Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Bestiary (2020)

  You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It was dark in the stairway, like turning the night back on, but we all followed after him. We scattered on the square rooftop, big as a parking lot, where wet lines of laundry hung heavy and dank as meat. Someone had burned something recently and the air was full of gossiping smoke. There was a chicken coop in the center of the roof, made of plywood and plastic wrap, and the two hens inside looked dead. My brother was standing at the edge, where the rooftop ended. Where the railing buckled its shadow around his waist. I was the one who got the closest. My thumb snagged the belt loop at the back of my brother’s jeans, but he had already climbed over the railing, the rust sloughing off on his hands. I came close enough to see that. He didn’t jump so much as sprint past the sky. He didn’t fall through the air so much as become it. Then my father was behind me, lifting me by my hair, saying Come back from there, come back. I didn’t know if he was talking to my brother or me. My mother had not moved since we got to the roof. She was a statue of salt, solidified by my eyes, but I saw she was speaking something, willing his wings. The building was at least a hundred stories, and when we first saw it from the window of the taxi, my brother said, It’s like a big boner. A big boner in the sky. I told him to shut up, it was not, it was beautiful, with rows and rows of windows opening like eyes. Wouldn’t you want to live somewhere like that, I asked him. The whole world in your window. My brother said, No, I’ll never live where he lives. Now the building was not tall enough. I needed it to never end, for the ground to be as far back as history. My mother, the one who watched, would tell the story better: She would say my father loved kites so much he became one, that my brother borrowed new bones. We both watched my father follow my brother as if tethered, yanked along, tied ankle-to-ankle by a kite-string. I grabbed at his ankle, but the weight of his want was too much for me. When my brother was halfway down and my father a breath above him, their bodies began to rise. They plateaued in the air, horizontal like kites, and flapped in the wind before riding it upward and out, blade-arcing through the air. My brother breached a cloud, rising up past the roof where my mother and I stood, our hands on the railing, our mouths round as sirens.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ma left the morning after. She’d said nothing about the penis, my sister, my arm. Dinner still on the table from the night before, flies redacting the fish from its bones. She’s gone three days before Ba notices, and even then he only asks why we’ve been eating porridge for every meal. Jie and I walk him to the bus, adjusting his hairnet before he boards, telling him to get off the bus when the road runs out of trees. On the fourth day, Jie and I forget to wash the spoons and bowls. Collars of mold strangle everything. Ba and Jie and I eat in front of the TV, scooping cold rice porridge with our hands. We look like a litter of pigs, suckling on our fingers like this. We watch Monkey King cartoons on the Chinese channel, translating the Mandarin into Ba’s first dialect, watching his mouth mime ours. Ba laughs at the sound effects, what we don’t have to translate: In this episode, the Monkey King gets buried alive under a landslide, and the little rocks rivering down the mountain sound like gunfire. Pa pa pa pa pa pa, Ba says. Then the Monkey King gets rescued by a monk who asks for a debt paid in bones, so the Monkey King castrates himself and hands the monk his penis and says, Enough? Ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ba says. When Ba is asleep, there’s only the news. That’s when we see Ma’s factory on fire. We recognize the blacked-out windows. The whole factory haloed in flame, smoke we can’t smell. There’s a close-up of ten hoses spraying the flame at different angles, each one leashed to a different little man. Jie says the hoses look like alien penises. While she laughs, I watch the stretchers, scuttling in and out of the building like beetles. I wait for Jie to tell me. To tell me Ma must be inside there. To say Ma is ash. Or she can’t be, she is in our old house stroking a picture of our three sisters, she is on her knees in the next room praying, she is in the kitchen scraping away the mold that is our fault, she is undressing Ba in the bath and oiling his back. The reporter on-scene speaks too fast to understand. We scan the screen for a body count, but there is only the day’s temperature in the left corner. Jie shuts off the TV and we watch the last ghost-strand of static wriggle in the center of the black screen, then flatline.