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  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  Bestiary

  “Epic and intimate at once, Bestiary brings myth to visceral life, showing what becomes of women and girls who carry tigers, birds, and fish within. K-Ming Chang’s talent exposes what is hidden inside us. She makes magic on the page.”

  —JULIA PHILIPS, author of the National Book Award finalist Disappearing Earth

  “In Bestiary, K-Ming Chang upturns earth and language in equal measure. Every page is percussive, hypnotizing, and maddeningly smart. I am stunned by the imaginative reach of this debut, the remarkable prose. Chang isn’t just a new voice in the landscape; she is building a new landscape entirely.”

  —T KIRA MADDEN, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

  “K-Ming Chang is ferociously talented, one of my favorite new writers. She understands the language of desire and secrecy. 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

  “[A] vivid, fabulist debut…The prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bestiary is crafted at the scale of epic poetry: origin stories that feel at once gravely older than their years, yet viscerally contemporary. Chang knows well that the life of a family—marriage, immigration, queer coming-of-age—can so often feel like a wild and tender myth, being spun and unspun by its members, again and again. These are fables I wish I’d had growing up.”

  —ELAINE CASTILLO, author of America Is Not the Heart

  “To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor. Hers is a dizzyingly imaginative, sharp-witted voice queering migration, adolescence, and questions of family and belonging in totally new and unexpected ways. Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!”

  —SHARLENE TEO, author of Ponti

  “Fierce and funny, full of magic and grit, Bestiary is the most searching exploration of love and belonging I’ve read in a long time. Family, immigrant, queer, magic realist—none of these tags can quite capture the energy of this startling novel, which is all of those things, yet somehow more. K-Ming Chang has created something truly remarkable.”

  —TASH AW, author of We, the Survivors

  “Told by many voices, Bestiary is a queer, transnational fairy tale whose irresistible heroine is a Taiwanese American baby dyke. Written in a prose style as inventive and astonishing as the story it tells, to read it is to enter a world where the female body possesses enormous power, where the borders between generations are porous and shifting. A worthy heir to Maxine Hong Kingston, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Jamaica Kincaid, K-Ming Chang is a woman warrior for the twenty-first century—part oracle, part witness, all heart.”

  —JENNIFER TSENG, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

  “This book astounded me, unsettled me, and left me envious of K-Ming Chang’s talent. Bestiary is a gleaming, meticulously crafted gem. I could spend all day marveling at Chang’s prose; these are sentences you want to climb inside, relish, and read again and again just for the pleasure of the language.”

  —JESSICA J. LEE, author of Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest

  Bestiary is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by K-Ming Chang

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Chang, K-Ming, author.

  Title: Bestiary : a novel / by K-Ming Chang.

  Description: First edition. | New York : One World, [2020] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019040853 (print) | LCCN 2019040854 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593132586 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593132609 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H35733 B47 2020 (print) | LCC PS3603.H35733 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019040853

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019040854

  Ebook ISBN 9780593132609

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Frontispiece illustration: istock.com/shuoshu

  Book design by Andrea Lau, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Michael Morris

  Cover images: Private Collection © Cristina Rodriguez/Bridgeman Images, soleil420/Getty Images, GB_Art/Getty Images (girl); Private Collection De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images, Julia August/Getty Images (goose); Anna Lukin/Getty Images, tigerstrawberry/Getty Images (bones); Yuliya Derbisheva/Getty Images, Khaneeros/Getty Images (envelopes)

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Mother: Journey to the West (I)

  Daughter: Hu Gu Po (I)

  Daughter: Girl in Gourd

  Daughter: Hu Gu Po (II)

  Daughter: Hu Gu Po (III)

  Daughter: Hu Gu Po (IV)

  Daughter: Bestiary

  Daughter: Birthdate

  Daughter: Back to Ben

  Grandmother: Letter I: In Which the River Is Not Responsible

  Daughter: Mazu

  Grandmother: Letter II: In Which the Clouds Are Eaten

  Daughter: Parable of the Pirate

  Grandmother: Letter III: In Which a Knot Is Tied

  Grandmother: Letter [ ]: In Which I Am the Driver

  Mother: Journey to the West (II)

  Daughter: Back to Ben

  Grandmother: Letter V: In Which I Name You

  Mother: Rabbit Moon (I)

  Daughter: Rabbit Moon (II)

  Daughter: Birdbirth

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “The name of the river is what it says.”

  —Li-Young Lee

  “There is a lot of detailed doubt here.”

  —Maxine Hong Kingston

  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 som
eday 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’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body.

  Ba says he’ll find the gold soon. Ma beats him again, this time with a pair of high heels (also a gift from the church wives). Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost.

  The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly.

  In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

  After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba.

  I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat.

  When Ma married him, he was twenty years older. Take the number of years you’ve lived outside of my body and plant them like seeds, growing twice as many: that’s the thicket of years between your grandmother and grandfather. Except Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields where she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar. Once, Ba asked her to teach him to write the Tayal alphabet she learned from the missionaries. But she said his hands were not meant to write: They were welded for war, good only for gripping guns and his own dick. Jie thought this was funny, but I didn’t laugh. I have those hands. When you were born, I saw too much of your grandfather in you: rhyming hairlines and fish-hook fingers, the kind that snag on my hair, my shadow, the sky. You made a moon-sized fist at every man, even your own brother, who tried to bury you in a pot of soil and grow you back as a tree. You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.

