Review: Lucky Creatures, by Joseph Trinidad

The opening essay of Joseph Trinidad’s debut collection, Lucky Creatures, follows a grandmother teaching her grandson to gut a chicken. From coop to dinner table: the slashing of the neck, the plucking of feathers. Blood-down-your-shirt gory. As a vegan book reviewer, this would usually turn my stomach. But the writing is so engaging, and the story is about much more than killing a chicken, so I leaned in. I tore through that essay, then the next, and didn’t stop until the end. Even then, I craved more.

Across thirteen essays, this coming-of-age memoir charts Trinidad’s life from childhood in the Philippines to adulthood in New Zealand. It explores family, identity, and migration, while also turning to dating, intimacy, and questions of queer parenthood.

The collection orbits Trinidad’s family – his mother and sister, his grandparents nearby, and the uncles, aunts, and cousins spread between the Philippines and America. We get snapshots of these people over time: flashes of them younger, then older, as memory both real and imagined reshapes them, and in turn, the narrator.

We follow his grandfather, who takes young Trinidad to get circumcised in ‘During the Summer, the Rivers Run Red’. It’s a rite of passage he can’t wait for – until the pain of the procedure, and the humiliation of wearing his grandmother’s skirt for weeks, sets in. We meet his sister as a voice of reason after Trinidad feeds Styrofoam to their grandfather’s treasured fish in ‘Lucky Creatures’. She’s also his ‘first beard’, letting him play with her Barbies ‘when Mama wasn’t looking’ in ‘To All the Cocks I Loved Before.’

But it’s Trinidad’s mother, Grace, who we come to know best. In ‘Da Skin Suit’, a ten-year-old Trinidad dresses in his mother’s flesh-coloured costume, complete with wig and mask. ‘I was a boy and she was a grown woman. We were separated by gender and age. It was a gay thing, maybe a queer thing,’ he says. ‘So, I became my mother…’ What begins as curiosity takes a surprising turn, drawing on Filipino folktale traditions: the skinsuit becomes a way of imagining Grace’s inner life – wearing heels to work, caring for children, messaging her husband in New Zealand for money.

Readers looking for pure nonfiction may resist the folktale-inspired sections. But for me, someone who usually veers away from the fantastical, these moments added depth and nuance to the collection. They offered another way to understand Trinidad’s family, and the narrator, through his imagined perspective.

We see his mother again in ‘Grace at the Farm,’ boarding a one-way flight from the Philippines to a remote farm in New Zealand. ‘We’re foreigners now,’ she tells her children. Grace gives up her teaching career, determined to build a life for her family. When homesickness sets in, she’s ruthless: ‘…get over it, or go home.’ In time, it’s the love she fills her house with that makes it home, no matter where she is.

Two mirrored essays, ‘The Cousin’ and ‘The Cousin Returns’, stayed with me. In the first essay, eight-year-old Trinidad waits at Manila airport to greet family arriving from America. While the adults reunite warmly, he and his cousin, only a year apart, remain awkward. Five years in America has changed his relative: different clothes, language, even a new name. They look alike, but sit on opposite sides of a cultural divide Trinidad can’t quite bridge.

In ‘The Cousin Returns’, Trinidad goes back to the Philippines after fifteen years in New Zealand. Now he’s the awkward arrival, moving through a remodelled airport stripped of what he remembers. He returns with his partner, Max, a relationship traced across the book. Trinidad’s grandmother waits in the arrivals hall but doesn’t recognise him until he’s right in front of her. This is what happens when you’ve been away from the place you’re from: time changes it, and you too, leaving a gap that never reconciles.

Lucky Creatures is a poignant, smart, often funny exploration of the people and places that shape us. Trinidad draws us in, and his love for those around him makes us care for them too. Home is complicated, especially for migrants, but it’s the people you fill it with – those who see you change over time and love you anyway – that make it feel like one belongs.