Author:: K-Ming Chang Full Title:: Bestiary Tags:#media/book
- themes::
- theme 1
- Summary::
- summary 1
* highlights from 2021-07-21
* I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you. ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=112))
* In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust. ([Location 129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=129))
* You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born. ([Location 144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=144))
* highlights from 2021-07-25
* She turns to the kitchen window and watches the mosquitos fatten into moons, light salting all the lines on her face. ([Location 225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=225))
* We are all looking at it now, the gold and the photo, our eyes alternating between the glow and its shadow, the payment and the cost. ([Location 246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=246))
* She summarized her life in slashes, everything a choice: Leave/Stay. Mother/Daughter. Love/Live. ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=282))
* highlights from 2021-07-31
* I’m on a diet, she joked. A diet called life. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=371))
* I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=395))
* highlights from 2021-08-10
* We didn’t blame our mother for her lies: We loved them into littler truths. ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=533))
* I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe. ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=567))
* In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=571))
* **Tags**: [[blue]]
* We stopped being able to taste after we landed. We weren’t fluent in the flavors here. Our tongues receded, beached in the back of our throats, whaling, amputated at the name. We walked until our feet were fish-floppy. We walked like those oxen: to death. ([Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082H2XTRT&location=663))