By Matthew Lemas
Early in K-Ming Chang’s Cecilia, the narrator, Seven, questions her mother’s perpetual use of couch coverings on their apartment sofa, wondering what the point is of caring for a cleanliness one will never see.
“It’s about knowing what you keep clean,” Ma tells her. “You don’t have to see what’s underneath. You don’t have to touch something to love it.”
Love, it seems, need not require physical intimacy, just the self, and the object of one’s affection. However, when does distance procure something darker, hungrier, love of a different shade—obsession? In the gap between the self and the object, a certain desperation fills the void, for there lies the latent hope that the self, too, will be filled. Through the other, one may become whole. Or, at least, that is the hope.
Such proves the premise of Cecilia, a novella that wades through the mire of obsession entirely without sentiment, nor censorship, despite the sticky-sweet tenor of the mother’s opening line. If one were to be lazy, one might call this a “gross” work, the way our narrator pines over various elements of her childhood friend Cecilia—a sucked-on pretzel, stray hairs, excrement—but that ignores the reality of obsession, that it is a messy thing.
I’ve been thinking of obsession since watching Saltburn, a film that attempts to show obsession’s all-consuming nature through one queer university student’s relationship with another classmate. However, where that movie betrays the relative quotidian truth of obsession for something far more pathological (“How else can one act like that lest they are a psychopath?” the film seems to ask), Cecilia does not attempt to explain the strange away; there is no sudden ghost in the machine of the mind.
That is not to say the work is slavish to realism. Indeed, the novella travels like a living Dalí, marked by imagery that constantly has one questioning what is mere metaphor and what is something more surreal. In one scene, for example, Seven’s late grandfather’s liver nudges her “the way dolphins on TV greet a friendly stranger,” and when Seven’s brother questions the validity of their grandmother’s own seemingly tall tales—“That’s completely impossible,” he tells her—one finds oneself wondering the same. All this is likely not accidental on Chang’s part, nor mere decorative prose, but form following thematic function. The very nature of obsession alters one’s perception to such a degree that to stake a claim in any one particular reality is to deny said reality’s shifting landscape.
The novella oscillates between the textual present—where twenty-four-year-old Seven works as a cleaner in a chiropractor’s office—and her adolescent past with Cecilia. In the former period, Seven comes across the eponymous character in a room she is preparing to clean. What follows is an uncanny journey by late-night bus, the two near one another, though exchanges often mediated by reflections in the bus window. Once more, the narrative rests on the continued notion of altered perception, the sense one cannot rely merely on the traditional means of awareness.
When we are in the past, Cecilia serves as Seven’s serpent in the garden, distilling various bouts of unsavory knowledge meant to disrupt the latter’s childhood innocence. “Boys hold their dicks when they pee, isn’t that gross?” she tells her, much to Seven’s dismay, and later, reveals that a cremated body doesn’t immediately turn to ash: “You have to be put in the grinder.”
In many respects, young Seven relies on Cecilia for all the knowledge she cannot gain on her own, and such dependence soon devolves into self-effacement, her own grinder of sorts, the belief that without the other, she would not be. “You know nothing,” Cecilia tells her in one memory. “You need me to fill you. You’re completely seedless.” Yet, what Cecilia ultimately comes to reveal most in the narrator—her burgeoning queerness—cannot be sated or answered by the object that gave it rise.
What, then, can ultimately come of an obsession that fails to abide one’s most intimate self? How much can one truly rely on another for one’s own existence? At thirteen, the narrator considers Cecilia the life from which she came, “a root we all grow from,” but there is another avenue the book allows. Elsewhere, Seven writes of Cecilia, “Though I originate from you, I cannot return. The urge to enter you has been replaced by the need to be empty.” The reader will certainly question the validity of these lines, given the way Seven seems to otherwise deny her own worth in favor of Cecilia’s perceived wholeness, but the wisdom is there, nonetheless, “the need to be empty.”
Despite this apparent tone of erasure, one need not equate emptiness with popular notions of nothingness. As Buddhism would teach us, there is a wholeness to emptiness. The pursuit of obsession, Cecilia seems to say, may be seeking to fill that which is already whole, an act as futile as covers on the living room sofa.
Matthew Lemas is a writer living in Southern California, where he earned an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. His research interests include queer literature, the bildungsroman, and the influence of Buddhism on Western literature.