"Strange Beasts of China" by Yan Ge

[SFFBC, Ancillary Mod]

Buddy read for the Dozen Roses Game.

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[Anna]

Content warnings: (view spoiler)[ suicide, self harm, loss of loved ones, body horror, all kinds of murdery/genocidal violence towards groups and individuals, including children (hide spoiler)]

[Beth]

Has anyone else started this one yet? I'm close to 2/3 of the way through.

[Nicol]

I haven’t. But it’s next after I finish the book I’m currently reading so soon!

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

Christopher and I have both started and finished it.

Took me awhile to get into as I didn't quite like the short story nature of it to begin with but as we spent more time focusing on the life of the POV character it grew on me. I filled with dread when it declared that no one expects a short story to make sense. Assumed it meant we were going to embrace more alienating short stories of different Beasts, but it didn't play out that way.

Much of it went over my head as I struggled to understand what deeper story Yan Ge was telling, but I liked it nonetheless.

[Anna]

Ryan wrote: "Much of it went over my head as I struggled to understand what deeper story Yan Ge was telling, but I liked it nonetheless."

This sums up my feelings as well. I gave it 3.5 stars but couldn't quite bring myself to round up on GR, because I didn't get emotionally attached to anyone or thing.

It didn't feel at all like short stories to me, though, but I'm not scared of them, so maybe that's why :)

[Beth]

Ha, I'm not scared of short stories! :D I just don't like them very much because the shorter the piece is, the more likely it is to slip right out of my brain leaving nothing behind but a vague impression and no memory of either the title or the author's name.

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

With Sorrowful Beasts, Joyous Beasts, and Sacrificial Beasts I was struggling to put together a coherent story. Was getting annoyed that the Beasts weren't beastly enough and that I was possibly missing what they were meant to be representing. I still think I missed what they represented of our nonfictional world, but I'm okay with that.

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

And I'm with you, Beth. For me to like a short story it usually has to be part of a larger universe established in longer form.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

gonna put on my big girl PJ pants and go renew my library card so i can jump in!

[Christopher]

This was written as a serial with one chapter a month appearing in a magazine back in 2005 when the author was 21 years old then later combined into one volume and just recently translated to English.

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

That helps explain it.

[Beth]

I had a similar thought, Ryan. Our narrator's awfully flighty, careless, etc for somebody who's supposed to be well past her teens and even "an older woman" in some situations. Slap fight with her professor, shouting or collapsing whenever somebody tells her something surprising, spontaneously bursting into tears... so much vomiting... honestly I don't know where that last comes from.

[Anna]

The older woman thing was by seven months or so! :D

[Ryan, Your favourite moderators favourite moderator]

Yes, that's about how old girls have to be before we start demanding that they take responsibility for the men in their lives.

[Meredith]

I'm planning to read this, but I kicked off the new year by over-committing to a bunch of reads. This is still on my list for later in the month.

[Michelle]

LOL, Ryan!

[Beth]

Anna wrote: "The older woman thing was by seven months or so! :D"

I came across this in the book not long after my earlier post. My impression before that, was that she'd been a zoology undergrad for a time, quit, and from there had written a number of romance novels before her series on the beasts. At some point in there Liang would have started as an undergrad. She'd also bought her own condo apartment, so I'd placed her as somewhere in her mid-20s. But it does seem instead that she is a few years younger than that.

I just finished reading the book. My response is similar to Ryan's in message 5, and Anna's in message 6. My level of interest waxed and waned over the course of the book. By page 200 or so I was very ready for it to be over, but the last story did bring things together well. My favorites were Flourishing, Heartsick, and Returning.

This is more "literary" than my usual scrubby junk reading, and as a result I found myself straining to find metaphors or themes. A couple of potential ones: (view spoiler)[how we humans tend to anthropomorphize animals and/or mold them into images that please us (i.e. dog breeds); how identity is malleable and much of it depends on others around us, and when someone is suddenly gone we feel unmoored from reality (hide spoiler)]. After a while, either as I got more comfortable with the writing, or the author herself did (though knowing nothing about her aside from her age at the time of writing the stories, this isn't safe ground to stand on), the strain eased quite a bit and I was able to enjoy it more than approaching it like a school assignment.

I liked how the characters and settings sort of built themselves up as the stories went along. The Dolphin bar, the Zhongs, our narrator's cousin and niece, Charley, the underground city.

For me this was a great pick because I doubt I'd have landed on it on my own, and as mentioned above it's very different from my usual fare. It fits the remit of the "game" really well.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

I just finished Sorrowful Beasts. I listened like 4 times to try to grasp what it was telling me. And now I Clutch at you. What was it telling me??

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Spoiler for Sorrowful Beasts

(view spoiler)[ I have to think this is not a good translation. I think it was about two men being together, and what that would take? But I don't know why smiling was pain. I imagine this is word play or culturally significant in Chinese? (hide spoiler)]

[Christopher]

I'm sure that a lot of subtlety and allusion gets lost between translation and cultural references that wouldn't be picked up by a Western reader. For me, I just took what I could from the stories and treated them as a trip through a dream world where not everything needs to make sense or tie back to anything specific. Some of the stories stirred emotions without me being totally able to describe what was going on or why I felt that way.

[Christopher]

One example from an article I read at Arts Fuse by Maxwell Olin Massa: "For example, there is a character named Zhong Liang, whose father’s name is Zhong Kui. Outside of a passing comment in the text that this name is “lofty,” there is no indication that the moniker is revelatory. Zhong Kui is a figure in Chinese religion; he is a renowned demon killer. In a book about mythic creatures, readers should be informed that a character is named after a beast-slayer."

Stuff like that.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

I've just finished and I really want someone who knows Chinese and Chinese cultural touchstones to read it and talk about it. Going to look at the article Chris found, because I see lots of potential meaning, but I think a lot of it revolves around cultural references and wordplay which are two things very hard to translate.

Spoilers:

(view spoiler)[ I like the idea of exploring that we all have some monster and myth in us, and that none of us quite know just how or why we're here, but we accept it as normal. I thought there were strong allegorical hints--the rise of fascism, how to have zero crime, what "civilized" means. Horrified at how normal suicide was in the city. I know that this is an actual issue and wonder if this is sort of a reflection on beastliness and the connection to the underground city, sort of? (hide spoiler)]

[Rachel]

I’m still working through it but I don’t feel … like I understand these main characters