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  And to Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, Larissa Lai, Helen Oyeyemi, and so many more. Thank you to my Agong. You deserve everything. Thank you for your smile and the way you held your hands behind your back. I miss the paper pinwheels and the garden with the tree and the chili bushes. Wherever you are, I hope your pigeons are with you and that they’ve finally made it home. ABOUT THE AUTHOR K-MING CHANG was born in the Year of the Tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York. Bestiary is her first novel. kmingchang.com Twitter: @k_mingchang What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had cast off all my friends and joys, and embraced misery as my career. For a week - and then another - and another, and another - I did nothing but slumber, and weep, and pace my chamber; or else I would stand with my brow pressed to the dirty window, gazing at the Market, watching as the carcases were brought and piled, and heaved about, and sold, and taken away. The only faces I saw were those of Mrs Best, and Mary - the little skivvy who had opened the door to me, who changed my pot and brought me coal and water, and who I sometimes sent on errands to buy me cigarettes and food. Her expression as she handed me my packages showed me how strange I had become; but to her fear and her wonder alike, I was indifferent. I was indifferent to everything except my own grief - and this I indulged with a strange and horrible passion.I believe I barely washed in all those weeks - and certainly I did not change my dress, for I had no other. Very early on I gave off wearing my false chignon, too, and let my hair straggle greasily about my ears. I smoked, endlessly - my fingers grew brown, from the nail to the knuckle; but I ate hardly at all. For all that I liked to watch the carcases being towed about at Smithfield, the thought of meat upon my tongue made me nauseous, and I had stomach for none but the blandest of foods. Like a woman quickening with child I developed a curious appetite: I longed only for sweet, white bread. I gave Mary shilling after shilling, and sent her to Camden Town and Whitechapel, Limehouse and Soho, for bagels, brioches and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries. These I would eat dipped in mugs of tea, which I brewed, ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk. It was the drink I had used to make for Kitty, in our first days together at the Canterbury Palace. The taste of it was like the taste of her; and a comfort, and a frightful torment, all at once. The weeks, for all my carelessness to their passing, passed by anyway. There is little to say about them, except that they were dreadful. The tenant in the room above my own moved out, and was replaced by a poor couple with a baby: the baby was colicky, and cried in the night.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Snakehead fish can limp on land their gills sewing shut I carried my daughterfish*1 home in my skirt released you all into a rainbarrel from the river I take frogs turtles fish I scoop the turtles from their shells debone the frogs with my fingertips feed you minnows whole feed the barrel like my own belly in the water you slough your scales your fin fleshes into a foot you outgrow your barrel in a week girl again I ask you not to blame the river you did anyway you wanted the river dammed some part of you misses that water umbilical cord of salt silt admit it return to it your name the river loving your wrists like rope you my redgirl my shithole my first to follow little missionary boys around hunting sparrows frying them on fencewire candying the bones I didn’t want you around those boys I knit you a leash from reeds tied you to my calf you dreamed of slaughtering both my calves vealing me running from me. If every mother in the world threw her children*2 in the sea how high would the water rise to hood me how much of this coast do I lose to you daily When you died I asked the crematorium to wash your body clean as when it was born bright as an onion don’t believe any doctor what whipped your blood to cream wasn’t sodium sofas food coloring it was the river roosting in you eroding your bones into rooms I’ve lit. I admit to putting it there: I pulled the river through you like string through a bead into the mouth-hole out the asshole my life threaded through yours *1 YOU LUCKED OUT. A TIGER TAIL IS SO MUCH COOLER THAN BEING A FISH. I KNOW YOU’RE AFRAID OF IT, BUT I’D MUCH RATHER BE FEARED THAN FEASTED ON. —BEN*2 小鬼, I WOULD STAY AWAY FROM WATER IF I WERE YOU. —BENDAUGHTERMazu [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] The snake in Dayi’s belly breeds itself into three. A braid of snakes born in the south of her stomach, migrating up through her mouth. Most days they slept in her bowels, wearing her intestines like sweaters. When I shined my flashlight down her throat, I saw a rope-thick shadow shouldering out, tackling her teeth. Dayi said a snake swam down her throat when she was a baby. It grew to adult size inside her, eating everything in her belly and leaving nothing for her blood. I asked her how the snake swam in and she said, I fell in a river once. When I opened my mouth to shout, it made a home in me. She said: Anything open can be owned. She said: Never sleep with your mouth open or a man will slide in, just like a snake, and beach in your bowels until you belong to him. The only man you should marry is the moon, she said, so you can divorce it every morning. _

