A Beast Slinks Toward Beijing

Yang’s visionary debut finds a Chinese American woman grappling with her father’s claims about the curse placed on his life. Twenty-five-year-old Manhattanite Qianze reluctantly takes in her estranged father, Weihong, after receiving a call that he’d wandered onto the porch of her childhood home in Virginia. An alcoholic with dementia, he needs constant care. As he weaves in and out of lucidity, he tells Qianze his life story, beginning with growing up in Anshan, China, with an abusive father who hated him. One day, in search of a way to frighten his younger sister, Kangmei, their parents’ favorite, Weihong takes her to a seer known as the Woman in the Alley. Instead, it’s Weihong who’s terrified when the Woman in the Alley shows him an apparition of himself with a monster growing in his belly. He goes on to join the Red Guards and commits massacres during the Cultural Revolution, knowing that his zealousness will shield his family from the same fate, and that the beast will protect him from being killed. Meanwhile, in the present-day narrative, Weihong’s presence in Qianze’s life causes friction with work and with her boyfriend. The father-daughter dynamic adds an intriguing layer to Yang’s multigenerational story of family sacrifice and the lengths people will go to protect those they love. This one hits hard. Agent: Iwalani Kim, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Jan.)