DAUGHTER OF MOTHER-OF-PEARL

It’s a marvelous world.

Novelist and essayist Wong gathers 17 essays, illustrated with photographs, that animate the undersea world with creatures that have the capacity for yearning, love, hope, and loyalty. With a lyricism that evokes the poetry of Mary Oliver, Wong describes her encounters with a variety of sea life, such as the starfish, in whose gaze she feels evidence of her own insignificance. She and the starfish “communicated to each other the precious happenstance of our coexistence.” Humans, she writes, “prefer to envision other animals as abstract, mechanistic ‘economies,’ incapable of wanting anything more than food and sex.” Not Wong: She considers the conundrum of an animal tearing off a part of itself that goes on living, a “polyvitality” that allows for one individual “simultaneously living many lives.” She considers the life cycle of the abalone, the snail’s creation of its shell, and the thoughts of creatures imprisoned in laboratories, where they are subjected to probing by giant earthlings. While most of her observations concern waterborne life, one day she discovers a specimen of otala lactea, a snail that has found its way into her family’s mailbox. Creating a habitat for it in a box, she develops a connection so intense that it seems like love. Her gentle coexistence with other life-forms stands in stark contrast to humanity’s predilection for exploitation, whether of oysters, implanted with foreign matter in order to produce cultured pearls, or snails deemed invasive and so targeted for elimination. “We’re a disgrace,” she writes, “because we bring suffering and extinction upon quiet little strangers.” Instead, she counsels respect and awe. Take jellyfish, for example, whose “flowing, glowing beauty” is worth admiring “without using them, as you yourself would wish to be admired but not used.”

A passionate paean to life’s wonders.