Braised Pork by An Yu

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Press on April 14, 2020

Braised Pork tells the story of a woman who is struggling to cope with the demands of a changing life. Wu Jia Jia’s husband, Chen Hang, killed himself while kneeling over their bathtub, leaving her with an expensive apartment and little money with which to maintain it. She wants to sell the Beijing apartment, but rumors of her husband’s suicide have made buyers view the apartment as a place of misfortune.

Jia Jia thinks about moving in with her father, but is shocked to learn that he remarried while she was grieving her husband’s loss. Her other option, living with her grandmother and aunt, is difficult because they have settled into a way of life that makes her feel like an outsider. Finding a new husband might solve her problems, but the parents of the only man she has dated — the bartender at the tavern where she spends her evenings — believe it would be bad luck for their son to marry a widow.

Jia Jia attended art school and has some talent, but Chen Hang thought it would be inappropriate for her to sell her paintings. Now that he is gone, she contemplates a sketch he made of a fish with a man’s head. She obsessively paints her own version of the fish man but can never visualize the face that belongs on the fish’s body. In the meantime, she has been commissioned to paint a scene with Buddha on the wall of a friend’s home.

All of this is background for the true story, which involves visions or dreams or shared experiences in which Jia Jia and others encounter the fish man in a world made of water — a world that, in their view, represents true reality. Jia Jia feels compelled to take a trip to Tibet, where she finds a crude sculpture of the fish man in a small village and later discovers a connection between an old villager and her own family.

The recurring appearance of the fish man is something that might be found in a fable, but most of Braised Pork is grounded in a more recognizable reality. Exactly what the fish man represents or symbolizes — whether the fish man even exists, or is the product of mental illness — is ambiguous. In at least one case, the belief that we live in a world made of water seems to drive someone mad, perhaps because that person believes the world of water took everything from her. That person’s husband comes to believe that there are “two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them.” Whether the body can be separated from the rest of human experience is one of the philosophical questions that An Yu poses to her readers.

I’m not sure quite what to make of the fish man. Despite its central importance to the story, I was drawn more to the life that Jia Jia is trying to make after the death of her husband — her uncertain relationship with the bartender, her reconnection with her father, her decision to start making art again. Jia Jia has an appealing resilience. Whether she has experienced visions that open a gateway to a different concept of reality or is suffering from a mental illness, her determination to place the best interpretation on her encounter with the water world, and to take something positive from its darkness, offers a ray of light in an otherwise dark story.

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