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often—will it be for always?—how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved. Didn’t the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined? Chapter Four This is the fourth—and the last—empty MS. book I can find in the house; at least nearly empty, for there are some pages of very ancient arithmetic at the end by J. I resolve to let this limit my jottings. I will not start buying books for the purpose. In so far as this record was a defence against total collapse, a safety-valve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat. Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss. I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired. Today I have been revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so happy in my bachelor days. And this time the face of nature was not emptied of its beauty and the world didn’t look (as I complained some days ago) like a mean street. On the contrary, every horizon, every stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-H. happiness. But the invitation seemed to me horrible.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air. And poor C. quotes to me, ‘Do not mourn like those that have no hope.’ It astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? I don’t mean that I fear the worst of all. Nearly her last words were, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She had not always been. And she never lied. And she wasn’t easily deceived, least of all, in her own favour. I don’t mean that. But why are they so sure that all anguish ends with death? More than half the Christian world, and millions in the East, believe otherwise. How do they know she is ‘at rest?’ Why should the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs? ‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it. Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him. Come, what do we gain by evasions?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  C. S. Lewis A Grief Observed Illustrated A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis's deeply personal and poignant reflection on the intense grief he experienced following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Written as a series of journal entries, the book offers an intimate glimpse into Lewis's raw emotional journey, where he grapples with profound sorrow, anger, doubt, and ultimately faith. In this powerful meditation on loss, Lewis confronts his own beliefs about God, suffering, and the afterlife, questioning his faith and the nature of divine love in the midst of overwhelming pain. As he wrestles with these difficult emotions, A Grief Observed becomes a universal exploration of the human experience of mourning and healing. With its unflinching honesty and vulnerability, this book resonates with anyone who has faced the heartbreak of loss, offering comfort, understanding, and insight into the grieving process. Lewis’s reflections make A Grief Observed not just a testament to personal grief, but also a profound exploration of love, faith, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of tragedy. Table of Contents Foreword Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Publisher: Andrii Ponomarenko © Ukraine - Kyiv 2024 ISBN: 978-617-8478-61-2 Foreword When A Grief Observed was first published under the pseudonym of N. W. Clerk it was given me by a friend, and I read it with great interest and considerable distance. I was in the middle of my own marriage, with three young children, and although I felt great sympathy for C. S. Lewis in his grief over the death of his wife, at that time it was so far from my own experience that I was not deeply moved. Many years later, after the death of my husband, another friend sent me A Grief Observed and I read it, expecting to be far more immediately involved than I had on the first reading. Parts of the book touched me deeply, but on the whole my experience of grief and Lewis’s were very different. For one thing, when C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, she was in the hospital. He knew that he was marrying a woman who was dying of cancer. And even though there was the unexpected remission, and some good years of reprieve, his experience of marriage was only a taste, compared to my own marriage of forty years. He had been invited to the great feast of marriage and the banquet was rudely snatched away from him before he had done more than sample the hors d’oeuvres.

