Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

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  In my version, Meng Jiang Nu marries another tree. This other tree is a daughter like her, with branches too soft to be switches, a trunk holed into nests. The tree is marrowed like bone. The story silvers into a mirror: One day, while stretching her roots under the soil, Meng Jiang Nu butts into the roots of another tree without a shadow—a bone-tree—and the two are married through friction. By striking their branches against each other, they invent fire. Unlike Meng Jiang Nu, the bone-tree eventually outgrows her soil, her roots forking into human feet, her fruit ripening into a face. The bone-tree dresses as a boy and becomes a gardener, guarding Meng Jiang Nu with a pair of silver shears.

  Late in the empire, the bone-tree is drafted to build the Great Wall. The Wall contains so many corpses—so many men dead of exhaustion—that it can be built through the night. Bone is a source of light. When the bone-tree dies working on the Wall in midwinter, her bones are so cold they shatter into sugar. The next worker in line paves over her body and moves on, builds the next rung of the Wall’s spine.

  When the bone-tree doesn’t come home, Meng Jiang Nu decides to walk north to her wife, all the way to the Wall. She uproots herself and brings two bladder-bottles of water and a flint. By the time she reaches the north, it’s already the next winter, her eyes frozen to fruit pits in their sockets: She can only look ahead. She reaches the campfires lining the base of the wall. To keep warm, men sleep inside scooped-out horse carcasses, wearing their entrails as scarves.

  Meng Jiang Nu searches a thousand miles of camps, opens the belly flaps of each horse pregnant with a man. In my mother’s version of the story, Meng Jiang Nu weeps so hard the Wall collapses, and another generation must donate its bones to rebuild it. Her river unravels the spines of cities and drowns a million men, each body pickled in her salt. The river rinses out her wife’s skull. The skull bobs down the river. She fishes it out, brings it to her lips. For the rest of her life, she drinks from it. For the rest of her life, the army hunts her from city to city, this woman whose grief has the strength of gods. Who can kill a whole country by weaponizing the water in her body.

  DAUGHTER

  Hu Gu Po (II)

  A week before I woke with a tail, my mother was outside in the front yard, arguing with the new neighbor about his encroaching eucalyptus tree. Its shadow bruised the side of our house all eggplant-black. Its sap ran fast as a nosebleed and hardened into shards of gold glass on our driveway. This was the first house I’d ever lived in—we’d moved in after my father left for the mainland, sending him the key inside a bubble-wrapped package, along with an assortment of my latest-lost baby teeth. The house had smoke-scarred windows and a balding lawn and squirrels that died in its walls and attracted funerals of flies. Our rent was paid in envelopes of cash my father sent back from the mainland. Every hinge in the house was loose and our doors fell out with the frequency of baby teeth. At night, we nailed our windows shut to keep them from panting open in the dry heat. The only grocery store in the city was so dim inside you had to bring a flashlight. Hundreds of advertisements and posters were taped to the windows so that no light was let in: The store was barricaded by the faces of missing daughters and posters of local psychics promising to predict CA lottery numbers. Coupons fled in flocks from the parking lot, offering discounts on pipa gao and tuoxie and dried tongue-looking meats that my brother and I licked and put back in the bin, disappointed that they didn’t make a sound in our mouths.

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  My mother chose this city because it was a drivable distance to LA and Agong, but still far north enough from Ama that they spoke only on the phone:

  Today my mother pointed at the chasms in our concrete driveway, flooding with rare rain from the week before. She threw her wire hairbrush at the neighbor, and when he didn’t turn from his mailbox, she said: Look at these! The roots of your tree are canyoning me! The neighbor swore at her in Sichuanese, a dialect that sounded to me like ducks being deboned alive. Don’t be so racist, my brother said. It’s not racist if he’s a mainlander, I said.

