Bestiary by K-Ming Chang

Bestiary by K-Ming Chang

• Publisher: One World, 2020
• Genre: Magical Realism, Literary Fiction
• Format: Paperback
• Page Count: 272 pages

Click on the cover for my review on Goodreads.

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Content warnings: cannibalism, animal abuse, animal killing, child abuse, miscarriage, suicide, blood, poison, gore, bestiality, PTSD, gun shot, on-page amputation

Throughout most of the read, I thought the gruesome imageries were the author’s attempt to make Bestiary a disturbing read. But when I was two-thirds in, I realized this isn’t just a Taiwanese American novel, but also a retelling of Tayal fables (Tayal are a Taiwanese indigenous people, 泰雅族), strung together with common themes, told in English but are really also in Chinese (mostly Mandarin, but Taiwanese sort of helps).

So I continued my reading as my eyes trailed the lines of English, my thoughts flipped to Mandarin and all the Tayal folklore I remembered and could find.

Then things started to make sense.

I still don’t understand most of the book, but I now see the intricacies Chang put between the lines, and it isn’t just the internal rhyming and play-on-words in English (e.g. daughter/slaughter), but more, far more. As a Taiwanese, I had thought I’d easily get the references but I didn’t. I thought long and hard before things slowly clicked into place, and I am writing down these details so you don’t have to fry your brain like I did mine. But then again, most of these are not mentioned in Bestiary and are merely my theories.

My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in.

In Tayal legends, there are four types of animals, the beasts, the humans, the snakes, and the birds. Throughout Bestiary, we see the cycle of consumption, the never-ending loop of deaths and rebirths, of ingesting excretions and excreting ingestions. The scenes and events are downright crude and revolting. Beasts, like tigers, like Hu Gu Po (虎姑婆) from Taiwanese folklore, are predators, eating and hunting for children’s toes as peanuts, which sounds like penis, and therefore leads to bodily fluids, excretions of humans. There is Ben (does it sound like root/本/běn?) with her shadow bird, and women who are snakes (白蛇精, literally “white snake demon”). The main animals were indeed tigers, humans, snakes, and birds (mainly geese). I originally thought the animals were all references to Zodiac signs, but goose isn’t one.

Excretions. Saliva (口水, kǒushǔi) is literally mouth water in Mandarin, and the mouth, the 口, is repeatedly mentioned in the story as a hole. And semen (精液, jīngyì), which, if we were to create a word for “whale liquid” would sound exactly the same. Hence the whales in the story, I think. Water, rain, sea, salt, sweat is one general theme. And the sky, the bruising sky, which meant the blue sky because bruise in Taiwanese is black-blue (烏青, oo-tshenn) and bruise-blue (瘀青, yūchīng) in Mandarin. The same character for blue (青, chīng) can be combined with the character fo sky (天, tiān) to mean sky (青天, chīngtiān) and so the sky is blue. The (controversial) national flag of Taiwan is described as “blue sky, white sun, red ground everywhere” (青天白日滿地紅). Red like blood, and white as in White Terror (see Taiwanese history of martial law period from 1949 to 1987), white snakes, and a hint of racism in the US. There are also political elements of the animosity between Taiwanese and Chinese. And why were there crabs in Bestiary? My theory is that crab (蟹, xiè) sounds exactly like flood and excretion (洩/瀉), and therefore water again, and the gruesomeness of piss and shit everywhere in the story.

The cycle of ingestion and excretion leads to cannibalism, and the story of filial piety involving slicing a piece of your thigh to feed and cure your sick parent (割股, gēgǔ) is actual Chinese history. So not only do we have cannibalism here, we also have the complex relationship between children and parents. In The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars (二十四孝), there is also tasting one’s parent’s feces to determine whether or not they are sick. Ingestion of excretion. Also, are you you when you were born from your (biological) parents’ flesh?

The Tayals believe that there once were two suns, and their warriors carried babies who grew up to be the men who tried to shoot down one sun. An arrow struck one of the suns and it bled lava. When it died, its corpse became the moon. And from this fable, we have the image of the sun and the moon, the living and the dead, a cycle that repeats itself, opposites with the same roots, and blood and that everything is alive.

According to the Seediq (賽德克族), a tribe of the Tayals, a god and a goddess (or were they siblings?) from a half-petrified tree trunk (note the polarity: half-living and half-dead of a tree) sired many children. Back then, cooking a tiny piece of a grain would produce a full pot of porridge, boiling a boar’s hair meant having a full pot of boar’s meat. How the parts breed wholes, like planting a seed and growing what you planted. I suppose this is what Chang meant, when in Bestiary, they wanted to plant human body parts in holes and water to grow people.

And then the contrasting ideas of whole and hole. There are a lot of holes in Bestiary—holes on human bodies, in bone marrows (like spine which is like rivers and the Great Walls of China), in the ground. Are they holes or are they what make things whole?

Writing this review and analysis makes my head feel like it’s exploding and spinning. The whole book is written with wordplay—wordplays between Mandarin and English, in-between English, in-between Mandarin, beyond languages and tongues, and based on Tayal folklore and the cycle of life and death, of consumption and creation. Note that I haven’t mentioned the queer elements in Bestiary. The characters are casually queer, with sapphic and achillean characters alike, and brief comments on countless genders and non-gendered pronouns in spoken Mandarin. I feel like queerness isn’t the main point of the book.

Bestiary is not an easy read. It is repulsive, mystic, and densely packed. It is a story that spans three generations of women, vicious and unbreakable cycles and ties of life, death, and everything in between.

Buddy read with Kes! Check out their review on Instagram here!

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