  Decades ago in Yilan, Ba shat out his last bar of gold, along with a sash of seawater and silt. He buried it here, in this yard we never owned and that you were born far from. Ma liked Arkansas because it sounded like Ark, as in Noah’s. All of Ma’s words are from the Bible. Most are single-syllable: Job, Ark, Lot, Wife, Smite.

  The only way we’ll find the gold is if we shoot Ba’s skull open, extract the memory of where he buried it. Ma tried it once. She pointed the shotgun at Ba’s head and stomped the floorboards while saying Bang, believing the memory would evacuate from his head. Instead, Ba wet himself and Jie had to mop the floor with a dress. Apparently Ba needs a war to motivate him. Ba won’t unbury anything unless there’s a boat to be bought and married. We have a week to hire a war to come to our house. Or else, Ma says, the gold will stay buried and we’ll have fed all we own to the trees that grow moss like pubic hair.

  Jie suggests we hang Ba by his feet, upside down, so that all his memories flee upstream and pool in his skull. We’d have to unscrew his head somehow. I tell her it doesn’t work that way, but Jie’s been taking anatomy lessons at the high school ten miles away, meaning she knows how to diagram a body, meaning she’s drawn me a penis with veins and everything, shown me a hole or two it could go in. She pulls down her pants so I can see. I ask her to show me where all my holes lead to, and she says if I dig into the dark between my legs, I’ll find a baby waiting to be plucked like a turnip. (Don’t worry, I didn’t scavenge for you. You were conceived the carnivore way.)

  Ma shaves soft wood from our birch tree and skunk-sprays the strips with perfume to make incense, burning it in bunches. The smoke keeps mosquitos from marrying all our blood.

  We pray to god and Guanyin, in that order. Pray for Ba’s gold to fall as rain or grow a hundred limbs and shudder out of the soil like metallic shrubbery.

  We consider other strategies: If we borrow a bulldozer, we can flip the whole yard like a penny. But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body.

  * * *

  _

  By the creek, Jie teaches me to read out of the Bible. We sit under a grove of trees belled with apples. The branches applaud in the wind and drop what they hold, concussing us with fist-hard fruit. Last week, rain rutted a hole in our roof and everything flooded, so we’re drying the Bible on a tree branch, its pages flapping like moths. I can pronounce only easy words, no proper names, no verbs. Jie says fluency is forgetting. Says I’ve got to un-name my mouth and crack my tongue like a whip. When I pronounce the word tongue with two syllables, Jie pushes me facedown into the mud.

  When I get up from the riverbank, I swallow the mud of my tongue. Jie says she once saw two girl ghosts kissing in the creek. I mishear her and think she means they were cleaning the creek. Why? I say. Jie says, Because a god made them want but didn’t give them a word for it. I think Ma is made that way too, unable to name her need.

  Jie and I climb the trees and pretend to be monkeys, swinging to steal the neighbor’s apricots like we’re Sun Wukong thieving a peach of immortality from the garden of gods. He was punished for this, but we can’t remember what the punishment was, so we swallow our apricots whole and without mercy. We shit the pits out, and they rattle the pipes of our toilet when we flush. Ma can’t stand us dirty when we come in from the yard, but she’s the kind who calls the sky a stain, who tries to bleach a bruise.

  Two months ago the church people got a toilet installed for us. When we first used it, we squatted on top with our feet on the seat. It was Jie who told us we were doing it wrong: Our asses were supposed to go inside the halo. Don’t laugh—there was a time you didn’t know how to do this either, when I told you that the toilet is an ear that the sea hears through, and even now I sometimes see you with your head inside the bowl, conversing with another country.

  * * *

  _

  A boy at the Old Colonial Diner teaches Jie how to make a metal detector out of a radio, a broomstick, cardboard, copper wire. I won’t tell you all the
details, in case you try to build one yourself. In return for the lesson, Jie lets him finger her in the back of the diner. Jie washes dishes at the sink while he stands behind, three of his fingers spidering around inside her. His nails snag on her pubic hair and she hisses, twists the faucet hotter, scalds off her calluses.

  We use the metal detector in the yard behind the house to search for the gold. Jie holds the broomstick and I hold the radio. The copper wire wraps around both ends of the broomstick and the radio is taped to one end, the hair-clump of extra wire dragging on the ground like a tail. Jie switches the radio to AM and the morning news sounds like someone getting strangled, all static, a sound like the sea muffled inside our mouths.

  We discipline the dirt. Rake into rows and follow along. I warm the radio on my skin while it announces the weather: the sky cussing rain at us in the afternoon, more rain tomorrow morning. Jie skims the soil with the broomstick, sweeping its splintered end in half-circles, shushing me even though I’m not talking. When we’re near metal, the radio will whine with another voice, a song in gold’s frequency. I hear nothing until the static sours into something higher and raspier, almost Ma’s voice. Jie says, Dig here. We’re on a square of land where shadows don’t seem to survive. We dig with our bare hands, but we’re only a fist deep when we find an old lawnmower blade. The radio sings in three more spots, but the quicker we dig, the sooner we surrender to our suspicions: that the gold’s gone. In its place: five spent bullets, a dog whistle, a saw blade, some pennies, a bike chain, a whisk, a blank dog tag. The bullets glisten like dog eyes and my toes remember when they were shot, their ache outdated and residing in my spine.