The book is propelled by the mystery of a daughter who grows a tiger tail, linking her to the myth of a carnivorous tiger spirit in a human body, who loves eating children's toes and calling them "peanuts" (a story that my mother told me growing up and that I found equal parts funny and tragic). I wanted to understand how trauma and history could be alchemized or told slant through mythology.
It explores three generations of a matriarchal Taiwanese-American family and their migrations and inherited traumas – it also attempts to subvert the static idea of a canonical “history” by allowing the women in the family to embody their stories. Here are some excerpts from my interview with One World about the book!īestiary is part coming-of-age and part mythological retelling (and part family saga?) I sometimes call it “speculative history” because it reimagines the past, and in doing so, attempts to redefine the future and all its possibilities. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.Īhhhh, the book is coming out soon!!! So, so terrified. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. 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. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own.
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. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family's queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.
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