  My mother’s dislike of mainlanders was medical: She claimed to develop a rash or lose a tooth every time she spoke to one. She rubbed my thumb against her silver fillings and said, This is what you get from kissing a mainlander, from marrying one. Remember: This hole in my tooth is the one you were born through. I said, But Agong was born a mainlander, and my mother said, Agong doesn’t even know he’s been born.

  Our mother’s teeth were brittle with lies. She earned all her cavities not from kissing our father but from working night shifts at a Baskin-Robbins when she was new in LA, back when she ate ice cream every night for dinner. We didn’t blame our mother for her lies: We loved them into littler truths. For instance, she was not the last granddaughter of a Tayal chief but descended from lower-ranked warriors, born with a shark’s tooth under her tongue. Another one: Our mother once ran from an entire army, climbing a tree so soft-boned that it collapsed, shish-kababing two soldiers and ending martial law on the island forever. The part about the tree is true at least. Her wrist wears a scar like a bracelet, where the bones battled out of her skin. She imagined the soldiers skewered and strung, her injuries dormant inside their bodies.

  My mother said, It’s like martial law on this goddamn street, when the mainlander moved in next door. He was a renter like us, but he paid his rent on time, while my mother spent whole months writing excuse notes: My husband is working on the mainland and the money was swallowed at sea. My husband is a raccoon and currently unemployed. My husband is a pilot and we plan to set the roof on fire to signal him home. Our Russian-speaking landlord survived an army too and gave us extensions out of sympathy. She and my mother traded stories as a truce, stories gouged of their truths. About husbands that grew trees to hang their mothers from. About soldiers with striped uniforms, dizzying the enemy to death. I like Chinese people. I love China, the landlord told us monthly, as if to assure herself we were worth the stories we’d sold her.

  Nicknaming our neighbor Duck Uncle, my brother and I made quacking sounds with our armpits whenever he spoke. When my mother threatened to hang raw meat from the branches of the tree to attract raccoons and coyotes and flies to his yard, Duck Uncle retaliated by stealing the knob off our front door, coaxing pigeons into our home, dressing a rake like a woman and staking her in the lawn, impersonating our ghosts. When they fought, they leaned toward each other at the same angle, their shadows braiding on the sidewalk. My mother slowed her words, mocking the make of his mouth. Don’t touch my house, she said. It’s not even yours, he said, and she retaliated by filling my brother with cans of Pepsi and Hong Van and paying him a quarter to pee somewhere on Duck Uncle’s property, somewhere he’d see. When Duck Uncle accused her of deploying my brother, she told him it was a dog that did it. Must have been a smart dog, Duck Uncle said, because it peed its initials on my door.

  In the morning, my mother felled the tree with a single wire and her will, standing for hours in the sun while she sawed the wire through the trunk. She’d threatened Duck Uncle with a bent screwdriver until he retreated into his house and locked the door. Crossing over into Duck Uncle’s front yard, she began flossing down the tree. By the time the landlord came, the tree was broken in the middle like a bone. We were asked to move again, to pay for all damages to plant life. In the end, it was Duck Uncle who spoke to the landlord for hours. Afterward, we were allowed to stay. What did you say? I asked him. We stood in his front yard with the tree stump between us, wet and scabbed like a sore. Duck Uncle was the tallest man I’d ever seen, a man whose body doubled as his own building.

  I called her a racist and told her that cutting down trees is a cultural thing, he said.

  What’s a “cultural thing”? I said.

  Like a funeral or a wedding, he said. Like you.

  This was how my mother came to thank Duck Uncle for keeping us in a house we couldn’t aff
ord: My mother had seen him bury a key under the bush by his front door, so she knuckled into the soil, uprooting the key like a seed. With her fingers wet, she unlocked his front door and found his room, doorless with a skin-thin curtain. Behind the curtain, Duck Uncle was changing into his work clothes—a suit vest embroidered with his name—and my mother could map the whole city of his body. The wet street of his skin, the forehead greased into sky. Duck Uncle was not surprised to see her in his doorway: It was like looking at himself, like looking into water and seeing your own face stitched there.

