The poet K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary offers up a different kind of narrative, 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.
Chang’s novel is like no other I have ever read. She reinvents the genres of immigrant novel, queer coming-of-age story, and mother-and-daughter tale at every level, from the use of myth to the reinvention of language, mixing dialects and Chinese characters with English ... None of these dilemmas is new, but the way Chang writes about them is revolutionary ... Chang does not shy away from graphic depictions of emotional and physical violence ... Chang’s greatest accomplishment in Bestiary may be that her artistry allows the reader to see her characters’ great resilience rather than merely their pain.
Violence is not one-dimensional in Bestiary; Chang doesn't excuse it, especially when it takes place between the family members, but she has her narrators contextualize it in their stories, reaching back through memories dressed up with myths to find the beauty that coexists with hurt and trauma ... Though Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter each endure traumas, they are storytellers, their words both plumbing and transcending their pain to weave a wide range of additional emotions and experiences. Their stories color their everyday lives with magic ... Chang's facility for making even mundane or traumatic events beautiful with words is a reminder that stories are, among other things, some of our very best survival tools.
... bursts open like delicious fruit on the edge of rot. Believe me when I say that’s a good thing ... You’ll never read another book filled with so much excrement and decay, at least until Chang writes her next ... The stories of Hu Gu Po and other Taiwanese mythology aren’t used winkingly here: Their physical manifestations are the novel’s reality. And they manage both to ground these women’s experiences in tradition and to help them take flight ... There’s nothing new about a queer coming-of-age narrative combined with a multigenerational account of family trauma...The list could go on. However, Chang not only ups the intersectional ante but also raises the stakes with vivid, earthy language ... as Chang opens up multiple perspectives, there are moments of relief and rest. This is not a book about abuse qua abuse, but about how abuse travels through a family, carried forward unto the next generation ... The daughter expresses that freedom in her love of a woman, Ben, who happens to come from Ningxia in mainland China. Expressing that love, she unleashes an exemplary flourish of symbolism, a showcase of the author at her supple best ... Her lyrical imagery promises a better future, and Bestiary promises more great work to come from K-Ming Chang.
... [Chang] creates her subversive and vivid voice with skilled poetic prose and fabulist framework ... a one-of-a-kind coming-of-age story. From one generation to the next, Chang masterfully illustrates a cycle of abuse. The weight of each family member’s choices and the pain that accompanies them are present on each character as they struggle to navigate their own paths. The novel blends mythology with queer love and the immigrant experience with stunning prose. Her writing is surprising and assertive, flowing seamlessly on the page.
... a visceral experience. Its prose is relentlessly, ruthlessly corporeal, and it is fearlessly beautiful ... the book deftly threads together three generations of women with each other, land, water, trauma, violence, and love ... True to the title of the book, the characters are steeped in their animalistic needs and desires, which feels like revealing a truth about human nature ... Chang goes all in on the sharp. She artfully, and with precision, breaks the reader open by taking the ideas of intergenerational inheritance and memory and literally grounding them. There’s nothing wistful about it ... Bestiary rejects binary categorization like poetry or prose, or magical realism. Instead, it creates its own landscape ... it is wonderful.
... suffused with lyricism, a multigenerational, mythological, and magical-realist retelling of one family’s fraught history ... By equating it with animal transformation, Chang portrays trauma as something corporeal, out in the open, no longer an enigmatic force inhabiting the dark of the mind. Its tangible effects in Bestiary are manifest; Chang’s prose assumes a crudeness that frequently and unabashedly presents bodily wounds, functions, and fluids as byproducts of a harrowing past. The generational pains depicted in Bestiary thus become fully embodied, impossible to ignore or explain away ... It is not only through the grotesque that Chang renders trauma as something profoundly visceral. Her prose is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the novel, never straying far from the lyric-poetic. Chang deconstructs language, fashioning verbs from nouns, rendering the earth a landscape for each narrator’s expression. Chang and the women of Bestiary sacrifice the stability of linguistic conventions to fully convey emotional truths. In this way, the novel lights a path to the reader’s understanding of each character’s wounds ... While Chang’s novel is an impressive display of language, Bestiary may wear on the poetically-uninitiated reader. The prose is incredibly ornate, and each page weighs heavy with elaborate images and abstractions ... While this steady extravagance may deter certain readers, it is also what makes Chang’s novel such a memorable debut. And for a story fundamentally about language—or the lack thereof—in the face of trauma, Bestiary’s unconventional and elaborate style provides a welcome sort of excess.
At 22 years old, K-Ming Chang writes with a wisdom well beyond her years ... 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 ... 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 ... Chang’s mix of the real and the surreal allows for a sense of hope 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.
From the beginning, the story is one of internalized violence ... the daughter navigates both the demands of her American community to assimilate and the need of her immigrant family to preserve the cultural memories of a place she has never known. The magic of these origin myths is very much present ... A visceral book that promises a major new literary voice.
...vivid, fabulist .. The narrative arc meanders through the characters’ various relationships, but 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.
Raw, angry, even sneering, Ama, Mother, and Daughter’s three-voiced narrative is often breathtaking ... The agile, abundant beauty of Chang’s phrasing, however, is not quite enough to mitigate the relentless abuse, dysfunction, and violence that permeates her debut ... stifling enough to potentially estrange less patient readers.
