Why this book

Yan Ge writes inside China's old bestiary tradition, the kind of catalogue ancient scholars once kept of strange creatures at the edge of the map, but she resets that form inside a thoroughly modern Yong'an of smoky bars, university zoology departments, and newspaper deadlines. The old cataloguing habit becomes a tool for examining very contemporary cruelty.

Yong'an recognizes nine kinds of beasts living among its people: sorrowful, joyful, sacrificial, impasse, flourishing, thousand-league, heartsick, prime, and returning. A washed-out zoology student, now working as a chain-smoking newspaper reporter, is assigned to track each kind down in turn, interview them where she can, and write exactly what she finds — one beast, one profile, one chapter at a time.

The Story

The first tale: sorrowful beasts. Their single rule is absolute — if a sorrowful beast ever smiles, it dies on the spot. Yong'an has turned this curse into commerce: sorrowful daughters are married off like property, drugged into permanent flatness so no husband need fear the grief locked inside them ever breaking loose into a smile.

The reporter follows one such bride through her own wedding day and watches her sedated to keep her expression still, while male sorrowful beasts are steered instead into weaving trades — their hands kept endlessly busy so their sorrow has nowhere left to show itself. No one in the room calls it cruelty.

No law bends and no cure ever arrives. The sorrowful beasts' rule — one smile, one death — stands exactly as it began; what has changed by the chapter's end is the reporter, who can no longer file this arrangement as merely strange instead of cruel. She underlines that distinction twice.

It is here the reporter first leans on Zhong Liang, the professor's new research assistant, for the folklore behind the rule. Their conversation runs longer than the fieldwork strictly requires — an early thread of closeness neither names aloud, though both notice it, and it will not be the last time.

The second tale: heartsick beasts. Parents commission them the way one orders furniture — built to match a child's exact loneliness, delivered as playmates, tutors, and comfort against an empty house, sold with an unspoken warranty that expires the moment the child no longer needs them.

The reporter meets a heartsick beast nearing the end of its contract, its family already arranging its removal now that the child it was built for has simply outgrown needing it. She thinks, uninvited, of her cousin's daughter Lucia, and finds she cannot look away from the comparison, though she never says so aloud.

She writes the profile anyway, refusing to soften a single line, and it becomes the piece that first makes her editor — and her readers — visibly uneasy about a practice Yong'an has long filed under ordinary business. Complaint letters follow within the week.

The third tale: prime beasts. Their bloodline runs on a single, terrible bargain — mothers kill their own offspring young, sparing them, the story insists, from a worse fate the reporter is never fully told. She is only told that the fate is real.

Any offspring who survive that culling grow up only to kill and eat the parent in turn, generation folding into generation as though cruelty itself were hereditary rather than chosen, a debt each prime beast inherits before it is old enough to refuse it or even understand it.

The reporter cannot locate a villain anywhere in this cycle, only inheritance repeating itself. She starts to hear its echo in her own tangled bond with the professor — care and harm arriving, again and again, from exactly the same hand.

Across nearly every chapter, the professor resurfaces — the man who first taught her Yong'an's beasts back at university, before she dropped out under circumstances the book never fully resolves. Each visit to him now uncovers knowledge older and more compromised than the last, as though he has always known more than he taught her.

Zhong Liang, his new research assistant, keeps turning up beside her fieldwork, and a warmth grows between them that neither one names outright. The closer she gets to him, the more her beasts and her own private life refuse to stay separate, chapter after chapter.

The book never stages one clean unmasking scene for either man. Instead, chapter by chapter, both the professor and Zhong Liang come to seem less purely human and more folded into the very taxonomy she was hired to observe from a safe, professional distance.

That distance was never safe to begin with, and the book never pretends otherwise. Investigating Yong'an's beasts becomes, without her ever choosing it, an investigation of herself — of whether the human category she stood inside so confidently was ever as solid as the city liked to pretend.

What it means

When the contract lapses, the heartsick beast is taken back and discarded, its usefulness spent, with no ceremony and no protest permitted it. The reporter leaves the interview unable to separate this transaction from the ordinary ways families quietly discard the people who love them too well.

I hold the book's final pages honestly: they do not hand the professor, Zhong Liang, or the reporter herself one tidy last scene. What they offer instead is certainty that none of the three ends the story as clean, or as simply human, as they began it.

That refusal is deliberate, not an accident of memory. Strange Beasts of China was never built as a mystery meant to be solved — it is built as an argument, made case by case, chapter by chapter, that the solved feeling was always the trick.

Beyond the three featured tales, Yong'an's taxonomy keeps going: joyful beasts, whose delight the city treats as nearly as dangerous as sorrow; sacrificial beasts, raised and expected to give themselves up for others' sake; impasse beasts, stalled permanently between two states, belonging fully to neither one.

Flourishing beasts multiply in numbers the city finds unsettling rather than reassuring; thousand-league beasts carry a foresight so exact it reads less like a gift than a curse, and are believed nearly extinct because of it; returning beasts are rumored to tend a city of the dead beneath Yong'an itself.

Every single chapter closes on the same dry refrain — 'otherwise, they are just like regular people' — a line that starts out as a journalist's tic and, beast by beast, curdles slowly into something closer to an accusation the reader cannot unhear or forget.

The Dolphin Bar threads through nearly every chapter too, the one place the reporter sets her notebook down, drinks with whoever is left, and lets beasts, colleagues, and old private grief sit at the same table without needing to be classified at all.

The single view binding all nine beasts together is this: the border Yong'an draws between human and beast is not a fact of nature but a convenience — one that lets love curdle into ownership, and expertise curdle into complicity, on both sides of that line, in every chapter alike.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.