Bestiary
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Average rating3.5
Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this blazing debut of one family's queer desires, violent impulses and buried secrets. One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. Her name was Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her estranged grandmother; a visiting aunt leaves red on everything she touches; a ghost bird shimmers in an ancient birdcage. All the while, Daughter is falling for a neighbourhood girl named Ben with mysterious stories of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies an old Taiwanese myth, and fears the power of the tiger spirit bristling within her to cause pain. She will have to bring her family's secrets to light in order to derail their destiny. 'What gives me fuel are other books - anything stylish and/or dirty. This year I loved reading K-Ming Chang's Bestiary' Raven Leilani, author of Luster
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It was very interesting to read this right after Transcendent Kingdom. Both novels deal with diasporic narratives, mother-daughter relationships, and (folk) religion. Curiously, they both recounted an anecdote based on the apparent myth that a mother bird will abandon her baby bird if she smells the scent of a strange human on it.
Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of a neuroscientist who strikes me as particularly cerebral and less attuned to her heart and spirit (perhaps at the root of her conflicts) - a perspective I appreciate and resonate with, although I think that could have been drawn out more in the story. I read a couple articles and interviews with K-Ming Chang, the author of Bestiary, who talks about how her stories are “completely embodied.” This contrast between embodiment and cerebral-ness is really interesting to me.
Bestiary is unusual in its angle on magical realism; the characters take the magic that manifests in their lives and is the main propelling force in the narrative for granted, even when it's bizarre or grisly, and often disgusting. I feel like this is a way of showing how they integrate their folk religious beliefs, which for me is a refreshing change from more commonly represented perspectives and experiences of religion or spiritual beliefs. At the same time, this focus made it challenging for me (a more cerebral type) to really understand the characters in Bestiary. A lot of the embodiment - the physicality, bodily functions, and sexual desire - was off-putting, and not relatable or even very recognizable to me.
Like the author, I am Taiwanese on my mother's side and mainland Chinese on my father's, so I very much appreciate reading a Taiwanese narrative that provides an Indigenous perspective and is not centered on the mainland.
This is probably one of the strangest books I've ever read, in a good way - but not for the faint-hearted.
Poetic, highly surreal, visceral, violent, explicit about everything bodily, shocking, but also very funny at the same time. I think (but could be wrong) a lot of the often gruesome violence has its origins in the Tayan (Taiwan's indigenous people) myths that pervade the storytelling.
So many mentions of piss..... I saw other reviews complain about it as well. I only made through 10 minutes of the audiobook and the talk of piss was already overwhelming. I quit a little after the narrator described following a piss trail...
“You were conceived the carnivore way.” This quote confused me so much. Can someone explain what it means?
