China Dog
- Aug 21, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 13
by Lisobel Tang
My mother hates dogs.
A city child in the sixties, she often stayed with her aunt in a rural village south of Shanghai. The dogs there, she assures me, reveal the true nature of the species. They’d lived with farmers for centuries, primitive creatures that slunk down from the mountains to scavenge. Lazy spirits, she calls them. Grow too close and their idleness will infect you.
My great-aunt’s mutt was no different — slow and loutish, slobbering over my mother’s leather boots when he begged for food. At dusk she heard him howling, a reedy, pitiful sound that reminded her of the drunkards that frequented the village bar, who made half-hearted passes at her when she walked past. She despised his foul breath; resented his insistent physicality when he crowded his damp bulk against hers. He dragged his snout over her skirt and climbed onto her mattress every night, as if to remind her that she was only a guest in his home.
When the Red Guards came and took him away, she wept for a fortnight.
Back in the city, she grew up mean and quick to anger, and married a high-ranked government worker. She raised an obedient daughter who learned to bear a mother’s harsh words.
Do not let them into your heart, she tells me, a single child hoping for a friend, a teenager dreaming of her first boyfriend. Their love is like poison.
Many young people walk their dogs along the Huangpu River now. When we pass one on our evening rounds, my mother raises her walking stick with her stiff right arm. A yellow film covers her rheumy eyes. Her face, beaten and hollowed by the years, contorts in a fearsome rictus when the dog approaches, as if she’s about to scold someone who isn’t there.
Lisobel Tang is an emerging Chinese Canadian writer from Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). She studied classical piano at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and holds a law degree from McGill University. In her spare time, she can be found with her dog by the St. Lawrence River, where she regularly pauses to contemplate sentence structure. Find her at lisobeltang.com.
