Lucky creatures

In his masterful debut collection of interconnected essays, Trinidad, the Filipino-New Zealand writer, addresses issues of family and identity, the richness of Filipino culture, the challenges of immigration, and the onset of gay adulthood. A detailed account of the process of catching, cleaning, feathering and cutting up a chicken turns into a warm portrait of his intrepid grandmother, a university professor who runs a successful business providing poultry to her colleagues. Trinidad recalls his grandfather's exotic pet: a ferocious arowana he kept in a large tank. It was Trinidad and his sisterThey suffer from nightmares of being swallowed, similar to the story of Jonah and the whale. His world was steeped in superstition: as a boy, he was taken to a folk healer to “cure” his sleepwalking, and to a doctor who circumcised him. It was believed that without circumcision, he might "become transsexual, or not exceed 157cm tall". The operation was performed during the summer holidays, when he could stay at home wearing his grandmother's skirts while he convalesced. Issues of colonialism and racism emerge as major themes in his essays dealing with his move to New ZealandWith his mother and sister, to join his father who immigrated six years ago. This move came as a huge shock, especially to his mother, who had to give up her career as a university professor and had to work in a supermarket. As for his father, he worked for The Farm, a huge agricultural company that “didn’t look like Shire at all.” His mother felt homesick and lonely, and believed that immigration would help her children live a better life, even if it uprooted them from their homeland and language. Trinidad is highly critical of the hierarchyLinguistically, the English language, hardly described as “useful and harmless,” becomes “a constant effort to neutralize the power of our words.”