Zhang Ling continues to delight

Source: China Daily (2/18/15)

Master storyteller continues to delight
By Mei Jia (China Daily)

Stories by Toronto-based author Zhang Ling, 58, know how to enter the readers’ hearts and leave an impression that demands more pages to turn even when the book is finished.

Aftershock, a graphic tale of choices amid the massive Tangshan earthquake in northern China in 1976, so impressed director Feng Xiaogang that it was turned into a blockbuster in 2010.

Zhang’s latest novel, Birth Throes, received wide critical acclaim including from Writers Publishing House veteran editor Wang Shuyuan. Closer to home, Wang’s daughter in her 20s, found the draft difficult to put down even before it was published.

Covering a span from 1942 to 2008, Birth Throes features three mothers from four generations in a Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, family who experienced the joys as well as pains of birth against a backdrop of upheaval.

“The novel has really masterful storytelling, which is rare in contemporary works,” Wang said.

“My daughter, of the so-called 1990s generation, said she was fascinated and could totally sympathize with the women’s pain and joy in the story.”

Living outside of the country, Zhang has been depicting part of the Chinese experience in her mother language for more than 20 years.

The distance has given her the room to both refine the language and delight the reader.

Her peer writer Yan Geling said: “Zhang Ling has a special talent for words, and what’s more, she’s polished each to shine like a gem. Her sentences are gilded; she brings hope to Chinese literature.”

Zhang believes that a certain separation from the geography of the story and from her birth land and its history gives her a sharper insight.

“You can’t see the full mountain when you’re on it,” Zhang said with a typical philosophical twist.

Her lectures and talks to hundreds of her loyal and devoted readers in Beijing and Shanghai were warmly welcomed. The recent talks in clear well-pronounced tones, were presented as if to make her audience see how her mind works to get the right word for a particular situation.

The author of five novels and five collections quotes liberally from Franz Kafka, Susan Sontag and Alexander Pope during the interview, as if she had just met them for coffee. A successful career as an audiologist in Canada has been dropped to focus on her writing.

“I decided to be a novelist when I was 7,” she said. ” Later I found that I needed to create a favorable environment to do justice to that devotion.”

It wasn’t easy at first, as thousands of writers have discovered. “I did not believe initially that I could make a living being a writer. A writer needs to feed herself; she needs to have a room like what Virginia Woolf said, both physically and mentally, and she needs not to worry about everyday stuff, like food.” Hence the safety net of audiology, a branch of science that relates to hearing and balance.

Hence, no doubt, the importance she attaches to clear diction and possibly it also accounts for the balance in her stories. Nothing is one-dimensional.

She was over 40 when her debut work was published. After graduating from Fudan University as an English major in 1983, the Wenzhou native became a translator, and moved to Canada for a higher degree in 1986. She obtained an MA in English at the University of Calgary, and later in communication disorders at the University of Cincinnati.

But the allure of the written word was always present. Zhang picked up her childhood dream in the 1990s when she began writing stories.

“I usually get the inspirations for the beginnings of my writing from trivial moments that nonetheless touched me,” she said.

Gold Mountain Blues is triggered by one particular scene that Zhang witnessed. Moss covered, nameless tombstones, scattered on the outskirts of Calgary. After more than two years of intense research, Zhang finished a story spanning five generations, from the late 19th century, focusing on the Chinese laborers from the villages of southern China who went to the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, searching for gold.

Birth Throes takes the experience of Zhang’s mother’s family, and is inspired by one of her aunt’s difficult birth against a backdrop of armed conflict during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76).

Her sparkles of inspiration are always based on a foundation of meticulous research. She draws up a family tree for the many characters in her novels and makes sure the language evokes a place. She travels to experience the wind, land, vegetation and buildings to give the reader a real feel of how geography can shape our destiny.

The book, as the title suggests, is woven around the travails of birth, and she went back to her hometown to better understand the culture and rituals of bringing a new life into the world.

“To maintain the authenticity of details, I managed to go inside the delivery room and talked with the midwives,” she said.

Critic and poet Tang Jiadu said that the result was a story “I have been craving to read”.

Zhang has shaped a piece of history’s sweep with a delicate chisel to form the female perspective, Tang said.

Zhang said her grandmother gave birth to 11 children in the tough days of the early 20th century. Ten survived, against the odds when you consider the rudimentary healthcare available, with a gap of 20 years between the eldest and youngest.

“Looking from a distance, I feel the independence and courage of the women in my mother’s family are inspirations for my writing,” Zhang said.

The grandmother also made her consider different roles the two genders have in the long run of history and the male characters are fleshed out just as much as the female ones.

In the turmoil of the times, men often devoted everything including their lives for a better future, while the women were tested in different ways as they carried on with life on the home front and the difficulty of raising families and giving hope, through birth.

“It’s never easy to live,” she said, “and the humblest hope the newly arrived babies bring is the thing that lights the fire.”

Major works by Zhang Ling

Aftershock

Like the lachrymatory film directed by Feng Xiaogang, the story tells of choices people make when major catastrophes arrive, as well as how the choices affect lives after everything returns to normal or as normal as it can be.

Wang Xiaodeng’s mother chose her brother over her to save when the Tangshan earthquake struck in the summer of 1976, but Wang somehow manages to survive and lives on with the pain. She returns to her mother 30 years later, trying to heal the wounds.

Gold Mountain Blues

A Fa left his home village in Guangdong province in the late 19th century to join Chinese laborers working in gold mines or rail projects in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Decades later, his fifth generation descendant went back to China upon her mother’s dying wish. The novel focuses on the identification of early Chinese immigrants in the West.

Birth Throes

The novel, which is about the “independent and courageous” Chinese mothers, has a highly internationalized setting. The background shifts from China to the United States and to France, while the major male characters have varied nationalities.

Zhang Ling believes the four generations reveal a transformation of female self-awareness and identification of the Chinese society.