RACHEL SOO THOW - 10 MAY 2021

I’ve been having quite lucid dreams lately - sometimes dreams where I’ll wake up wondering where I am and the very existence of sleep. How our bodies have been programmed time and time again to recognise nature versus nurture and if these listless dreams are really even dreams at all. If such dreams were projected, what would the deepest of sleeps reveal?

Like this other-worldly experience, debut novel Braised Pork by An Yu demonstrates a fantastical reality submerged underneath a body of water much like our protagonist Jia Jia’s husband (a death that sets into motion bizarre and understated experiences). Weirdly coincidental moments in time are vividly imagined by Yu with a dignified sense of detachment and domestic noir. With each page comes memories of childhood that are sorrowful and awakening and a world in which the all-elusive hunt for the ‘fish-man’ is superimposed with strange melancholia much like that of author Haruki Murakami. This obscure fish-man figure becomes the novel’s motif. The mystery behind it will eventually send Jia Jia from Beijing to Tibet, forcing her to reckon with the secrets of her past and the possibilities of her future.

The world might be strange, surreal even, but...“Don’t you think that sometimes we just need to love in the simplest way possible?”

As the novel wears on, we are bouncing between dreams, memories, spontaneity and existential brilliance. The vulnerability of a female character is executed ‘impartially’ and as family secrets are uncovered, Yu writes as though she is constantly changing her mind. Much like the metropolitan Beijing – with its unhappy marriages, nosy neighbours and expensive property market our vulnerable heroine Jia Jia emerges; set free from the suffocating constraints of a pressurised loveless marriage and comes up for air.

What I struggled to fully grasp were ideas that I feel had potential to be expanded more - the role of marriage today, familial harmony, the generational differences in Chinese attitudes toward widowhood and the financial realities Jia Jia faces as a painter struggling to make ends meet. If Yu would have fully grasped and hung on tight to these ideas, this novel could have flourished - traumatic past events would have been better resolved through personal development and embraced for future reinvention in the hopes of becoming a shapeless and authentic version of oneself. I guess this is what had me thinking about this novel afterwards - our dreams and opinions are forever floating around us, suspended in a societal capsule where trauma and anxiety seem to pierce the veil we try so hard to protect.

“As the tears gushed out of her, she felt herself shrinking down like a bar of soap, losing her original form. She had become a shapeless and authentic version of herself.”