• From Cultish (2021)

  In the late 1950s, Synanon started as a rehabilitation center for hard-drug users, labeled “dope fiends,” but later extended to accommodate non- drug-addicted “lifestylers.” In Synanon, children lived in barracks miles away from their parents, and no one was allowed to work or go to school on the outside. Some members were forced to shave their heads; many married couples were separated and assigned new partners. But everyone on the Synanon settlement, no exceptions, had to play “the Game.” The Game was a ritualistic activity where every evening, members were divided into small circles and subjected to hours of vicious personal criticism by their peers. This practice was the centerpiece of Synanon; in fact, life there was divided into two semantic categories: in the Game and out of the Game. These confrontations were presented as group therapy, but really, they were a form of social control. There was nothing fun about the Game, which could be hostile or humiliating, yet it was referred to as something you “played.” It turns out that this type of extreme “truth-telling” activity is not uncommon in cultish groups; Jim Jones hosted similar events called Family Meetings or Catharsis Meetings, where followers would all gather in the Mother Church on Wednesday nights. During these meetings, anyone who had offended the group in some way was called to the Floor so their family and friends could malign them to prove their greater loyalty to the Cause. (More on all that in part 2.) I cut my teeth on Synanon tales from my father, who escaped at seventeen and went on to become a prolific neuroscientist. Now his very job is to ask hard questions and seek proof at every turn. My dad was always so generous with his storytelling, indulging my wide-eyed curiosity by repeating the same stories of Synanon’s dismal living quarters and conformist milieu, of the biologist he met there who tasked him with running the commune’s medical lab at age fifteen. While his peers outside Synanon were fretting over puppy-love squabbles and SAT prep, my dad was culturing followers’ throat swabs and testing food handlers’ fingertips for tuberculosis microbes. The lab was a sanctuary for my dad, a rare space on Synanon’s grounds where the rules of empirical logic applied. Paradoxically, it’s where he found his love of science.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  her, how much she had meant in my life, how many positive initiatives she had contributed to our long partnership. I felt I had told her all these things before, but that night they had an intensity and sincerity they had not had before. I told her she should not feel obligated to live, that all was well with her family, and that she should feel free to live or die, as she wished. I also said I hoped the white light would come again that night. Evidently I had released her from feeling that she had to live—for others. I later learned that when I left, she called together the nurses on the floor, thanked them for all they had done for her, and told them she was going to die. By morning she was in a coma, and the following morning she died very peacefully, with her daughter holding her hand, several friends and I present. That evening, friends of mine who had a longstanding appointment with the medium previously mentioned held a session with this woman. They were very soon in contact with Helen, who answered many questions: she had heard everything that was said while she was in a coma; she had experienced the white light and spirits coming for her; she was in contact with her family; she had the form of a young woman; her dying had been very peaceful and without pain. All these experiences, so briefly suggested rather than described, have made me much more open to the possibility of the continuation of the individual human spirit, something I had never before believed possible. These experiences have left me very much interested in all types of paranormal phenomena. They have quite changed my understanding of the process of dying. I now consider it possible that each of us is a continuing spiritual essence lasting over time, and occasionally incarnated in a human body. That all of these thoughts contrast sharply with some of the closing portions of the chapter, written only two years earlier, is obvious. Activity and Risk Perhaps partly in spite of, and partly because of, Helen’s death, I have recently accepted more invitations than usual to participate with other staff members in workshops at home and abroad. The list includes: a workshop for educators in Venezuela; a large, turbulent workshop near Rome, with an international staff; a brief but deep experience with a Paris program for training group facilitators; a very rewarding regional person-centered workshop on Long Island (the second year with the same eastern staff); a person-centered workshop at Princeton, with many foreign participants; a fascinating workshop in Poland, held at a resort near Warsaw; and a beautifully flowing four-day workshop on “Life

