Bestiary

Chapter 1

Mother

Journey to the West (I)

Or: A Story of Warning for My Only Daughter

Moral: Don t Bury Anything.

Ba doesn t know where he buried the gold. Ma chases him around and beats him with her soup ladle. You ve never been to a funeral, but this is what it looks like: four of us in the backyard, digging where our shadows have died. A shovel for Ba, a soup ladle for Ma, a spoon for me and Jie to share. We dig with what we don t want piss buckets, a stolen plunger, the hands we pray with. We even use the spatulas gifted to us by the church ladies, after their days-long debate about whether Orientals even used spatulas. It was decided that we didn t but that we should. Hence our collection of spatulas, different sizes and metals and colors. Ma mistook them for flyswatters. She used them to spank us, selecting a spatula based on the severity of our crime. Be glad I use only my two hands on you.

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won t come and rescue you.

You ve never been to this year, so let me live it for you: 1980 lasts as long as it rains. It rains the Arkansas way, riddling the ground like gunfire. Years after this story, you re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss. You ask why your grandfather once buried his gold and forgot about it, and I say his skull is full of snakes instead of brains. He s all sold out of memories. One time, he pees all over the yard and we follow his piss-streams through the soil. Pray they convene at the gold s gravesite. The gold in his bladder will guide us toward its buried kin. But his piss-river runs straight into the house and floods it with fermented sunlight.

When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don t sweeten tea. Don

K-Ming Chang was born in the year of the tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist in poetry. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York.

Full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter and all the things in between. The New York Times Book Review

Bestiary blurs the lines between humans and animals, exploring the stories we tell about ourselves to survive. The Wall Street Journal
 
Chang's facility for making even mundane or traumatic events beautiful with words is a reminder that stories are, among other things, some of our very best survival tools. NPR
 
Bestiary bursts open like delicious fruit. . . . Her lyrical imagery promises a better future, and Bestiary promises more great work to come from K-Ming Chang. Los Angeles Times

Young queer love, family secrets, and a girl who grows a tiger tail, all told by a language obsessive? Extremely sold. LitHub

K-Ming Chang, an extremely talented young Taiwanese-American author, offers a wild portrait of three generations of women who have in them tigers, snakes, and birds: the myths of their homeland. The Millions

Epic and intimate at once, Bestiary brings myth to visceral life. K-Ming Chang s talent exposes what is hidden inside us. She makes magic on the page. Julia Philips, author of Disappearing Earth

I didn t read this novel so much as become immersed in it, a jungle filled with surprises, countless moments of desire and pain and light. Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

Chang is ferociously talented, one of my favorite new writers. Here is a book so wise, so gripping, so mythical and dangerous, so infused with surreal beauty, it burns to be read, and read again. Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

Crafted at the scale of epic poetry . . . These are fables I wish I d had growing up.