Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.

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.

You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.

But there’s nothing inside him we can spend, not unless grief is a currency.

Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her.

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.

We didn’t blame our mother for her lies: We loved them into littler truths.

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?

My mother was ready for work before the sky chose a color to dress in.

When I asked why, he said that touch is territory. A hand is owned by what it holds. A hand is a whole country.

My second husband the soldier lives by the law of loss kill what you cannot carry marry what you cannot bury writing will wring lies from the white open a gate to our griefs. I have no need to grieve what I named

We brought Dayi to Costco. I told her it was the only place in the country where you could buy both your cradle and your casket. Your life span was the length of an aisle. Carts so big they looked like animal cages rattling across the concrete floor. I sat cross-legged in the cart and humped the bars until my mother told me to stop acting deranged. I said I was pretending to be a tiger in its cage.

he was just another accused Communist, that the police threw his body into a river with the shoelace still noosed around his neck, which is why no one in this family was allowed to wear anything with laces. You’ll summon his spirit through your shoes, my mother said.