What If Things Were Different?: A Guest Post by Abraham Chang

By Abraham Chang / May 3, 2024 at 1:21 am

Abraham Chang knew he had something to say and 888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers was his conduit. Written through the pandemic and exploring questions of his own life through quirky characters and pop culture references, Abraham’s debut novel was an obvious choice for this month’s B&N Discover pick. Read Abraham’s essay on how his incredible story came to be, down below.

Hardcover $26.99 ~~$29.99~~

888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers: A Novel

By Abraham Chang

In Stock Online

Hardcover $26.99 ~~$29.99~~

A love story, a coming-of-age-story, and an immigrant story told in a fresh, funny new voice. (And Kevin Wilson — author of our Fiction Monthly Pick, Now is Not the Time to Panic, loves this novel as much as we do.)

The inspiration for 888 LOVE AND THE DIVINE BURDEN OF NUMBERS started over 25 years ago with a daydream over some delicious soup dumplings. I remember being full and content, taking in the sights and sounds of the bustling restaurant – my family happily slurping up the piping hot unctuous broth from the tender pockets of deliciousness. We were beaming and blessed, thriving in our corner of Flushing, Queens – in the best city in the world that we called home, New York– but what if?

What if things were different? Some other path, some other upbringing? What if my mother wasn’t so proud of my choice to go fresh from college to get my MFA in Creative Writing at NYU (focusing on poetry, of all things)? What could I possibly do to make her angry, to get up in this packed restaurant of our neighbors, friends – and just make a scene? Something worthy of being on the printed page, up on the silver screen?

I scribbled this idea in the back of one of my notebooks. Like most writers, I have stacks of journals, scraps of paper, Word documents filled with all the things “I’ll get around to writing one day”.

So, I got my degree, started a career working various jobs in the publishing world, had my heart broken (once, twice, thrice), wrote poems and songs, went to hundreds of movies and concerts, read books and comics, collected action figures, met the love of my life, got married. In short: I was fortunate to have a happy little life – my xiao sheng huo.

But I blinked and I was no longer in my twenties and was facing middle-age. I had spent a lifetime surrounded by the things I loved – at my day job and in my “civilian life” – admiring the written word and the created art of others. But what about me and my (day)dreams? What if?

I had lived and experienced enough. It was more a mental “dusting off” of those old ideas and lessons learned. It was time to get off my butt and just freakin’ do it. Wordsworth’s “powerful feelings recollected in tranquility” – sometimes that peace and quiet never comes. You just have to get down to business. (Yes, even in a pandemic.) Action.

But would anyone care what I had to say? An Asian American coming-of-age story filled with Western pop culture references, about mental and spiritual health, about free will vs. destiny — where the most traumatic thing I want to write about is getting over a broken heart?

Just put it on the page. Remember what you learned:

Write what you know. (Depeche Mode’s discography.)

Show don’t tell. (Like a TV show?)

Truth and beauty. (David Lynch is a genius. Winona Ryder forever.)

Find the universal in the specific. (That time in China – the cute waitress that smiled at me.)

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. (Reflection, reaction, refraction – here’s the re-re-remix. Relax, it’s all fiction.)

My book is now a real thing. I’ve held (and smelled) the paper. (Day)dreams do come true! And like my favorite comic books – the multiverse can exist, the what ifs can be explored – at least on the page. I did return to finish that idea of a dramatic (fictional) moment in a Chinese restaurant. And it’s a cinematic doozy. It appears in the last third of my book. What is it? You’ll just have to pick up a copy to find out, True Believer!