K-Ming Chang

A haunted, ecstatic essay that asks whether girlhood—the realm of playacting, hidden worlds, and secret identities—can be understood as a portal to alternate futures and queer possibility.

At age five, K-Ming Chang imagines ghostworld into existence—an uncanny double of earthly reality accessible only to her and her best friend M. Like any intensely fantasized childhood game, ghostworld stretches the bounds of reality. It’s hidden outside of time, held in place by the shared act of playing pretend.

Later on, as an adult still enthralled by the memory of this friendship, Chang returns to girlhood’s “field of play”—a realm haunted by both grief and possibility. Girlhood, she writes, is itself a kind of ghost world: a stage that ends when a girl dies so a woman can be born. But it is also the realm of playacting, hidden worlds, and secret identities, a phase whose very transience encourages experiment and transgression.

From this site of haunting, transformation, and obsession, Chang writes to understand why she returns again and again to M. What can we cull from childhood to disrupt normative adulthood? Can we make, of our girlhood selves, a present world of our own imagining?

Ghostworld: On Girlhood is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.