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When the bone-tree doesn’t come home, Meng Jiang Nu decides to walk north to her wife, all the way to the Wall. She uproots herself and brings two bladder-bottles of water and a flint. By the time she reaches the north, it’s already the next winter, her eyes frozen to fruit pits in their sockets: She can only look ahead. She reaches the campfires lining the base of the wall. To keep warm, men sleep inside scooped-out horse carcasses, wearing their entrails as scarves. Meng Jiang Nu searches a thousand miles of camps, opens the belly flaps of each horse pregnant with a man. In my mother’s version of the story, Meng Jiang Nu weeps so hard the Wall collapses, and another generation must donate its bones to rebuild it. Her river unravels the spines of cities and drowns a million men, each body pickled in her salt. The river rinses out her wife’s skull. The skull bobs down the river. She fishes it out, brings it to her lips. For the rest of her life, she drinks from it. For the rest of her life, the army hunts her from city to city, this woman whose grief has the strength of gods. Who can kill a whole country by weaponizing the water in her body. DAUGHTERHu Gu Po (II) [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] A week before I woke with a tail, my mother was outside in the front yard, arguing with the new neighbor about his encroaching eucalyptus tree. Its shadow bruised the side of our house all eggplant-black. Its sap ran fast as a nosebleed and hardened into shards of gold glass on our driveway. This was the first house I’d ever lived in—we’d moved in after my father left for the mainland, sending him the key inside a bubble-wrapped package, along with an assortment of my latest-lost baby teeth. The house had smoke-scarred windows and a balding lawn and squirrels that died in its walls and attracted funerals of flies. Our rent was paid in envelopes of cash my father sent back from the mainland. Every hinge in the house was loose and our doors fell out with the frequency of baby teeth. At night, we nailed our windows shut to keep them from panting open in the dry heat. The only grocery store in the city was so dim inside you had to bring a flashlight. Hundreds of advertisements and posters were taped to the windows so that no light was let in: The store was barricaded by the faces of missing daughters and posters of local psychics promising to predict CA lottery numbers. Coupons fled in flocks from the parking lot, offering discounts on pipa gao and tuoxie and dried tongue-looking meats that my brother and I licked and put back in the bin, disappointed that they didn’t make a sound in our mouths. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  According to Ama, the moon is the corpse of the sun. There were once two sons, double yolks that had been hard-boiled in the sea. A warrior shot down one of the sons, inventing dusk. The dead sun ascended to the bone-throne of night. The first sun grieved their separation, and we have morning, where the dead son and the living son kiss once. But one of them always sets while the other rises. Grief is their gravity. _ My mother carried Agong to the car, his legs clacking together, glass-veined. Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat. I wondered if Agong knew what he’d given birth to. We folded him into the backseat and drove away, the dark chasing us home like a stray. If my mother was still afraid of me, she no longer looked it: She nudged me into the car with her knee. It was hot inside and my armpits were jungled with sweat. On the way home, Agong gurgled in his sleep, his tongue frothing. When we realized he was choking, we took turns holding his mouth open, scooping out the spit with two fingers. Flinging strands of it out the window. They stuck like stars to the night. Ama didn’t speak when we carried him out. She’d walked to the kitchen and removed her curlers one by one, her hair already singed. The strands glowed orange, faded black. The colors of my tail. She bundled the little rabbit in newspaper and said she’d get rid of it. We saw her go through her drawers for a box of matches to burn it with. I knew it was inside him, Ama said about the rabbit. We didn’t know if it had been born inside him or if it was planted in him. We didn’t know how it’d been able to breathe inside his body. I knew there was something in his body I had to save him from, Ama said again. I wanted to say that she was the one inside of him, that she didn’t know the difference between who he was and what she had done to him. Ama’s hands shook when she tried to strike the match. She dropped each one, singeing hole after hole into the carpet, charring her heels to stamp out the flames. Smoke ghouling up from the ground. Finally, my mother reached forward and took the match from Ama’s hand, striking it alive on her own callused palm. She lit the rabbit’s newspaper-shroud and I lowered its body into the sink, basketing the light in my hands. Even after we were gone, the rabbit-fetus burned. We searched for its bones in the sky, mourning that our agong was now moonless. