Bestiary Poetically Raises a Coming-of-Age Tale to the Level of Myth

K-Ming Chang’s debut novel is about the echoes of yesterday butting heads with the realities of today.

BestiaryAt 22 years old, K-Ming Chang writes with a wisdom well beyond her years. With her debut novel, Bestiary, she charts her characters’ experiences in a world defined by myth, beauty, and pain. Chang, a poet and Kundiman Fellow, has been anthologized in publications like The Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and her prose doesn’t fall far from the poetic tree. That’s very much evident in her intense focus on language, use of blank space, and the visceral images that she conjures throughout the book. As she traces her characters’ lives, marked by poverty, abuse, immigration, war, queer love, and magic, we’re tasked with embracing myth and confronting certain hard truths.

One legend that Chang incorporates into her story is that of Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit who takes the form of a woman and munches on children’s toes. After hearing the story, Daughter awakes the next day with the tail of a tiger growing from the scab on her lower spine—a reminder of the abuse that she suffers. From here, a world of magic intertwines with these characters’ stark lives: a brother who flies away from his father’s fists; a grandfather who gives birth to a rabbit; an aunt whose touch turns everything blood red.

Then there are the holes that Daughter digs in her family’s yard that spit out handwritten notes from her grandmother, Ama. Along with Ben, a neighborhood girl who Daughter falls in love with, the pair spend their days translating these notes. Slowly, the history of Daughter’s family begins to unravel as Ama’s letters reveal more and more about their past in Taiwan and their immigration to America, a past that Daughter wasn’t there to witness. Daughter becomes the connection between her grandmother and mother, the translator of these histories, myths, and symbols—the bearer of dark secrets she must choose to either act on or relive.

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As Bestiary untangles a complicated family lineage, the influence of Maxine Hong Kingston is felt. Indeed, Chang’s combination of folklore, mythology, family history with the experience of assimilating to a new culture is a nice nod to Kingston’s most famous works. An easy comparison to make, yes, but that isn’t to say Chang is a copycat, only that she uses similar tools to effectively tell her own story. Her experience as a poet is ever-present in the novel’s prose—in how shockingly perfect her line breaks are, how every simile forces you to pause for a moment, how she uses tools like blank space in Ama’s letters to develop character and voice. The reader can sense every stutter on the page, every instance where translation is lost.

It’s as a modern story of American assimilation, queer love, and coming of age that Bestiary is most resonant. From working in chicken coops to sharing a bed with your mother and brother, the novel is also about an immigrant family’s struggle to survive, to find a better life than the one left behind in another country. The family may use myth and magic to explain their surroundings, but they cannot escape the reality of poverty, of a mother needing to clean feet at a nail salon and a father sending checks from the mainland so they can pay their rent.

Chang’s mix of the real and the surreal allows for a sense of hope—a world where boys can fly off rooftops and girls can grow tiger tails to defend themselves—while also presenting a vivid story of abuse and assimilation within one’s family, and within the larger scope of one’s country. Bestiary is about the echoes of yesterday butting heads with the realities of today, and the work of a young writer whose stories I hope will continue to grab us in the years to come.

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K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary is available on September 29 from One World.

Alex Eaker

Alex Eaker has his MFA from the College of Charleston. His writing can be found in SmokeLong Quarterly, Eclectica Magazine, and The Esthetic Apostle.

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