When Anita cut her palm on the chain-link fence or bit herself in the forearm playing dog, playing dawn, she bled all the way home. Her bleeding was widespread. Once, when she cut herself picking windshield glass off the street, saying she was afraid the dogs would step on it or mistake it for sugar, her blood spread itself thin as steam, a red haze floating in the air for days. But I don’t even know what her other insides are shaped like, Rainie said, looking down at the table. Vivian said, Oh, I do. I go to the butcher’s all the time with Ayi, and the organ meats are always the cheapest. Have you had breakfast yet?
I really enjoyed K-Ming Chang’s previous works — the novel Bestiary and the short story collection Gods of Want — and especially because they were just so weird; combining Taiwanese mythology with the outsider SoCal queer immigrant child experience, the weirdness seemed the perfect way for Chang to capture that jarring outsider experience. Organ Meats continues in the same vein — with the maybe-more-than-friendship of two girls metaphorically tied together over time with the threads of their belief system — but whereas the previous books combined myth and magical realism to marvellous effect, this one stretches into full-on surrealism, and I found it challenging to follow. I continue to marvel at Chang’s imagination and bravura, but I didn’t feel very much for the story or the characters: like looking at a Dalí painting, I can recognise the skill without really liking the result; and while I might say that I didn’t really like this, I’m still rounding up to four stars and will read Chang again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
We swim in the thickest cut of shade under the sycamore, smoking a cigarette each, slobbering like the dogs we are. Dogs can see the dead — we come from generations of canines, some dogs and some not, so we know their ways, we still use our hind legs — and they aren’t as interested in the living as you think. And we see the two girls, Anita Hsia and Rainie Tsai, red threads knotted at the plum of their throats, sitting together on the blanched roots of the sycamore, and we know after this summer they will never see each other again, not as daughters and dogs, and that only one of them knows this, the smarter one, Rainie, though both their mothers are fools, naming their daughters after singers, one of whom died early, and we know exactly the kind of woman who names her daughter in front of a TV screen or while dancing in the dark to nothing, and Rainie at least is better at belonging to her loneliness, inhabiting it like a house, ornamenting it with narratives of how she came to live inside it, her mother at work, her brothers out all night snipping the ears off dogs, her best friend belonging to a sycamore tree.
Anita and Rainie are ten years old, and at Anita’s insistence, have knotted red threads around their throats in order to tie themselves together, like dogs, for life. They spend their time interacting with a group of woman-faced stray dogs that laze between the roots of a dying sycamore tree in an otherwise empty lot, and if the day gets too hot in their parched urban environment, the girls will take off their clothes and stretch out on the concrete floor of the pesticide-filled garage on Rainie’s side of the duplex their families share. Through stories from their mothers and interviews with the dogs, the girls (and the reader) learn where they (and the not-quite-canine) dogs came from, and with pages filled with banana ghosts, pearls, feces, and red thread, a messy history and a mythology are invented for this pair. But when Rainie’s family moves away — mostly to get away from her friend’s strange influence — Anita loses herself in that mythology, and it will take Rainie a decade to follow the thread back to her lost friend.
As with her previous works, I enjoyed Chang’s strange metaphors in Organ Meats, as with: They tried to cut the thicket of hair off her skull, though the blade bent against her strands. Her hair had the tensile strength of time. and The moon dragged its tassels of light, licking the windows bright. But, as I wrote above, this stretches into surrealism and I was never quite sure what I was meant to take literally, as in:
Look, Abu said, scraping at the plaster walls of our house with her nails. Beneath the first layer was flesh. The wall licked her hand and gloved it in slobber. I pressed my hand to the opposite wall and felt it pulse and flex like a belly, and beneath it I could feel the snaking of intestines and the drumbeat of a tongue as the house swallowed and swallowed around us. One day when the plaster collapses like a broken wing and the wood beams rescind into the dirt, the house will finally succeed in digesting us, returning to its first life, lifting our beds like tongues and drooling all over our bones until we glow.
And I found the surrealism distancing: I don’t really understand what happened to Anita after Rainie left (what is written could be a metaphor for just about anything), and as the friendship seemed less important to Rainie, her return a decade later didn’t provide any emotional catharsis to me:
What she felt for Anita ran through the ground, beneath her feet, like those dogs racing on the underside of the pavement, erupting through a rain puddle. She wanted all the miracles of being near her. All the births she beckoned. I’ve chosen, was all Rainie said.
And yet: the banana ghosts and the woman-faced dogs and the bunks full of oyster shuckers on the underside of the home island give a sense of the pressures faced by Taiwanese women that might be hard to convey in a straightforward narrative, and I recognise the artistic skill that Chang has brought to bear here. I just wish that more happened on the page to make me understand and care about Anita and Rainie; I felt distanced and unconnected throughout. Still four stars.
