or not? [...] It’s about knowing what you keep clean, Ma said. You don’t have to see what’s underneath. You don’t have to touch something to love it.”

So, there’s this idea instilled that touching something, knowing the boundaries of it, keeps you separated from it. With that logic, the distance from Cecilia allows Seven’s boundaries to remain porous so they can meld together. 

Seven says that, because Ama used to beat Ma, her mother believed, “If she ever gave birth to something, she would love it as lightly as a fly landing on a cow’s ass [...] the culmination of every relationship is separation. It’s death. Every relationship is just practice for parting.” I’m interested in how that relates to the ways Seven experiences love, or how ideas of loving are inherited. In a way, Seven embodies both, right? Because she's never truly able to be connected to something, she's never able to really attach, just like the fly. She mirrors that detachment, even while refuting it. 

SH: And by that logic, the thing she longs for – to meld with Cecilia, to be within Cecilia – would be the touch that ultimately separates them. Seven openly struggles with that, because she even has to ask herself: is she then in a relationship with that person, or in a relationship with desire? She touches desire on all sides but that’s the entire experience, and is that an experience of love or connection?

SC: Borders feel related to the binary thinking throughout the novella. Like how Ama tells Seven, “There are two species in the world [...] Predators and prey. Everyone is born from one of these two lineages, and you can’t predict which. [...] Whatever you are will emerge and announce itself, like sugar in your pee.” This binary renders relationships as oppositional, which explains Seven’s dynamic with Cecilia.

Throughout the novella, Seven considers herself a predator. At one point, Seven says, “My memories all pipeline into a single reminder: You are the predator.” There’s such a distortion between Seven’s self-perception and how I perceived her. Though her obsessive nature could be interpreted as predation, I felt that her character was too impotent to be threatening. (laughs)

Like, on the bus with Cecilia, Seven imagines the light peeling “away [her] falsest face, revealing [her] predatory one.” But as the bus scene progresses, she’s revealed as prey.

SH: Yes, in the pivotal, climactic moment where the bus almost hits a deer, or maybe a woman – Seven can’t tell – that’s when Seven and Cecilia feel most vulnerable. They’re confronted with, if not reality, something that exists outside the two of them on this bus. It’s so surreal because Seven’s hyperinteriority clashes with her embodied life. What did you make of that? It's this violent, visceral moment that could, in another novel, snap the characters into reality, but we’ll never know here, because they narrowly evade it. 

SC: I interpreted the exterior of the bus as a representation of Seven’s interiority. The bus’ movement feels repetitive and liminal, like Seven’s life. She’s within this dissociated reality, the constant repetition of memory and landscape, and then, in the moment she’s confronted with Cecilia’s realness, this rabid woman appears and is almost hit by the bus! I figured this event as a symbol of – maybe it’s too simplistic, but – the perceived danger of Seven’s own desires. 

SH: There’s this stuff early on about how crows and humans are “parallel populations,” not touching but growing simultaneously, alongside. That’s what Seven and Cecilia do, even if that’s not what Seven wants.

But the novella ends on a moment of change: they get out of the bus, Seven thinks “we were alone, nowhere I knew” and follows Cecilia over to this group of crows feasting on … maybe the woman. Seven’s eyes “lock[...] to the knob at the back of Cecilia’s neck, and [... she] wonder[s] if this count[s] as hunting or haunting her [...] there[’s] no difference between the two, except for teeth and tense.” 

Then they walk over to this group of crows feeding on the carcass, and … well, I don’t want to spoil it, but her and Cecilia become parallel in that moment: they don’t meld, but they do become the same thing, the same symbol.

SC: It’s hard for me to keep a good grip on this novella, because the boundarylessness of the reading experience makes everything bleed together. Even though the plot is simple, and the action of the arc is clear, the emotional progression is messy and difficult to track.

Speaking of messy and difficult … drinks?

Drinks: The Knowledge of Touch Was Touch

SH: We’ve both had a shot of tequila and now a prickly pear and orange blossom gin and tonic. This is the sex section! (laughs)

Chang depicts the erotic as base, like: “she rolled her lower lip between her teeth, and I watched it ripple and shine with spit, the slug of my love.” Or: “even as I shuddered, I imagined stroking the spores. A row of nipples stiffening.” An erotic moment of someone rolling their lip between their teeth is figured as a slug, or mushroom spores as nipples stiffening, which Seven thinks of as she remembers Cecilia’s nipples sticking out under the chiropractor gown. This concept of the erotic relates to their sexual encounter as teenagers, the pivotal memory of the novella. Younger Seven’s boundaries – her fear and disgust in relation to certain things, but not others – morph as she becomes an adult.

SC: The only time you’re really grounded is within the processes of the body, the fluids of the body. From Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness” (5). I was curious about how this idea connects with how Seven relates to her body. Seven’s focus on bodily functions paired with her dissociation from the needs and desires of the body lends to Fanon’s idea of “a third-person consciousness.” There’s a sense of self-spectatorship. While she seems to, whether consciously or subconsciously, deny herself the tangible pursuit of her desires, she also seems to rely on her body as a source of validation. The body serves as both self-negation and evidence of living.

