Cecilia by K-Ming Chang review – teenage kicks

The acclaimed American-Taiwanese author explores sexual awakening in a visceral novella of disgust and queer desire

K-Ming Chang’s oppressively sensual, thrillingly disorienting novella of queer love and intimate obsession is narrated by Seven, who is 24 and working as a cleaner in a chiropractor’s office. She works in near isolation, seeing the chiropractor and receptionist only when they pass through the laundry room to use the toilet; she listens “entranced” to their contrasting urination. Seven’s duties include refilling the soap dispenser, “which dribbled like a nosebleed”, gathering “bouquets of dark hair” from patients in the vacuum cleaner, and folding ageing towels that “hung like pigskin over my forearm, clinging directly to my meat, nursing on my heat”. She works in a windowless room, where “it was always warm, and the wet fluorescent light flicked my earlobes with its tongue”. This bodily world is a knot of disgust and desire.

Seven is summoned to clean a treatment room where she finds the patient has remained behind, and she sees “a face I had dusted off in my memory so frequently that seeing it now, in the present, made me wonder if this one was a bootleg, if the original had been destroyed to keep me from corrupting it”. It is Cecilia, a friend from girlhood and the object of her ongoing obsession. After this first re-encounter, Cecilia waits for Seven at the bus stop and they board a bus together, prompting the narrative to unspool into vivid memories from their childhood, the stories they told one another, and their sexual awakening. Their tangled attraction and repulsion play out, reaching a climax of shame.

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