Source: Asian Review of Books (4/23/23)
“Where Waters Meet” by Zhang Ling
By Susan Blumberg-Kason
Zhang Ling
Zhang Ling is so renowned a writer in China that one of her books was adapted to film as China’s first IMAX movie. She has written nine novels, as well as a number of collections of stories, all in Chinese. But Zhang Ling has not lived in China since the mid-1980s, when she immigrated to Canada. She started writing a decade later and has had at least one novel translated into English. But it’s only now that she has published a book in English. Where Waters Meet is a story centered around a family’s grief and takes place in Toronto and its surroundings, as well as various places in China, namely Wenzhou and Shanghai. The title of the book is taken from the large bodies of water that link these parts of the story together.
Where Waters Meet (Amazon Crossing, 2023)
The novel begins when Rain Yuan, or Yuan Chunyu as she was known in China, passes away at her nursing home in Canada. Rain’s daughter, Phoenix, and son-in-law, George, had been taking care of Rain until she started to exhibit signs of dementia. When that started to happen more often than not, George felt proud to find a suitable place for his mother-in-law to receive the best possible care.
“One of the best long-term care facilities in town, a strong Alzheimer’s team. Built with Hong Kong money, so the staff mostly speak Chinese. Chinese menu, Chinese recreational programs,” reported George, with a fluent command of the facts, “government subsidies available. Two blocks away from my hospital, visits are easy.”
But as the story progresses, one may wonder if Rain was really demented or if the trauma from her young adult years resurfaced as she grew older and had no way of dealing with it. She had been living in Canada for the better part of two decades with Phoenix; George became a part of their family of two after he married Phoenix. But Rain had never told her daughter about what happened to her during WWII and the Chinese civil war. The only person who knew the truth was Rain’s sister, Mei, in Shanghai. After Rain dies, Phoenix travels across the Pacific to get the truth from Mei.
Once Phoenix arrives in Shanghai, the chapters begin with emails between Phoenix and George and what Phoenix learns from her aunt Mei. And there is so much to learn, so she writes her mother’s story in book-like chapters and e-mails them to George in different installments, as she completes each new chapter. The e-mail exchanges are followed by Phoenix’s chapters. While George reads them in Canada, he comes up with a title for the compilation of these chapters.
Last night, in one of his entangled dreams, he heard a voice, silent but persistent, demanding an answer. A dream asking another dream. Then the title came, in the wee hours of morning, presenting itself in the fuzzy space between the last round of the dream and the first round of awakening…Where Waters Meet. Yes, waters. He should not forget the plural. The s was crucial—he could almost hear the sibilant sound, of the finding, the clashing, the breaking, the merging and expanding. The pain. The joy. The s had turned an ordinary meeting into a cosmic event.
The story of Rain and her sister Mei during WWII and the Chinese civil war—and the tough decades that follow—may shock readers who are not familiar with the trauma from this era. It’s no wonder Rain bottles up her past. But for those who do know the history, there are some early hints of what befalls the Rain and Mei in their teens.
It’s the story of Phoenix and George that gives the novel its strong backbone. Widower George meets Phoenix when she takes her mother to see an audiologist, who turns out to be George. When the two start to date, Phoenix makes it clear that her mother is part of the package; George is accepting. He was a Vietnam War draft dodger who ended up in Canada after leaving his home and family in the US. He’s also extremely supportive of Phoenix and becomes her confidant when she needs to turn to someone to deal with her own trauma from her childhood and early adult years in China.
In reading Where Waters Meet, it’s difficult to understand why Zhang Ling has not published in English until now. Her prose flows as smoothly as the water in the title. For English readers, one can hope this is the start of a new chapter in Zhang Ling’s writing career.