In José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, he reframes Freud’s melancholia as “not a pathology but an integral part of daily existence and survival” (6). For “blacks, queers, or any queers of color,” melancholia is an important psychic “mechanism that helps us (re)construct identity.” I interpret Seven’s preoccupation with the body as another form of melancholia – her unattained desire is displaced onto what can be attained, her body’s being. The physicality of Seven’s body grounds her, allowing her to construct, not only an identity, but a sense of fulfillment through its productions and processes. Chang gets flack for how much she revels in grossness and bodiliness … like, if you go on Goodreads, everyone's so mad, they're like, poo, pee, NO! But bodily fixation as a mechanism to assert your survival – it's beautiful. And so subversive.

SH: Chang’s writing style feels like a striving-towards unfiltered bodily experience. I think that's especially effective in Cecilia, which is primarily concerned with girlhood friendships, with an unfiltered child consciousness being constantly accessed to escape this self-spectating adult consciousness. I know you’ve thought a lot about this kind of turning toward the self, this kind of autoeroticism, almost. 

SC: It makes me think of this quote from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet: “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole” (7). And I think Chang is so interested in absence. Absence serves as a driving force, but also as a fixation for Seven: “To mate, [lovebirds] rub their holes together. But how is that possible? A hole is an absence, and two absences can’t touch. [...] Ama shakes her head and says[...] A hole, like all empty space, is pure potential. Filling it with something, however satisfying, erases its infinite possibilities. It’s better for your body to be empty, Ama says, to be purposeless. To be free.”

The two absences are Seven and Cecilia. Seven is pure longing, and longing inherently requires absence. And Cecilia is an absence because Seven will never allow her to relate in a way that is tangible, meaningful. Cecilia is a love poem – the self is the beloved, the absence is the beloved, and Seven’s just writing to herself, really. Carson has another quote: “When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack.” Desire is the lack, and if the lack were filled, the desire would be sated, it’d be gone. So much of Cecilia is just about that yearning, that desire …

SH: And desiring desire – desiring to maintain the distance between them. That is what Seven wants: let me be with your absence rather than your presence.

There’s this scene from childhood, where Seven and Cecilia and their two friends are ‘practicing kissing’ in the school bathroom. One of the friends says that imagining is practicing and Seven thinks: “I don't dare to look at you, afraid you might see what wades in my eyes. If Melody is right, if there is no difference between doing something and dreaming it, it means I have violated you many times.” Here, the imagined, the longing, takes up the space of action as some legitimate violation. I'm not in the practice of psychoanalyzing any characters, it’s annoying, or whatever …

SC: (laughs) I definitely am …

SH: But there's this root of internalized homophobia – how the actualization of anything is something that Seven could be punished or reprimanded for.

This is also related to my favorite moment of the book – it's a memory between Seven and Cecilia and these girls at school. They're playing this game – an alphabet soda tab game, where you flick the soda tab back and forth and say the letters of the alphabet and when the soda tab flicks off, it's the first letter of the name of the person that you’ll be with: “I pray as I pinch the tab between my thumb and forefinger, pray as I yank: C, C, C. I twist too hard, and the tab snaps off at A. The girls laugh, and you do too. You must really like someone whose name begins with an early letter, they say, singing the names within reach, and in my mind I repeat C, C, C, a sea of C’s tipping, leaning back into boats, sailing me toward the nameless place where I am known.” 

SC: (gasp) Listen to this: “We live inside languages we don’t know. I confuse the words sea and see, seen and scene.” I didn’t realize that this quote was an offshoot of this constant repetition of C for Cecilia! It connects to the boundarylessness of perception, performance, language, desire – they all blend.

SH: No, absolutely. Sounds take dominance over meaning – or the sounds make their own meaning.

But, the soda tab is one of the most real, grounded moments that we have to hold onto. I found it to be the most arresting section. Just because, within this sea of simile and distancing, I was like … I know this moment. That recognition.

SC: The soda can tab moment also stood out to me. It just felt so legible. There are very few moments when we can sit with Seven and be in the same realm of understanding. There’s a moment of clarity, then obfuscation, and then a moment of clarity – then more obfuscation.

I noted this other moment when I felt real clarity. Seven says, “What seed did you sprout from, springing up whole and self-sustained? How did you come to possess yourself? [...] If it’s true, if you and I are equally empty, harboring only the tiniest of souls, then why are you the direction of my longing? Why do I turn away from myself?” I felt like that was a moment of epiphany, of clarity, that Seven turns away from. It doesn’t enact change for her.

Which is why I had so much hope for the sex-scene-memory. I thought it would finally be Seven’s opening to change or, at the very least, a real connection to Cecilia – what did you think?