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It rained, rained our sweat. Our blood turned the color of mirrors and mosquitos mated with our skin. I could name every species of tree, copy the posture of their thirst. It was typhoon season when we left Yilan, and it was like the typhoon had saddled us, rode us here. Our farts took the form of wind and fled here. Arkansas was landlocked, the opposite of the island, but the weather here spoke the same sky. It was so humid, the air was white-haired with steam, and we were the ones being boiled of our knees. And the trees that grew there, they looked just like the trees in Yilan, big-hipped and knuckle-boned and mustached with birds. There’s a story where I was born. About trees that could walk. At night, they stood up on their roots and left the earth. They walked through rivers, roped up all the water, and left them dry-mouthed. They walked to the city and kneeled into the cement, planted themselves on the street. They walked to the sea and hollowed themselves into canoes, slid away on their bellies. They walked and walked. And in the morning, the trees were never where you left them. They’d be lounging on their sides, or linking arms in a circle, or gone except for one. And my sisters and I, we went searching for the other trees. We went to all the neighbors and asked what they’d seen. But the trees, they went missing. Walked off. There were these holes in the ground where the roots used to be. They went deep, so deep my ba had to paint circles around the holes with pigblood to warn kids away, keep them from falling in. One time an ox walked into one of the treeholes and broke all its legs. Each leg was pointing in a different direction: at me, at the sea, at my sister, at the trees. My ba shot it with his army pistol. In the forehead, here, where my finger is. Here. Oxen aren’t like pigs, they don’t make a sound when they die. They just fall over. Like trees. My father drove the oxen so hard, they died of being tired. Just fell over in the fields in the middle of plowing a row. And there wasn’t even any meat left on their bodies to eat. They were hip-bones and hide, a molar maybe. All we could eat were the eyes. And my sister said, I bet if we plant those eyes, we could grow a whole new ox. But animals aren’t like trees, they don’t grow back. I learned that. In Arkansas, we were the only ones of our species.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Oh, Sir, I should have said that, for mine is the loss, mine the unspeakable misfortune now”, and through my tears I saw that his eyes too were full. He had just given me a letter to Froude, “good, kindly Froude”, who, he was sure, would help me in any way of commendation to some literary position “if I have gone, as is most likely”, and in due time Froude did help me as I shall tell in the proper place. My pen-portrait of Carlyle was ferociously attacked by a kinsman, Alexander Carlyle, who evidently believed that I had got my knowledge of Carlyle’s weakness from Froude’s revelations in 1904. But luckily for me, Sir Charles Jessel remembered a dinner in the Garrick Club given by him in 1886 or 1887, at which both Sir Richard Quain and myself were present. Jessel recalled distinctly that I had that evening told the story of Carlyle’s impotence as explaining the sadness of his married life and had then asserted that the confession came to me from Carlyle himself. At that dinner Sir Richard Quain said that he had been Mrs. Carlyle’s physician and that he would tell me later exactly what Mrs. Carlyle had confessed to him. Here is Quain’s account as he gave it me that night in a private room at the Garrick. He said: “I had been a friend of the Carlyles for years: he was a hero to me, one of the wisest and best of men: she was singularly witty and worldly-wise and pleased me even more than the sage. One evening I found her in great pain on the sofa: when I asked her where the pain was, she indicated her lower belly and I guessed at once that it must be some trouble connected with the change of life. “I begged her to go up to her bedroom and I would come in a quarter of an hour and examine her, assuring her the while that I was sure I could give her almost immediate relief. She went upstairs. In about ten minutes I asked her husband, would he come with me? He replied in his broadest Scotch accent, always a sign of emotion with him: ‘I’ll have naething to do with it. Ye must just arrange it yerselves’. “Thereupon I went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Carlyle’s bedroom door: no reply: I tried to enter: the door was locked and unable to get an answer I went downstairs in a huff and flung out of the house. “I stayed away for a fortnight but when I went back one evening I was horrified to see how ill Mrs. Carlyle looked stretched out on the sofa, and as pale as death. ‘You’re worse?’ I asked. ‘Much worse and weaker!’ she replied. ‘You naughty obstinate creature!’ I cried.