  After that, we ate for free at Duck Uncle’s dim sum restaurant, which had a name so generic we never learned it. The food was so greasy it shot down our throats before we could swallow. My brother and I tried hating him, but Duck Uncle’s Sichuan accent was honky and high-pitched and made us laugh until our throats tied themselves into bows. He even promised to teach us to hunt ducks, cutting targets out of shoeboxes and letting us shoot them with his BB gun. My brother had the best aim out of the three of us, threading the pellet through the penciled-in eye. I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe.

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  In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying.

  Our mother bought us snorkel masks to wear outside, as if sipping air through a smaller opening would shrink the scent. We met after school in the backyard and drew holes in the dirt with our toes. The grass was a ghost of its former green, and most of it had been scalped away by the heat and our feet. In the grass we found trash that smelled recently deceased: soda can tabs, beer bottles with a piss-colored liquid living inside it. My brother said we probably wouldn’t find anything else, but I said the point was the hole itself. I’d learned that there were gases trapped in the soil wherever trash was buried, and if we didn’t dig holes for the ground to fart out its gas, this whole city would explode: Houses like knocked-out teeth. Blacktop rising as a crow flock.

  Tracing three more holes in the dirt, he asked me what color the gas was and I said, The same as our breath. That’s what made it lethal: Its taste camouflaged with our tongues. When it entered your lungs, it became a blade inside you. From the kitchen window, our mother watched as we plotted the rest of our holes. When we came in, she scrubbed us so raw we couldn’t sleep with the sheets on our skin. Still we kept digging, saving the city from its flatulent past.

  We dug with our hands and waited until evening when the smell of the landfill was only as bad as our breath. My brother kneeled first. He shaped his palms into bowls and flung fistfuls of soil onto a pile behind him. I kneeled to follow him, but my hands dawdled too long in the dirt. My brother was elbow-deep now and sleeved in soil, but I couldn’t go farther than a fist down. Spit on the ground to soften it, he said. I mimicked his mouth, spitting a syllable of saliva into the hole. My brother had learned to spit from my father: tongue recoiling in the mouth, flinging the spit like a whip. Our mother always slapped my brother for it. One time he’d spat in a temple, a coin of spit faceup on the prayer stool, and everybody had turned to look at it. Learn to swallow it, she said. She trained her throat to swallow twice an hour while she slept, and she sometimes wore a bandanna as a muzzle. We’d never seen her drool before, her pillow clean in the mornings.

  After we spat in the soil, digging felt too much like burrowing into each other’s mouths. We took a break to play with the Snake, the water hose christened by our father. Unspooling its length, we pretended it was alive, fat with blood and a spine. We dared each other to jump over its body, to touch its toothless mouth. We laced it around our necks and pretended we were being strangled. My mother told us never to turn on the Snake because we were in a drought: If we spent too much water we’d get fined. But we thought if water came from the sky it should be free. We socketed the Snake’s mouth into the holes and fed them water until they flooded. The soil boiled into a stew around our ankles. When the water was deep enough to hide a fist in, we danced in it. Grass spun like compass needles on the water.

  We let the water run until our mother was home. The Snake’s body was wiring water directly from the sea. We mistook our sweat for its salt. Laughing, we beckoned our mother out of the screen door and into the yard, her feet lighting the water like fish. She stepped into one of our holes and whipped forward into the water, landing on her belly. The mud made a fist and dove down her throat. She thrashed like something stolen from the deep and released into the shallows, gasping through the gill-slit of her mouth. We laughed, thinking she was performing as a fish. She wanted us to hook our fingers into her mouth and tug her free of the mud. Her limbs slashed the water, scarring its surface. When the water backlashed against her face, her chest, we realized she was drowning. Flipping her onto her back, we licked her face awake.