SH: I think, again, there was this legibility, familiarity, with what happens there; they both clearly desire it without being clear on the fact that the other one desires it. And in the actual encounter – once they’re touching, they can’t meld anymore. 

As they try, Cecilia has this embarrassing, I guess, thing happen, and she gets defensive and leaps towards dismissiveness, to ‘you want this more than me’. That feels like teenagehood, but it also helps us understand the entire novella, as it’s what shapes Seven’s adult constitution, one of shame and Cecilia representing the abject. This is the moment where Seven confirms that there's something wrong with this kind of desire – something that has to be cast as separate from her. And Cecilia is a representation of that abjectness.  

SC: I was heartbroken, honestly. I'm naive enough to think things can work out, even after I've read one hundred pages of things not working out. I was interested in the greenness between them during the sex scene – they pose it as a recreation of leaked Hong Kong celebrity sex tapes. It was so cheeky and realistic in its awkwardness, but it also felt like a recreation of existing themes – mirroring and repetition without the culmination of desire. The sex scene pushes Seven to reckon with boundaries; she really has to come to terms with how their bodies are separate, and that's something that she can’t bridge. 

SH: The desire in this novella – it’s not just this sexual desire, but this desire to be within …

SC: It’s queer in the queerest way. What did you think about Cecilia, who, during the sex scene, is the one who puts her foot down? I know you're saying it's a product of her humiliation, which is understandable, but also she’s the one who reinforces like … homophobia, you know? Saying to Seven, “You know we shouldn’t be doing this.”

SH: I think of them as parallel lines. We have so much of Seven’s interiority, what Cecilia says to her, and how Seven feels about it: shame, wanting to cast away her own desire, but we don’t exactly know how Seven is reacting to Cecilia. So, I see them as parallel, reflecting that internalized homophobia back and forth at each other. They attempt to consummate their desire, and instead of becoming one, becoming unified, they become reflections, and that results in this whiplash for both of them. What about you? 

SC: I don't know. I mean, I feel very tender towards Cecilia, even though she's displayed as, like, a little militant, a little crass. She seems … what’s it called …

SH: Precocious? 

SC: Right. She's the one in the library looking up porn and hiding it from their teachers. I see Seven drawn towards someone who seemingly understands what they want and are willing to search for it, whereas Seven is unable to find ambition or drive. Cecilia is definitely not as self-fulfilled or whole as Seven wants or imagines her to be, but Cecilia is much more driven to understand what she desires and to fulfill it, which is the most important part!

SH: Yeah, that’s what I think I feel, especially in that sex scene. Cecilia is rendered as the one who has agency to start and stop it. Seven incessantly positions herself as the ‘passive one’ or the one ‘that is less,’ but that doesn’t seem real …

Seven is obsessed with the kind of agency that she thinks Cecilia represents. Cecilia has to do everything: stop the sex, show up at the chiropractor’s office, wait at the bus stop, stay on the bus, get off the bus. Seven positions herself as someone who is at the whims of Cecilia’s agency, but simultaneously presents herself as someone who is hunting Cecilia. In reality, it seems like Cecilia is the one who's chasing her.

SC: Cecilia acts as the director of their sex scene, right? She's like, cut, fucking cut! (laughs). Seven willfully distorts her perception of herself in relation to Cecilia.

SH: Before we end, I want to bring in my favorite quote: “My hands doubled on each wrist, and I felt the weight of both pairs burdening the air, pulping my pelt, smearing me into the sheets. The knowledge of touch was touch.” 

SC: Beautiful …

SH: It goes crazy.

SC: It hits because you're like, yes, Seven, the thing is the thing! Like, there's no substitution for the thing!

SH: The deeper you get in the novella, like nuzzled up to it, close with it, the more you're able to sink into the language. Then, things kind of wash over you and you understand their meaning, versus at the start, when you're parsing it and feel like you're wading, struggling with the text. Later on, it becomes more fluid. 

SC: The reading experience forces you into Seven’s mindset. Seven's always bombarded with memory, story, feeling. You can't get mired in the language or you can't continue.

SH: We've been talking about this the whole time, but the best way I can think about Seven and Cecilia is that they are similes of each other. You understand more about one through the other, but they're also parallel, like, they don't touch …

SC: Right, they’re comparative.

SH: Similes are sometimes contradictory, sometimes surprising, sometimes inherited – I think their relationship really reminds me of that. The structure of the book forced me – us – to have a parallel experience to theirs, and in that way, reflects them. 

1.  Artaud, Antonin, trans. Mary Caroline Richards. The Theater and Its Double. (Grove Press, 1958).

2.  Eng, David L. and Han, Shinhee. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. (Duke University Press, 2018).

3.  Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” In: J. Strachey, Ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (Hogarth Press, 1953.)

4. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997).

5.  Fanon, Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. (Grove Press, 1952).

6.  Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

7.  Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. (Princeton University Press, 1986).