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The crab was for him alone, *13 wearing a wedding veil of salt, its body cradled in the steamer, glistening with sea-sweat. Old Guang began to pray, and his wife startled at his voice, which now had a sea’s accent. Up and down and up, rocking her ears to ecstasy. He told the story one tooth at a time: Ah Zheng was defeated. The fleet was folded up at the bottom of the sea. They’d met an old warship full of coolies. Ordinarily, they never attacked British ships, which were even better armed than the Portuguese. Even outnumbered, the British had their tricks. So Ah Zheng’s men stayed away. But this time, Ah Zheng’s fleet had gotten close enough to see the coolies, *14 the ropes around their necks and feet. Ah Zheng had heard of the many men tricked into contracts or ripped from their sleep, thrown into the bellies of ships and collared. The men who harvested sugar in Cuba or scraped seabird shit from caves in Peru. Cantonese men—the very men that had banned his people from Hong Kong—were now the ones being dragged through the sea on leashes. Ah Zheng believed this was karma. But he also believed in divine intervention, *15 so he steered his ship straight into the British cargo hold. A hole bloomed open, and the water threaded in, sinking that first ship. The British veered away and fired their guns at Ah Zheng’s pirates, felling rows and rows of them. Oh shit, Ah Zheng said. Fuck this. *16 Remember, the coolies were quarantined together in the cargo holds. And most of them could not swim. Remember, too, that Ah Zheng never meant to save the coolies. He meant to drown them, which of course was the only way to save them. Better dead than kuli. Ah Zheng whistled, summoning whales and sharks to head-butt the British fleet. Two of the six coolie ships were sinking quick, and a fourth was injured. Old Guang and Ah Zheng, of course, resolved to die together. All the other pirates chose suicide-by-sea, flinging themselves over the side. Better dead than captured. In the end, there wasn’t a lot to see: gusts of gunpowder, cannonballs burrowing into Ah Zheng’s fleet, shards of ships embedded in the sea like shrapnel. Ah Zheng kissed Old Guang a last time, the water already past their hips. It was true: Ah Zheng’s blood was fish blood, completely clear. Or maybe the wetness was his tears. Either way, the salt of that last kiss scoured my grandfather’s tongue, cleared his ears. He knew then. He remembered the crab’s name, the crab he still kept below deck. He whistled with three fingers in his mouth, prayed the crab’s name in his mind.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He dreamed of tossing the blocks overboard, salting the river into a bloodstream. Agong was told not to taste the salt, but he licked every block when the crew was asleep, unable to resist their glow. As punishment for stealing, the merchants lashed both his hands until his skin ribboned off. This evening, I saw Agong crawling in the yard, hounding the soil for salt he’d buried, but the holes gave nothing back. The sofa cushions grew crowns of crystals. Salt icicles clung to the ceiling above his sleep. My mother shattered them with a broom and collected the saltcicles in buckets. We cooked with pinches of his powdered sweat. Sucking on saltshards, we preserved our mouths in the shape of his name. _ I tell Ben to bring me the letters. I live their translations, but she owns the originals. When she gets to my door, I pull her in and she licks me everywhere like a dog. My name is whatever she calls me. In the yard, I feed the letters one by one back into the 口, all the holes scabbing over before picking themselves open again, empty. Ben asks what I’m doing. I say I’m sending them back to Ama. I unfold a sixth sheet from my pocket, the letter creased so many times it’s tender with lines.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Jesus was born into a society traumatized by violence. His life was framed by revolts. The uprisings after Herod’s death occurred in the year of his birth, and he was brought up in the hamlet of Nazareth, only a few miles from Sepphoris, which Varus had razed to the ground; the peasants’ strike against Caligula would occur just ten years after his death. During his lifetime, Galilee was governed by Herod Antipas, who financed an expensive building program by imposing heavy taxes on his Galilean subjects. Failure to pay was punished by foreclosure and confiscation of land, and this revenue swelled the huge estates of the Herodian aristocrats.31 When they lost their land, some peasants were forced into banditry, while others—Jesus’s father, the carpenter Joseph, perhaps, among them—turned to menial labor: artisans were often failed peasants.32 The crowds who thronged around Jesus in Galilee were hungry, distressed, and sick. In his parables we see a society split between the very rich and the very poor: people who are desperate for loans; peasants who are heavily indebted; and the dispossessed who have to hire themselves out as day laborers.33 Even though the gospels were written in an urban milieu decades after the events they describe, they still reflect the political aggression and cruelty of Roman Palestine. After Jesus’s birth, King Herod slaughtered all the male infants of Bethlehem, recalling Pharaoh, the archetypal evil imperialist.34 John the Baptist, Jesus’s cousin, was executed by Herod Antipas.35 Jesus predicted that his disciples would be pursued, flogged, and killed by the Jewish authorities,36 and he himself was arrested by the high-priestly aristocracy and tortured and crucified by Pontius Pilate. From the start, the gospels present Jesus as an alternative to the structural violence of imperial rule. Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as “Son of God,” “lord,” and “savior” and announced the “good news” (euaggelia) of his birth. Thus when the angel announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, he proclaimed: “Listen, I bring you euaggelion of great joy! Today a Savior has been born to you.” Yet this “son of God” was born homeless and would soon become a refugee.37

