The idealized concept of young love has been a ripe source of artistic material for eons. We’ve seen it from cave walls and papyrus to bubblegum pop songs and Disney Channel original movies. That heady brew of wide-eyed optimism can be intoxicating and even deceptive.
It’s why I’ve always preferred art that examines the realities of young love in practice. Gimme your unrequited pining, tear-stained journals, and minor key pop songs. Sure, it might be even more hackneyed and cliched than the sappy stuff, but it certainly feels more authentic. It’s not for the faint of heart, and if really want to up the ante and drama, find yourself a young love that contains elements of the forbidden, the misunderstood, the unorthodox.
Which is exactly the stage that K-Ming Chang sets for us in Cecilia.
Published on Coffee House Press as part of it NVLA series, this haunting novella tells the story of Seven, a disaffected and melancholic twenty-something. She lives in a small apartment with her mother and grandmother, each of whom works a thankless job cleaning up after others. Seven works in chiropractor’s office: she isn’t allowed to have any interactions with the customers, the chiropractor never speaks to her, and the front-desk clerk treats her with classist disdain.
By happenstance, our main character reconnects with the titular Cecilia while cleaning a room at work. We quickly learn that the two of them were best friends in their early teen years adolescence and that Seven still retains her myopic focus on Cecilia. Told exclusively from Seven’s perspective, K-Ming Chang takes the reader on an intertwining, two-pronged journey through intense longing and curiously arrested development.
On one path, we get the earlier, whimsical recollections from their time in high school.
These dreamy scenes come with sapphic situations that straddle the line between puppy love and growing affection while still feeling innocent. Much of their time together is spent without any sort of supervision, as both their mothers work domestic labor jobs that keep them out of the house. They discuss their feelings, their absent fathers, school, and other common subjects of the teenaged experience. But while it’s obvious that Cecilia is a playful ingenue type, Seven grows increasingly convinced that her friend is the center of her world.
On the other path, Seven and Cecilia reconnect after work one day.
K-Ming Chang sends the two on a creepy, nightmarish bus ride that takes them all the way to the end of the route. Along the way, they have conflicted conversations about their fractured memories of their lonely afternoons together. At times, it seems that Cecilia is being very indulgent of Seven’s prolonged adolescence, as if she can tell that her teenaged friend hasn’t grown up that much in the intervening years. At other times, she almost seems afraid of Seven, especially because of unnerving stares, awkward questions, and consistent twitching to be as close as possible to the object of her unhealthy obsession.
But Seven remains oblivious to who Cecilia really is in both timelines.
She idolizes her friend, seeing her more as someone to admire and desire instead of actually being a peer. The reader experiences all of this in an often brilliant rush of thoughts, feelings, and impressions – some of which are conversations with Cecilia, others with her mom and grandmother, and even more with her own subconscious.
The slowly simmering tension is insular and introverted, but never intimate, as with each mile of the bus ride, Cecilia drifts further and further away from Seven, despite her desperate grasping. The result is viscerally and visually stunning descriptions with a claustrophobic tunnel vision to the narration. K-Ming Chang creates a fascinating tale that never approached any sort of resolution, but the intense character work is sublime.