Rants and Raves: How to Swallow Teeth: the Queerness and Beauty of the Grotesque in K-Ming Chang's "Mariela" by Reia Li
How to Swallow Teeth: the Queerness and Beauty of the Grotesque in K-Ming Chang's "Mariela"
When I was younger, I learned to fear disgust. It was easy to identify—I saw it in the way the other kids twisted their lips or furrowed their brows or screamed “Ewww” in a chorus. I remember once proudly wearing new sneakers to elementary school, shiny red ones just like my older brother’s pair, and being told, pointedly, disgustedly, by a group of boys that those were “boy shoes.” In shame, I never wore them again.
The disgust wielded against me by the other kids was in response to anything perceived to be different. Whether that was the food I ate or the clothes I wore, these differences usually fell along gendered, racial, queered lines.
As I grew up, I started to purposely do things that people found disgusting. I once goaded my friend into daring me to eat a piece of rubbery white dried gum on our school’s sidewalk. Another time, with little provocation, I ate a small green insect in front of my entire track team. I made a big spectacle of it to show the people around me that their disgust no longer held power over me—I saw the horror on their faces, but popped the bug into my mouth anyway, relishing the crunch, relishing their faces.
Because of this, it takes a lot to get me to react to gross things. But when I first discovered the work of K-Ming Chang, a Taiwanese American writer and poet, it was me who was grimacing and wincing—from disgust, but also with awe and delight. Her stories made me realize how much I’d been yearning for a writer to present a version of queerness that felt real to me, rather than the sanitized, (white) romantic version of queerness I often encountered.
Chang refers to this quality of her writing as the “divine disgusting.” I agree. In an interview with Hayden’s Ferry Review, she said, “I want the divine to be disgusting—the divine disgusting. And I feel like that's tied with desire…For these characters, these queer characters, oftentimes, desiring something and then also being really repulsed by it are the same feelings for them, or are tied together.”
Chang’s words encapsulate what I love about her writing: she uses disgust, a weapon those in power use to shame people, but she uses it alongside love, intimacy, and desire. In doing so, she frees queerness from the constraints of cleanliness and agreeability.
In Chang’s 2022 short story collection Gods of Want, one story in particular is brimming with divine disgust. In “Mariela,” the unnamed narrator is a young girl who is friends? desperately in love with? another girl named Mariela.
On their last day of fifth grade, they are waiting for Mariela’s mom to pick them up, when Mariela suggests a game: they each “choose the other’s best feature and let the other girl wear it” (136). Mariela chooses the narrator’s eyelashes. Chang writes:
“Okay, I said, and shut my left eye, closing my fingers on the fringe of my lashes and tugging until it tore away, my eye lining itself in blood. [Mariela] opened her hand and I gave her the fan of my lashes, some skin still on them” (136).
Ew! Disgusting! Gross! When I first read this, I shuddered. But it gets worse. The narrator looks at Mariela, thinking, then chooses her teeth.
“Kneeling in the gutter, Mariela lifted her head and slammed her face into the curb. When she looked up, her bottom lip was torn open, raw inside as a slug, and there was a molar on the ground. Blood threaded through her spit, a red chain tugging her chin to the pavement” (137).
I find that scene painful and violent. But the narrator is not afraid. She leans into the gore. The tooth that Mariela gives the narrator plants itself in her hand “like a seed” (137). Then, the narrator says, “When I touched myself with that hand, a toothache hummed in the center of my palm” (137). A fifth-grade girl masturbating? A queer fifth-grade girl masturbating? A queer little fifth-grade girl masturbating with the tooth that her lover smashed out of her mouth embalmed in her palm? The world is shaking.
Or, more accurately, I was shaking. In Chang’s world, despite the gore, the shame that normally accompanies disgust is missing. The only people that matter are the narrator, Mariela, and their mothers. There are no white kids pointing at them on the playground, laughing, grimacing. I wish I’d had this world as a kid.
I love that Chang’s type of magical realism isn’t about dainty girls or fairy dust—it is about blood and horror and grime. But I think the true magic in Chang’s writing is in the spaces it creates to experience queerness as queer; that is, as exciting, scary, and vulnerable because of how far outside of “normal” it is.
Many of her characters are young and still figuring out the world and the place they and their queerness have in it. Much of the grotesqueness in “Mariela” comes in moments where these young protagonists explore queer sex and intimacy.
In describing a kiss between the narrator and Mariela, Chang writes:
“[When Mariela] put her fist inside my hand-me-down shorts that stank of boy-sweat, I clutched her wrists between my thighs. My tongue prodded the loose baby tooth at the back of her mouth…I swallowed (134).
Despite my desire to flirt with disgust, I struggled with this passage. It felt like Chang was challenging me: Look away. What are you ashamed of?
To me, queer sex and intimacy are some of the scariest things I’ve ever experienced. No one told me how strange it would feel to have sex with a woman. But right alongside the bodily weirdness was freedom and tenderness and vulnerability. This is what is so special about Chang’s work—she recognizes that beauty is not about overcoming the grotesque, but leaning into it.
There is so much pressure to make queerness palatable by making it beautiful. But what happens if we refuse? How freeing might it be if we turn not toward the perfect but toward the humanness of the dirty and painful and gross?
In K-Ming Chang’s writing, I found a little slice of freedom. She dared me to open my mouth and swallow it.
About Reia Li
Reia Li is currently a student at Pomona College in Claremont, California studying anthropology. She is a queer Chinese American reader and writer and might want to be a journalist when she grows up. Her news articles covering affordable housing efforts in Southern California are published in The Student Life, where she also wrote a column reviewing books called “Queer Asian Reads.” More recently, she has written for Arizona Luminaria, a community-centered journalism nonprofit.
She is grateful for all of the queer people who inspired, influenced, and gave feedback for this piece.
