Bestiary

A young Taiwanese-American girl wakes one morning with a tiger's tail growing from the base of her spine, the same tail her grandmother once had on the Chinese mainland in 1949. The book moves between the narrator's childhood in Arkansas, her mother Daughter's youth in Taiwan, and the grandmother's escape across a strait. Holes in the backyard swallow letters and return blood. Tigers were once women. K-Ming Chang writes a three-generation family myth that turns the body into the site where history, migration, and queer desire collide, with prose that reads as a feverish folk tale.