18 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020MANY STORIES OFdiasporic families lead
from the heart, playing on the sentimental-
ity and nostalgia that so often define inter-
generational narratives in mainstream
Western literature. Immigrant experience
gets boiled down to its soft, misshapen cen-
ter, full of mushy but comforting ster-
eotypes that may be easier to digest but
miss the hard-edge truth of where our iden-
tities really come from, how they take form.
The poet K-Ming Chang’s debut novel,
“Bestiary,” offers up a different kind of nar-
rative, full of magic realism that reaches
down your throat, grabs hold of your guts
and forces a slow reckoning with what it
means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother,
a daughter — and all the things in between.
The book’s compendium of beasts, both
real and mythical, helps define and distin-
guish the histories and futures of three gen-
erations of Taiwanese women. Their
stories take shape in the body, in the things
we bury and the dirt we bury them in. “Be-
fore digging a hole, you need to know
whose hands you own,” Chang writes, un-
derlining the pulsating nature of what we
leave behind when we leave our land and
people. The living, breathing soil of family
and home is ever-present in “Bestiary,” as a
grandfather hides his gold in the ground
and his granddaughter digs holes in the
mud that unearth the stories of her aunts
and her mother.
All unnamed, mother, daughter and
grandmother are inextricably linked by the
fantastical beasts that birthed them and ul-
timately bind them together across oceans,
states and cities. The story of Hu Gu Po, a
tiger spirit who wishes to live inside the
body of a woman, but can only do so if she
eats children, becomes the central force in
the young daughter’s life. As she finds her-
self growing a tiger’s tail, she begins to real-
ize her own power, and how that power
leashes her to the generations of women
before her. The tail helps her see herself
both as her family’s protector and as a bur-geoning romantic conqueror. In both cases
she’s unsure of who ultimately wields her
newfound power: the woman or the tiger.
“Bestiary” floats in and out of fantasy,
layering its airy legends of imaginary crea-
tures with the grounding reality of build-
ing a life in a new country, of sever-
ing the ties with your past so you
can lay claim to a future you
can call your own. Children
inherit their parents’
trauma, settle the moral
score their parents have
racked up.
At the same time that it lays
bare the ground that shaped
this particular family, “Bestiary”
also paints a portrait of Taiwan-
ese identity, poking at the vari-
ous histories and horrors that
built the island and its citizens. A place
where “Ma doesn’t measure her life in
years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan
Creole in the indigo fields where she was
born... Japanese during the war, Man-
darin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each
language worn outside her body, clasped
around her throat like a collar.” From pi-
rates to soldiers and those who came be-
fore, the men who claimed Taiwan and thewomen who sustained it, the country’s evo-
lution is as much a part of the book’s col-
lection of beasts as is the tiger spirit.
And in retelling so many of Taiwan’s leg-
ends, Chang manages to create new ones,
filling pages with hopeful, queer love, from
lost pirates creating a crab daugh-
ter born from their passion, to
young girls hungrily discover-
ing sex and friendship in the
salt of their bodies.
Chang’s poetry lifts her
prose, creating a hybrid
voice that lends itself well to
the magic realism at play
throughout the novel even if it
becomes muddied at times, flit-
ting between the parsed lines of
myth and the frenzied lan-
guage of adolescence.
Despite occasional shakiness, the novel’s
portrait of motherhood stayed with me long
after I put it down. Maybe it’s because I de-
voured it while breastfeeding my weeks-
old baby, but in lines like, “I’m your mother... but you made me first. You needed me
first, and now I’m shaped like your thirst,” I
found myself compelled to consider what
truths I’ll leave buried for my own daugh-
ter. 0
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Three generations of Taiwanese women and the creatures they identify with.
By AMIL NIAZI
BESTIARY
By K-Ming Chang
259 pp. One World. $27.
ÁNGEL IS HAUNTEDby a terrible act: When
he was a soldier fighting in Peru’s civil war,
a woman begged him for help, but instead
of saving her he shot her and left her for
dead. Unlike his brother, Daniel, Ángel
can’t get out from under the shadow of his
country’s vexed history of violence. Rather
than starting a family and pursuing a ca-
reer, he sells pots and pans and spends his
evenings talking to a photograph of his
dead mother, or taking part in wrestling
matches that make his pain visible to oth-
ers through black eyes and bruises.
“The Wind Traveler” is the final novel in
Alonso Cueto’s so-called Redemption tril-
ogy, which began with “The Blue Hour”
(2005), one of the first Peruvian novels to
reflect on the brutal and often indiscrimi-
nate attacks by the Maoist guerrillas
known as the Shining Path and by the mili-
tary and the anti-insurgent militias it
trained. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission reported around 69,
deaths and disappearances between 1980
and 2000, though the killing didn’t end
there. Both “The Blue Hour” and Cueto’s
second Redemption novel, “The Pas-
senger,” feature characters who struggle
with the guilt and trauma of what they did
in the war.
This installment feels more like two nov-els. The larger part is rote exercise and
bald suspense. Within this, there is a more
nuanced, and thus more mesmerizing,
consideration of purpose and atonement,
but because it’s subsumed by Cueto’s flail-
ing prose and tiresome stereotypes, in the
end, it doesn’t amount to much.
The translators Frank Wynne and Jessie
Mendez Sayer haven’t lost anything here.
This is a story about a man’s veneration of
two women he wronged — the dead
mother he neglected in life, and the person
he shot — yet it offers not a single convinc-
ing female character, instead parading
around “enchantresses” and girls who
have “legs like a gazelle.” Women in this
novel are either “slim” or not pictured.
Ángel’s supposed horror of wartime
atrocities is expressed in sentences like:
“They had raped and murdered some of
the women. That’s just how things were.”
Machistalitanies of sexual assaults and
torture feel pat, flat and not in the spirit of
bearing witness, setting a record straight
or even probing the depths of the human
psyche in an effort to comprehend the sa-
dism of men toward women, as presented
throughout the book.
When a customer named Eliana, whom
Ángel believes to be the woman he shot,shows up one day at the store where he
works, his shock and subsequent quest to
persuade her to absolve him do not capti-
vate, nor do later revelations about her
own stance on their encounters, seen
through the lens of Ángel’s wishful think-
ing.
It is only during his three-year stint in
prison, where he lands after a run-in with a
shady character who hangs around Eliana,
that the reader gets a glimpse of the novel’s
point, as Ángel finds pleasure in the regu-
lar work of shoemaking and ceramics
workshops. Here, he has the peace of mind
to appreciate the passing days, his own po-
tential, the beauty of the world.
As soon as he is released, however, he
meets a gazelle: “Ángel was spellbound by
her slender neck. He suddenly imagined
someone appearing behind her to try and
slit her throat. He felt he needed to be there
to prevent such a thing from happening.”
The rationale for the coupling is never
called into question.
The dubious conclusions “The Wind
Traveler” draws are a far cry from the mor-
al solution it set as its task. It remains for
the reader to fathom the problem of guilt
and redemption — provided she’s slim
enough to do so. 0Facing Guilt
A novel about a former soldier struggling with his past.
By JENNIFER CROFT
THE WIND TRAVELER
By Alonso Cueto
Translated by Frank Wynne and
Jessie Mendez Sayer
232 pp. University of Texas Press. Paper,
$19.95.
JENNIFER CROFTis the author of “Homesick”
and the translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s
“Flights.”
CORNELIA LIAMIL NIAZIis a writer and producer whose
work has appeared in Hazlitt, Elle, Refinery
and Vice.
K-Ming ChangPHOTOGRAPH BY TRINA QUACH