The unusual novel “Strange Beasts of China”, by Yan Ge, takes the form of a bestiary. Each chapter is a story about one of the different types of strange beasts that live alongside humans in the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an.
The narrator begins each section by describing a creature, such as a “joyful beast” or a “thousand league beast”, including its physical characteristics.
Much of the strange atmosphere of the novel comes from the fact that although these beasts have certain monstrous characteristics, such as gills, spines on their elbows or jagged earlobes, they are all described as resembling exactly to “ordinary people”.
Yong’an is a relatively new city, but the ecologies of the various beasts date back millennia, linking the industrial present to the past.
In Yan Ge’s China, the present and the past are equally mysterious, and the narrator’s human relationship proves to be just as strange as her interactions with the beasts of Yong’an.
“Strange Beasts of China” could be a metaphor, perhaps for the way people tend to categorize and set apart anyone who is different from them. However, its strength as a novel is that this metaphor is always changing and never easy to pin down. The world is even stranger, Yan Ge seems to say, than this bestiary makes it appear.
