A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a novel about intergenerational trauma told through a magical realist lens, as a woman reunites with her absent father only to learn more about his and his mother’s pasts in China. Qianze works in a high-powered accountancy job in New York City, but when her father appears back at the family home he walked out of on her fourteenth birthday, she is suddenly pulled back into the feelings brought up when he left. But her father is there to try and tell her a prophecy he can barely remember, and in the process, he shares more about his own past during the Cultural Revolution in China and his mother’s experiences under the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.
This is a dark and sprawling novel, set across three generations but in a way that intertwines them and never makes it difficult to know what is meant to be going on in each time period as some intergenerational novels can do. The narrative has a very slow burn start and for a long time, you’re not quite sure where it is going to go or if anything will happen, but by the later part of the novel, it is difficult to put down, unfolding horrifying things and using magical realism to explore the trauma that reverberates from them. The relationships between parents and children are also central to the novel, not just in the passing on of trauma, but also in the complexities of relationships, especially under the stresses of colonialism and poverty. There is a lot to take in, but the novel still ends with something hopeful.
A powerful debut, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a book that I think will be difficult to forget. Around the middle of the book I did find myself struggling to get through it, but soon the pace picked up and the book revealed a lot of its darkness. I don’t know much about China’s history and this novel is a fascinating look into it as well as the story of a Chinese American woman reckoning with that history and her distance and connection to it.
Fiendfully Reading 
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