Violence – considered as a disease – breaks out with riots in the tropics, and soon becomes a sweeping epidemic. To contain its spread, the city government urges people to reinforce their moral construction and eat raw garlic to control their anger; residents travelling back from the epidemic areas are denied entry into the city and quarantined at the airport; indignant crowds gather in the streets to demand that the “infected” travellers be euthanised immediately.
It is hard not to associate these bizarre scenes with what we have witnessed in the world under the shadow of COVID-19 in the tumultuous year of 2020, from massive anti-lockdown demonstrations to frenzied attacks on patients as “spreaders”. The prophetic descriptions above are taken from Chinese author Yan Ge’s novel, Strange Beasts of China, published in 2006 when she was just 21, with updated editions in 2012 and 2018. The English version, translated by New York-based Singaporean writer Jeremy Tiang, was published by Tilted Axis Press in November last year.
The dystopian aspect of the novel is not the only thing that attracts readers; the book remains a popular read over 10 years into its publication for its wild imagination and bold surrealism. It is an enchanting account of a number of fabled beasts and spirits living alongside humans in the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an – “eternal peace”. Some beasts are almost indistinguishable from people, some are ancient breeds, and others have been artificially engineered.
The narrator, a trainee cryptozoologist-turned-novelist, is assigned the task of studying the beasts and writing their stories for the city newspaper. As her work and her relationships with her former professor, a well-known zoologist, and his student sidekick Zhong Liang proceed, she becomes more involved in the world of beasts and discovers more about her own identity.
Each chapter of Strange Beasts introduces a new creature – the Sacrificial Beasts who can’t seem to stop dying; the Sorrowful Beasts who would surely die if they ever laughed; and the Heartsick Beasts, an artificial breed engineered by scientists to be as loyal and loving as possible, just to name a few. Each species has a story to tell, and as the narrator’s fame grows as a writer specializing in beasts, some beasts approach her to have their stories heard. Their stories are cruel and sometimes heartbreaking – of love and loneliness, betrayal and resistance, death and despair, and often indicate the ignominious role of humans, the dominating power in the city.
The nine species of beasts are recorded in a form combining descriptive traditions from Chinese myths and supernatural novels with some modern elements that make readers smile. For example, the Sorrowful Beasts are “mild in nature and shade-tolerant…with greenish skin around their navels”, and they “love cauliflower and green beans, vanilla ice cream and orange pudding; fear trains, bitter gourds and satellite television”.
The witty and whimsical tales reveal some ugly and hard truths about the marginalised and alienated creatures living in all corners of the city. As the narrator digs deeper into the origins and history of the beasts, it becomes clear that humans and beasts may not be as different as first appears: “My mother used to tell me, ‘You can’t be sure that beasts aren’t people, or that people aren’t just another type of beast.’” The line between human and beast is indeed blurred.
Yan Ge’s language is daring, experimental and imaginative, and she praises Jeremy Tiang’s English translation as “accurate, articulate with musicality” and even “better” than her original. For instance, the sombreness and desolation of the story are illustrated perfectly in the last chapter, The Returning Beasts, when the mystery about the narrator’s identity is unravelled: “In bars like this, on nights like this, the people of Yong’an would talk about death. Death began sprouting in every baby’s body and took a human’s lifetime to reach maturity. By the time it flowered, all its energy was spent.”
This thought-provoking work has proved its enduring appeal in China and is now available to an English readership too. Soon it is expected to reach a larger audience with a TV adaptation on the way. But according to Yan Ge, there was a certain level of intervention from the censors and major changes had to be made in order to get the license. Perhaps not surprisingly, the city government in the story, as the overwhelming authority, is depicted as a corporation for the TV adaptation instead. More ironically, all the beasts in the story had to be shown as some type of robots, since any interaction between humans and beasts, let alone romance, would be unethical, according to a directive from the propaganda ministry – yet another testament to the blurred boundaries between beasts and humans, fiction and reality.
《紀念品》
Strange Beasts of China
by Yan Ge
Tilted Axis Press
Translation Jeremy Tiang