Bestiary writes familial love-a mother’s love for her daughter-in a way that exposes a physicality and hunger that’s often only ascribed to erotic love between women.
K-Ming Chang’s writing of the relationships between women, from familial to the romantic and erotic, is a revelation. Bestiary is a retelling of the Hu Gu Po story from the tiger-woman’s perspective, a reclaiming of the perspective of the hungry, wild woman. Instead, hunger is shown to be part of womanhood. What feels bold and exciting about K-Ming Chang’s version, and Bestiary as a whole, is that there’s no external punishment for wild women or the wildness of Hu Gu Po. Hu Gu Po is an example of how a narrative can have many versions, how all stories need someone to question them, and how violence is as much a part of a woman’s inheritance as the ability to nurture. Hu Gu Po is the protagonist of a Taiwanese folktale about a tiger-spirit in a woman’s body who sneakily eats human toes like peanuts.
K-Ming Chang explores a fragmented linguistic and cultural history, both within and beyond Taiwan, in order to create a woman-centered, fabulist, and transgressive inheritance of stories. As Daughter falls in love with a girl called Ben and uncovers a queer, woman-centered family mythology, she reckons with the hunger, desire, violence, and nurture that constitute her own daily bodily existence, and the bodily existence of women more generally. She becomes connected to Hu Gu Po, a tiger-spirit who is the focus of one of Grandmother’s stories. The central plot of the novel begins in California when Daughter grows a tiger’s tail. Chang insistently reminds her readers of the porous nature of our bodies, questioning the division between the beautiful and the gross, the profound and the taboo. The novel pairs magical realist elements with a persistent emphasis on the mechanics of bodily existence. The novel blurs the distinction between story and history and creates new, provisional narratives of being. These three perspectives migrate across country borders, state lines, and languages. Three generations of women-Daughter, Mother, and Grandmother-push against the boundaries of the roles and mythologies they have inherited.
It’s a ferocious, passionate book that uncovers a queer, female lineage within the Taiwanese folklore tradition. K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary, is truly unique.
0 kommentar(er)
