Jiaqi Kang doesn’t like to call their longtime habit — waking in the morning and scribbling recollections of dreams — a “practice,” because that word is “hoity-toity.” But one morning some months ago, after a devastating dream, “I immediately had to write it down,” says Kang.
In the dream, Kang and a friend were excited and nervous, planning an act of protest in support of Palestine, when the friend suddenly vanished, leaving Kang bewildered and alone. In a previous dream, the same friend was wearing a suit, “which he would never do,” they say.
Those two dreams became the nucleus of a short story, “Sequence From a Dream,” which Kang wrote in October right after arriving in Provincetown as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. The story is a visceral first-person narrative about protest, connection, disgust, and obsession. Kang’s writing is warm, like the inside of a body, with long, urgent sentences bumping against two-word interjections and no quotation marks to separate dialogue from action. The story is horrifying the way one’s own face becomes horrifying if stared at for too long in the mirror.
Kang was born in China, grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and moved as a young adult to Oxford, England, where they received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history and are currently on leave from a Ph.D. program. Kang is the founding editor of Sine Theta Magazine, an arts publication made by and for the Chinese diaspora.
Kang began writing fiction and showing it to friends to pass the time during the Covid lockdown. They submitted some short stories to literary magazines, most of which didn’t pay. “I did it for the love of the game,” says Kang. A first published story appeared in Jellyfish Review, now defunct. In 2022, Kang won the White Review Short Story Prize for the story “Class of 1985.”
Some of the stories are so brief they are “basically poetry,” says Kang. “I thought, ‘Why would anyone want to read more than 1,000 words from me?’ ” At FAWC, they’re working on a first novel: a story about someone who goes on strike.
“I’ve never been in a situation where the thing I’m supposed to be doing every day is writing,” says Kang. A stack of novels from the Provincetown library teeters on Kang’s coffee table. “I love reading novels,” they say. “So, I want to write one.”
The first draft of a novel is “supposed to be bad,” says Kang. As an editor, Kang finds that hard to accept. “I want it to be perfect in every way.” There are no perfect books though, Kang admits.
Every day, they try either to write for two hours or to produce 1,000 words. “I’ve been trying to psychologically trick myself into writing,” they say: 1,000 words is 200 words five times, or 300 words three and half times. Slowly but surely, “It’s working.”
Lately, as a reader, says Kang, “I’ve been looking for difficulty.” They loved The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss and The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie — the first a historical novel in which anti-fascist thought and art coalesce as a force for good as Nazism rises in pre-World War II Europe, and the second a work of auto-fiction inspired by Rafeedie’s imprisonment as a Palestinian dissident in the 1990s. Rafeedie’s novel was smuggled out of jail in pill capsules and balls of dough.
Kang is also inspired by the work of Sarah Ahmed, a British-Australian feminist scholar who wrote, most recently, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Ahmed writes of the politics of emotion — of “affect aliens,” says Kang. “If everyone’s happy, and you’re supposed to be happy, and you’re not, what does that mean?” Ahmed writes, too, of willfulness. “There’s a sense that being stubborn is childish,” says Kang. “Actually, it’s political.”
At Oxford, Kang and friends participated in an encampment on campus supporting Palestine — “affect aliens” themselves in the face of what Kang calls institutional violence.
When Kang arrived in Provincetown, far from a “cradle” of friendships at home, they felt a sense of loss. They’ve never written to purge something, says Kang — except maybe in early stories where they inadvertently came out to themself by writing about lesbians. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Kang remembers thinking, “if the reason I wrote this was because I’ve secretly been a lesbian this whole time?”
“Sequence From a Dream” was different. “It’s the most vulnerable and raw story I’ve ever written,” says Kang. “Every time I write a story, I’m learning how to write all over again.” Writing this one scared them. The emotions were real and bad.
“I’m trying to figure out what I really care about,” says Kang. “Sometimes I don’t trust my conscious self.” Dreams, they say, are a sort of “ultimate revelation,” where ugly feelings emerge without permission.
Kang printed the story on a Risograph at FAWC and spread the word on social media: they’d exchange the booklet for donations to support Palestinians suffering in Gaza. So far, Kang has sent out 200 copies and raised $3,800.
“In the past year, my ideas about what writing and art mean have been interrupted by the genocide in Palestine,” says Kang. Here in Provincetown, where Kang says “outside disturbances” are few, “I’ve been trying to reconfigure what it is that motivates me to tell a story.”
In writing “Sequence From a Dream,” Kang struggled with this question: “Am I making this about myself?” The narrator grapples with the same issue. “We’re not the people who need the spotlight,” says Kang. “But this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about: no matter what you do, you can’t delete your feelings.” No matter, they say, if they’re “ugly feelings, shameful feelings, difficult feelings.”
Kang has become disillusioned with Oxford. “I used to see the institution as a brick wall and myself as this hysterical, emotional being, thrashing against it,” they say. After being involved in the student-led coalition Oxford Action for Palestine, they’ve concluded that the roles are the opposite.
They still love art history. But the pursuit of a Ph.D. is losing its allure. “My backup plan is to be a writer.”
