Bestiary

In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us.

Author K-Ming Chang might be known best for her poetry and that poetic sensibility shines through on every page of her first novel, Bestiary. Filled with myth and allusion, in sentences crackling with lyric inventiveness, Chang explores three generations of Taiwanese-Americans, using the imagery of muck and filth to expose the unacknowledged beauty in otherness (trust me, it works). Employing a variety of styles and shifting POVs, there's nothing straightforward in Bestiary, but I was captivated by these characters and their lives; dazzled by the language. Just a stellar debut. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That's why she thinks we're compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

With scenes set in Taiwan, Arkansas, and California, Bestiary describes the evolution of a family that first came to the United States more or less as refugees (if I knew the history of Taiwan better, I'd better understand the forces that led them to flee their homeland), but even the third generation (“Daughter” and her brother, who were born in the States) seem no closer to being fully accepted by their fellow Americans than their parents and grandparents. There are scenes of racism (even within the family, as both the mother and the grandmother regret having married men from “the mainland”; with the grandmother, it's even unclear just how consensual her relationship was with this PTSD-afflicted former Chinese soldier), domestic violence, and crushing poverty. On the positive side, there are also the treasured passing down of Taiwanese myth and legends, moments of loving family connection, and when Daughter's friendship with fellow Asian student, Ben (a girl), blossoms into romance, the connection is deep and redemptive. And throughout, we read the myths and witness fabulous events that temper gritty realism with magical realism and I was strongly reminded of both Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater and fellow Taiwanese writer Miny-Yi Wu's The Man with the Compound Eyes.

I'm not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you're sweating so much? Because you're sick? It's the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you've pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart's a fish. If you open your mouth, it'll swim out of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive.

The meat of this immigrant story was very interesting to me, but it's Chang's poetic sense that most dazzled. I could have excerpted something from just about every page, so the many following examples I've chosen should be seen as restraint (lol). Some imagery that hooked me:

• Only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist-smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth.

• She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade.

• She told me she was blowing boys in the woods. And for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees.

Chang describes the sun or the moon or the sky at the opening of most scenes and it fascinated me to see how often she metaphorically tied the heavenly realm to the baseness of human corporeality:

• The night bruised its kneecap moon.

• Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it's given birth.

• It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue.

• Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat.

• The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum.

• It's summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks.

Characters become infected by nature (a girl can grow a tiger tale, be impregnated by rivers, swallow a sandstorm) and the natural world develops human characteristics (holes dug in the yard become mouths, eating offerings and regurgitating letters from afar), and while poverty, racism, and domestic chaos all threaten to alienate Daughter and Ben from those around them, when these teenage girls find each other, it makes for a very sweet love story:

The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels.

The love scenes don't get much more graphic than that and I both appreciated that the poetic language elevated these scenes above base mechanics and also that their relationship is unquestioningly accepted by those around them; there are same-sex encounters in the historical myths and stories, too, and it's all just presented as a natural part of life. The nonstop flow of bodily fluids throughout Bestiary might be offputting to a reader, but again, it's all used in the service of lyricism and I simply found it all fascinating. Chang's is a unique and talented voice, and as she made me care deeply about her characters while educating me on their difficult, outsider lives – in strange and engaging language – I'd have to call this novel a success; maybe not for every reader, but it certainly worked for me.