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In the morning, I helped her carry the bucket to the bathroom sink. The blood was only two inches deep, but it was heavy as bone. As if death had a hidden density. We tipped the bucket together. Later, my brother would complain that the sink wasn’t draining properly, that something down there was clogged. I would catch my mother spooning beef broth down the sink, feeding the drain like a mouth. _ In my version, Meng Jiang Nu marries another tree. This other tree is a daughter like her, with branches too soft to be switches, a trunk holed into nests. The tree is marrowed like bone. The story silvers into a mirror: One day, while stretching her roots under the soil, Meng Jiang Nu butts into the roots of another tree without a shadow—a bone-tree—and the two are married through friction. By striking their branches against each other, they invent fire. Unlike Meng Jiang Nu, the bone-tree eventually outgrows her soil, her roots forking into human feet, her fruit ripening into a face. The bone-tree dresses as a boy and becomes a gardener, guarding Meng Jiang Nu with a pair of silver shears. Late in the empire, the bone-tree is drafted to build the Great Wall. The Wall contains so many corpses—so many men dead of exhaustion—that it can be built through the night. Bone is a source of light. When the bone-tree dies working on the Wall in midwinter, her bones are so cold they shatter into sugar. The next worker in line paves over her body and moves on, builds the next rung of the Wall’s spine. When the bone-tree doesn’t come home, Meng Jiang Nu decides to walk north to her wife, all the way to the Wall. She uproots herself and brings two bladder-bottles of water and a flint. By the time she reaches the north, it’s already the next winter, her eyes frozen to fruit pits in their sockets: She can only look ahead. She reaches the campfires lining the base of the wall. To keep warm, men sleep inside scooped-out horse carcasses, wearing their entrails as scarves. Meng Jiang Nu searches a thousand miles of camps, opens the belly flaps of each horse pregnant with a man. In my mother’s version of the story, Meng Jiang Nu weeps so hard the Wall collapses, and another generation must donate its bones to rebuild it. Her river unravels the spines of cities and drowns a million men, each body pickled in her salt. The river rinses out her wife’s skull. The skull bobs down the river. She fishes it out, brings it to her lips.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama didn’t raise her head, but I knew she was listening, the soil turning bright-wet as the whites of her eyes. From the front doorway, my mother’s voice threaded through the house and into the yard. She called to me in a voice so like Ama’s, I thought for a moment that Ama was speaking from outside her own body. But only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist- smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth. _ According to Ama, the moon is the corpse of the sun. There were once two sons, double yolks that had been hard-boiled in the sea. A warrior shot down one of the sons, inventing dusk. The dead sun ascended to the bone-throne of night. The first sun grieved their separation, and we have morning, where the dead son and the living son kiss once. But one of them always sets while the other rises. Grief is their gravity. _ My mother carried Agong to the car, his legs clacking together, glass-veined. Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat. I wondered if Agong knew what he’d given birth to. We folded him into the backseat and drove away, the dark chasing us home like a stray. If my mother was still afraid of me, she no longer looked it: She nudged me into the car with her knee. It was hot inside and my armpits were jungled with sweat. On the way home, Agong gurgled in his sleep, his tongue frothing. When we realized he was choking, we took turns holding his mouth open, scooping out the spit with two fingers. Flinging strands of it out the window. They stuck like stars to the night. Ama didn’t speak when we carried him out. She’d walked to the kitchen and removed her curlers one by one, her hair already singed. The strands glowed orange, faded black. The colors of my tail. She bundled the little rabbit in newspaper and said she’d get rid of it. We saw her go through her drawers for a box of matches to burn it with. I knew it was inside him, Ama said about the rabbit. We didn’t know if it had been born inside him or if it was planted in him. We didn’t know how it’d been able to breathe inside his body. I knew there was something in his body I had to save him from, Ama said again. I wanted to say that she was the one inside of him, that she didn’t know the difference between who he was and what she had done to him. Ama’s hands shook when she tried to strike the match. She dropped each one, singeing hole after hole into the carpet, charring her heels to stamp out the flames.