Verwandte Artikel zu Strange Beasts of China

Strange Beasts of China - Hardcover

Ge, Yan

 
9781612199092: Strange Beasts of China
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1612199097 ISBN 13: 9781612199092
Verlag: Melville House, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of an English PEN award, Strange Beasts of China is a disquieting bestiary that blurs the line between human and beast told with stylistic verve by one of most exciting voices in contemporary Chinese literature

In the fictional Chinese town of Yong'an, monsters and spirits live, almost indistinguisably, alongside humans. Strange Beasts of China follows the narrator, an amateur cryptozoologist, as she attempts to document each type of beast with the help of her former professor and his enigmatic assistant. From the Sacrificial Beasts, who can't stop dying, to the Heartsick Beasts, who are genetically engineered to be as loyal and loving as possible, each chapter introduces a new beast and dives deeper into a mystery that threatens the narrator's very sense of self.

In prose that is both whimsical and daring, Yan Ge guides the reader through the underbelly of a chillingly uncanny world and questions what it really means to be human.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. She is the author of thirteen books, including six novels. She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Maodun Literature Prize (Best Young Writer), and was named by People's Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into English, French and German, among other languages.

Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean writer, translator, and playwright, based in New York City. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese and was recently honoured as the London Book Fair's inaugural Translator in Residence.

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As the Splendid River flows through Yong’an City’s centre and heads east, it separates into the Lotus and Peacock Rivers in Luoding District. The sorrowful beasts live in a housing development on the Peacock’s southern bank, in the north-eastern quarter of the city.

These old buildings, their walls thick with ivy, are known as the Leye Estate. They were originally built as dormitories for the Ping Le Cotton Mill, where many of the sorrowful beasts have worked for years, ever since they first came to Yong’an City from the south and settled here.

Sorrowful beasts are gentle by nature, and prefer the cold and dark. They love cauliflower and mung beans, vanilla ice cream and tangerine pudding. They fear trains, bitter gourd and satellite TV.

The males of the species are tall, with large mouths and small hands, scales on the insides of their left calves and fins attached to their right ears. The skin around their belly buttons is dark green. Other than that, they’re just like regular people.

The females are beautiful – slender figures with reddish skin, long, narrow eyes, ears a little larger than normal. For three days at the full moon, they lose the ability of human speech and squawk like birds instead. Otherwise, they’re just like regular people.

Sorrowful beasts never smile. If they do, they can’t stop – not until they die. Hence their name.

If you look back far enough, you might trace their forebears to a poet from ancient times, too far back for there to be any evidence.

Male sorrowful beasts are skilled with their hands, which is how they ended up weaving textiles. The females, being good-looking, often work as salesgirls in the fabric stores. The people of Yong’an City come shopping for textiles to this dilapidated little district all the way across town, just so they can catch a glimpse of these attractive beasts.

Legend has it that a sorrowful beast’s smile is so beautiful, no one who sees it could ever forget it. But no matter how many jokes you tell them, they never laugh, let alone smile.

This makes the loveliness of the female beasts all the more to be prized and pitied, and the tycoons of Yong’an City take pride in marrying them – the females can mate with people and produce human offspring. The males can’t do this, and so Leye Estate is filled with desolate bachelors, while the ladies end up in the wealthy district to the south, having fled so fast their feet barely touched the ground, their faces like ice.

At one point, the city’s zoologists raised an outcry in the newspapers: if things went on like this, these rare creatures would surely go extinct. And so the government passed a law: sorrowful beasts could only marry their own kind. If they wished to couple with a human, special permission would be required, and could only be balloted for once every five years. As a result, having a beast-wife became an even greater status symbol, and the extra demand from the elite greatly increased the government’s revenue.

· · ·

Lefty, an artist, was the friend of a friend. The sto­ries about her and the sorrowful beast had spread far and wide among our circle, but few people knew the truth of the matter. One day, she came up to me at a party and said, ‘I know you specialise in beastly tales. I want to tell you a sorrowful beast’s story. Are you interested?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I have to pay you something.’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘That’s the rule,’ I said, ‘I have to give you something.’ I smiled, but her face remained blank.

She said, ‘I’d love a vanilla ice cream.’

I bought her one, and she devoured it with gusto.

I’d smoked two cigarettes before she finally spoke.

She said, ‘My sorrowful beast died last week.’

· · ·

Lefty met the male beast at a time when the Ping Le Mill was doing badly – all the salesgirls had run off to marry tycoons, leaving no one to sell the goods. Many mill workers had been laid off. She first encountered him at the Dolphin Bar – he’d walked over and said to her, ‘I’ve just lost my job, could you buy me a drink?’

She looked up at him. He was very tall, with a serious expres­sion, the skin of his face shiny and unwrinkled. ‘All right,’ she said. As they drank, Lefty noticed an exquisite fin behind his ear. She said, ‘You’re a beast.’ He answered, ‘Yes, and I’m out of work.’

That night, he followed her home, and she tamed him. His name was Cloud. He slept quietly at night, didn’t talk much, loved baths, and ate nothing but three vanilla ice creams a day. If anyone turned on the TV, he’d let out a shattering howl and his eyes would flash red – his beastly nature revealing itself.

Lefty stopped watching television. When she got home, they’d sit at either end of the sofa, each reading a book. When he was happy, he’d let out a long cat-like rumble, but he never smiled.

At night they slept together, Cloud in the nude. His phy­sique was just like a human male’s. The skin around his belly button was green as the sea, even a little translucent. Lefty often found herself mesmerised by that patch of skin. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she’d say.

She stroked him, and he purred like a contented cat, but they couldn’t make love. ‘It’s because you’re human,’ he explained.

They slept in each other’s arms, like a couple of beasts.

It was a lovely time. The male beast was even more nurtur­ing and resourceful than a human girl – he cooked for Lefty and washed her clothes. The food was mostly vegetarian, and the laundry had a strange fragrance. As Lefty ate, he’d watch from across the table, his expression tender. She thought of him almost as her husband.

This all happened last May. Lefty painted quite a few por­traits of Cloud, and held a very successful exhibition at Ever­green Gallery. Everyone knew she had a sorrowful beast as her model, with long, sturdy legs, a flat, greenish stomach, and bright, empty eyes. Standing or sitting, he became an object of affection for all the young women in the city.

· · ·

I saw that exhibition. The first rumours I heard about Lefty and the sorrowful beast were from our gossip king, Char­ley. ‘That Lefty girl definitely slept with him,’ he said.

I said, ‘Male beasts can’t do it with humans.’

Charley sniggered. ‘You believe that?’

Yet I did believe he was a pure beast. In one of Lefty’s paint­ings, he sat on a windowsill, not a stitch on him, clearly expos­ing the scales on his calf. His expression was a little shy, and therefore captivating. Everyone thought how beautiful he’d be, if he would only smile.

But he didn’t.

If he smiled, he would die.

‘He’s dead,’ said Lefty now. She sat across from me, taking great mouthfuls of her ice cream. She looked terrible, not smil­ing either.

· · ·

Lefty said that on the night of a full moon, they had heard a long cry, like a phoenix. Cloud’s eyes had widened. In a panic, he ran to open the door. A girl was standing outside. Even in the murky light of the corridor, you could see she was gorgeous. She couldn’t speak, she just let out another cry, then hugged him tightly.

Lefty asked her to come in and gave her a vanilla ice cream. The girl’s skin was...

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Verlag
Melville House
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1612199097
ISBN 13 
9781612199092
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
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Verantwortliche Person
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