  She stood up, her lips pared back from her teeth. I thought she would spit at the both of us, breaking her own rule to dirty us. Taking my hand, she looked at the dirt loitering under my nails, the soil packed into the lines of my palm. She said I’d gone too deep: Digging was surgery and I’d forgotten to numb the body. Never bury anything, she said, unless you want the dead to spend it. She began to tell me a story about the time her father buried gold in their yard in Arkansas, but I told her this was different: We weren’t burying anything. We were doing the opposite: birthing. She stared out at the yard, the soup of our labor, the holes gulping water and breeding more of their mouths. I knew what she was reaching for before I could rename it: My brother and I had seen our father make the same movement, the Snake’s throat necklaced by his hands.

  My mother swung the Snake. I dodged its tin mouth, hot and hissing. She was the only one who could bring the Snake to life, loaning it her blood. The Snake missed my buttocks and rang against my shoulder-bone. My father liked to begin softly until our skins adjusted, and then he flung the Snake around like light, aiming to land on everything. If our father treated pain like a plural, our mother was singular. Where is she? my brother and I used to ask when she beached inside herself and didn’t speak for hours, shoring somewhere she didn’t know us. In a memory, I said. In another life, something had warned her away from water, and we had disbelieved her, filling the yard and reminding her lungs of their holes.

  When the Snake reared its head and bit my lower back, above the crack of my ass, I went down on my knees. My brother was somewhere in the mud playing dead, pretending to be a belly-up fish.

  She whipped the Snake through the air, lassoing it around the sun before lashing my back. Hunching to make a bunker of my bones, I prayed to swap skins with the water I stood in. She called me by her own name, beat herself out of me. I knew the words to arrest her hands: When I called her Ama, the Snake stopped flexing its spine. Its silver mouth had flung off and become the sun somewhere. Ama, I said again. My mother dropped the Snake and said, That isn’t me. I said, IknowIknowIknow. Snaking my arms around her waist, I beached my lips on her belly button, kissed her hard as a fist. Named her my prey.

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  After she fed me to the Snake, there was a scab above my butt cheeks where the Snake’s silver head nipped me. When I shoved the scab aside with my fingernails, there was a hole beneath, deep as my finger and bloodless as a glove socket. I slid my forefinger in, trying to diagnose what kind of hole it was. I named every hole-species I
knew: wells; wombs; wounds; spots in the wall where my brother stuck his pencil through, thinking the walls would scab on their own, and when they didn’t, he sealed them with his boogers and let them petrify into stone; lakes; seas, which meant most of the world was a hole, which meant I was native to holes, animal burrows, anuses, atlases. Twirling my finger inside the hole above my ass, I decided that it must be the beginning of a fault-line, a seismic shift of my spine.

  I considered telling my mother, but she always said holes were dangerous and led only to disappearance. They’re the number-one leading cause of loss. But I told her the holes in our yard were parallel to her throat, same depth and degree of darkness. Consider them a tribute to you, I said, the day after all the floodwater evaporated from the yard. But she watched them as if they were birth-holes, as if I were the midwife of some disaster. I watched her in the yard, checking them one by one like animal traps. When she began kicking soil back into the holes, I went outside to stop her, grabbing at her ankles.

  She wriggled her foot away, sat down hard on the soil, and said: Before digging a hole, you need to know whose hands you own. Your Ama, she said, has the stamina of a river when it comes to discipline. She said she’d tried to be the mud, what hems the river in, but she couldn’t redirect a woman like that.

  Remember, she said. I’m your mother, she said, but you made me first. You needed me first, and now I’m shaped like your thirst. Standing by the kitchen window and looking out at the holes with me, she said I should be prepared for when Ama comes in the night to eat our toes. Where will she come from? I said, and she pointed at the holes. I laughed and said no woman could fit through a hole that size. If Ama ever lumbered out like a tree, I said, we’d fell her together, cleave the woman from the tiger inside her. When I asked her for a practice axe, one I could learn to wield against Hu Gu Po, she refused. You’re my mother, I said, and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future.