The unnamed narrator of Yan Ge’s novel Strange Beasts of China, a former zoology student-turned-fiction writer, resides in the fictional city of Yong’an, somewhere in southern China, described as “a huge, filthy, ungovernable city, full of all sorts of beasts of unknown origin, and secrets, likewise.” Yong’an perhaps resembles the concrete jungles of nearly every provincial Chinese capital, save for the fact that it is also home to a number of exotic creatures, each species of which resembles homo sapiens, save for certain afflictions and anomalies. Sorrowful beasts, for instance, the subject of the first chapter, match their human counterparts in nearly every way, save for a green discoloration around their navels; otherwise, the beasts are defined by their preferences and aversions:
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.
Flourishing beasts, on the other hand, are all female and live in herds. Heartsick beasts are man-made creatures, concocted in Yong’an University’s biology lab, that you can now buy as pets in the city’s department stores. Each chapter begins and ends with taxonomic descriptions of these creatures, and in between, we learn of the narrator’s own encounters with them.
Writing firmly within the fabulist tradition of writers like Italo Calvino, whose Cosmicomics is a clear precursor, Yan is clearly making it up as she goes along.
The departure point for many of these stories comprising the novel is the Dolphin Bar, where the narrator spends her nights getting drunk and conversing with fellow social outsiders. Occasionally, she discovers that one of her human friends is, in fact, one of these strange beasts. Charley, one of her steadfast drinking companions, turns out to have been a sacrificial beast that was transformed into a human via painful experiments carried out by the narrator’s former professor in the zoology department at the university.
Given the relative ease with which these beasts interact with humans, as well as the narrator’s insistence on their similarities with our species, it is difficult not to read these contemporary myths as allegories of otherness. China’s vast territory, after all, does encompass dozens of ethnic minorities, and its cities are filled with economic migrants. The exoticness of Yan’s beasts are often marked by certain traditions—prime beasts, for instance, love to sing and dance, the males wear their hair long, the females prefer theirs short and with decorative wigs—or their choices of vocation and lifestyle. Within the perpetual nightscape of the Dolphin Bar, where Yong’an’s human outcasts also gather, a sort of counter-culture forms, in which differences are ultimately erased in favor of a communion among all those who do not fit into prefabricated molds or categories.
After Charley’s tragic demise, a new drinking companion emerges in the form of Zhong Liang, who eventually leads her on a whirlwind journey towards the discovery of returning beasts, nocturnal creatures that are the descendants of tomb robbers, and have unique access to the underworld city of the dead that is believed to exist beneath Yong’an’s streets. This unraveling culminates in a poignant reckoning, in which the narrator is forced to face certain existential truths:
Everything I’d lived and loved was now fixed in place. I’d used the life I had to understand his story, her story, their story. Now I knew it all, I had no story of my own.
Fabulism is in many ways an embrace of this idea of writing as not-knowing, a form in which no concessions to reality need be made.
Writing firmly within the fabulist tradition of writers like Italo Calvino, whose Cosmicomics is a clear precursor, Yan is clearly making it up as she goes along. This, however, seems to very much fit Yan’s fabulist project, as her reflections on the craft of writing woven throughout the novel make clear:
Storytellers are irresponsible. All we do is make things up from existing events. As for the actual stuff of life, we know absolutely nothing about it.
Fabulism is in many ways an embrace of this idea of writing as not-knowing, a form in which no concessions to reality need be made; in this, fabulism is always ultimately about the act of writing itself. Despite some baffling inconsistencies littered throughout as a result of this haphazard practice of invention, it is mostly a joy to go along for the ride. Yan’s real achievement may be her depiction of a contemporary urban China that is clearly recognizable, and that exists side-by-side with a China of the imagination—a place where myth and reality can co-conspire and nurture one another.