LUCKY CREATURES

In his well-crafted debut collection of linked essays, Trinidad, a Filipino Kiwi writer, considers family and identity; the richness of Filipino culture and the challenges of immigration; and gay awakening and queer adulthood. A graphic recounting of catching, gutting, defeathering, and butchering a chicken turns into a warm portrait of his feisty grandmother, a college teacher with a thriving business of providing poultry to her colleagues. He recalls his beloved grandfather’s exotic pet: a voracious arowana that he kept in an oversized tank. Trinidad and his sister were haunted by nightmares of being swallowed by it, “Jonah and the whale style.” His world was embedded in superstition: As a boy, he was taken to a healer to “cure” him of sleepwalking and to a practitioner who circumcised him. Without being circumcised, it was believed, he could “be a cross-dresser, or grow to only be five-foot-two.” The procedure was done during summer vacation, when he could stay home wearing his grandmother’s skirts as he healed. Colonialism and racism emerge as themes in essays about his move to New Zealand, with his mother and sister, to join his father, who had emigrated six years before. The disruption was profound, especially for his mother, who had to give up her career as a university professor, reduced to working in a supermarket. His father was employed by the Farm, a large agricultural business that “wasn’t like the Shire, not at all.” Homesick and lonely, his mother believed immigration would help her children live a better life, even if it wrenched them from their homeland and language. Trinidad is caustic about language hierarchy, in which English, hardly “helpful and harmless,” becomes “a sustained effort to neutralize the power of our words.”