One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called 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 grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.
Unfortunately, this wasn't for me. K-Ming Chang's Bestiary is a diaspora novel permeated with magical realism and overflowing with folk tales. I was really entranced with the subject matter, but the language used was too much of a barrier; it was a constant flow of imagery that described bodily fluids, or compared things to bodily fluids, and it got to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore. The prose is very creative and poetic, but the imagery wasn't working for me. I don't want to say it should be sanitized, it was obviously a precise choice by the author.
The author also wrote that she "wanted to write a story about queerness not as a source of pain but as something that saves her [Daughter] life". The girl's relationship with Ben is a beacon of light in the darkness of the novel, which also features generational abuse and, in general, dark subject matters.
Bestiary is a queer tale of diaspora that had some really upsetting imagery.
✨ 3 stars
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