Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don’t sweeten tea. Don’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body.

In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

She had to make sure my head was round enough to remember who loved me, sturdy enough to carry the stories she was going to crown me with.

I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay.

You’re my mother, I said, and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future. But who, she said, can prepare you for the past?

We got in trouble with the other teacher for never using plurals. When I said that Chinese words have no plural forms, she said, Then how do you know if it’s one thing or many? I said, One thing is always many.

you. That stretch of sheet where you’ve pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart’s a fish. If you open your mouth, it’ll swim out*23 of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive.