Hello bookworms! I hope you are doing well. Today I bring you a new historical fiction novel: Where Waters Meet by Zhang Ling. Below you will find information about the book and an excerpt!
Where Waters Meet
A daughter discovers the dramatic history that shaped her mother’s secret life in an emotional and immersive novel by Zhang Ling, the bestselling author of A Single Swallow.
There was rarely a time when Phoenix Yuan-Whyller’s mother, Rain, didn’t live with her. Even when Phoenix got married, Rain, who followed her from China to Toronto, came to share Phoenix’s life. Now at the age of eighty-three, Rain’s unexpected death ushers in a heartrending separation.
Struggling with the loss, Phoenix comes across her mother’s suitcase—a memory box Rain had brought from home. Inside, Phoenix finds two old photographs and a decorative bottle holding a crystalized powder. Her auntie Mei tells her these missing pieces of her mother’s early life can only be explained when they meet, and so, clutching her mother’s ashes, Phoenix boards a plane for China. What at first seems like a daughter’s quest to uncover a mother’s secrets becomes a startling journey of self-discovery.
Told across decades and continents, Zhang Ling’s exquisite novel is a tale of extraordinary courage and survival. It illuminates the resilience of humanity, the brutalities of life, the secrets we keep and those we share, and the driving forces it takes to survive.
Excerpt from Where Waters Meet
George Whyller’s mother-in-law, Rain Yuan, died ten days ago, unexpectedly.
Sure, she had been sick for a while: renal infection, diabetes, a stomach ulcer, rheumatoid arthritis, and the towering Alzheimer’s. But none of these things could cause one to kick the bucket so suddenly. A heart attack, they said. But she had always had a perfect heart. Well, when one gets to her age, the organs don’t give you much of a warning. Her age? For heaven’s sake, she was only eighty-three. There are parts of the world where people live to be a hundred and twenty—she was a spring chicken.
Screw science.
Rain was not her real name. No one in their right mind would call herself Rain unless she was a rock star or the mother of Snow White (the real one, not the stepmother). Her legal name, as recorded in her passport, was Chunyu Yuan, Chunyu meaning spring rain in Chinese.
When a man marries a Chinese woman, he marries the whole family. Luckily for George, the family of his wife, Phoenix, had been trimmed, through death, disappearance, and estrangement, to only a mother and an aunt, with the aunt living thousands of miles away in Shanghai and thus hardly a bother.
What remained of that family, namely Phoenix and her widowed mother, had been close. Close was not even the word. For most of their lives, other than a few necessary periods, Phoenix and Rain had always lived together, prior to Rain’s nursing-home days, of course. Phoenix brought her mother into her marriage, like an inseparable conjoined twin. Rain’s passing unhinged Phoenix and the worst part of it was she didn’t know she was a wretched mess.
George had left work a little early today. He and Phoenix planned to have an early dinner and then drive together to Pinewoods, the nursing home where Rain had died, to pick up Rain’s stuff before the reception closed at eight.
It was 4:09 p.m., April 20, 2011.
Southbound along Birchmount Road, the traffic was quite smooth, something rarely seen in a city like Toronto at this hour of the day. George practically sailed through and got home sooner than expected.
Setting his briefcase on the hardwood floor, he sat down on the footstool by the door, starting, automatically, to remove his leather shoes, replacing them with slippers made of cheap plastic. It was a habit Rain had pushed upon him when he married Phoenix six years ago. A habit, among others, that he had protested against half-heartedly for a while before giving up. Rain was a tireless buffing machine, smoothing out all the bumps where she treaded, by patience, or by sheer maternal force.
Walking towards the living room, he suddenly halted, noticing Phoenix standing in front of the bay window. He hadn’t expected to see her for another hour at least. Phoenix was an ESL teacher in an immigration settlement center. She had two afternoon classes on Wednesdays. By the time she finished teaching and hopped on the subway, then switched to a bus and walked a block to reach home, it was usually around 6:15.
She was peering through a gap in the lace curtains onto the street, her arms folded and her shoulders squeezing together as if cold. They lived in a quiet neighborhood of central Scarborough. There wasn’t much going on all day, other than an occasional trickle of bikers, adults mostly, and some Jehovah’s Witnesses walking around in pairs, selling God door to door.
How long had she been there? She must have watched him pull into the driveway, get out of his gray Altima, and fumble in his pocket— filled with a packet of cigarettes (he was a social smoker), a wadded handkerchief, and some crumpled gas receipts—for his house keys.
“You are early . . .” He paused as he noticed the suitcase beside the white leather sofa. It was an ancient piece of luggage, born before the age of rolling wheels, made of heavy fabric in a yellowish gray, the color of twenty-year-old dust. Strangely, this fossil held itself together despite a partially damaged lock socket and a few dents and scratches.
It was Rain’s suitcase, one of the few things she had brought all the way from China. Once he had offered to replace it with a more modern version, but Rain had stoutly refused. “Let it be, it’s her memory box,” Phoenix told him later.
So Phoenix had been to Pinewoods without him, and without telling him.
Phoenix turned around, smiling vaguely, murmuring a faint yes to the question in his eyes.
“Did you get all her . . . ?” He carefully picked his words and tone, as though she were a piece of Ming porcelain, too fragile to withstand the brushing of air. Nobody likes to lose a mother, but Rain’s death had hit Phoenix a few pounds harder than was usual.
“Yes,” she cut in tersely, another monosyllabic roadblock to conversation.
“I’ll do spaghetti today, the meat sauce is ready in the fridge.” He switched subjects, finding himself again gauging the volume and tone of his voice for fear of overstepping.
He turned on the stove to boil water for spaghetti. It was Wednesday and his turn to cook, a rule they had set in the early days of their marriage. Before proposing to her, he had considered all kinds of stumbles in their life together, a mixed-race marriage with a mother-in-law stuck in the middle. Not exactly a fairy-tale situation. Yet he had never imagined that the choice of food would be their first major roadblock. He could tolerate well enough their Chinese cooking: the deep frying, soy sauce, green onion, minced garlic. But his cream and cheese were Rain’s poison.
Eventually they had worked out, after a few grudging meals, a little plan—a balance in power, as George would say. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, the mother and daughter would cook up a Chinese storm, and on the rest of the weekdays he could have his say over the dinner menu. On Sunday, the three of them would go out to eat, taking turns in the choice of restaurants. Before long, he noticed, with wry amusement, that Rain had started to fry her veggies with butter, and sesame seeds made an exotic appearance on top of the salads he made.
Things have a strange way of working themselves out, he concluded. Force and reaction, pressure and endurance. In the sphere of marital science, one needs chemistry to kick open the door, but after that, it’s physics that governs the running of it.
The water was soon boiling, the lid and the pot joining in an awful racket—click, click, click. It took him a while before he realized he hadn’t thrown in the noodles.
“You better turn on the fan.”
She was standing right behind him. He sensed her presence before he heard her voice.
“It’ll be ready in a wink,” he said, suddenly annoyed by the tiptoeing in his voice. Ever since he walked into the house, he hadn’t been able to utter a simple, meaningful sentence.
He knew why.
It was the suitcase sitting in the living room, with all its guarded coolness. Maybe it was the fabric, smelling of mildew and history. Maybe it was the broken lock, revealing half a secret, inspiring exploration rather than closure.
It was the soul of Rain, lurking about the house, watching their every move, alive and alert even in death.
He switched off the stove, waited for the noise of the pot to die down, and then turned towards Phoenix, locking eyes.
“What do you plan to do with her ashes, Nix?”
His voice had started out tentative but slowly found its course. As soon as he heard the word ashes, he knew the hardest part was behind him.
She didn’t answer. The corners of her mouth twitched, hinting at tears that didn’t come. In complete stillness she stood, eyes desolate and unmoored, a lost cat. Her cheeks were fuller the night before.
He put his arms around her. The chill seeping through the fabric of her blouse made him aware, suddenly, of the tenebrous distance between them. Grief was messy, with its many folds, layers, and loose ends that were vaguely familiar to him from the days when he had lost Jane, his first wife. A void filled with amorphous grayness, as he came to remember it, a numbness to the evanescence of all things. He didn’t want to go back there. Powerless then, and more so now that the pain was once removed.
No longer attempting a conversation, he let go of her and restarted the stove.
She wafted past the kitchen, sitting down at the dinner table and staring, through the bare window, into the backyard. The huge maple tree with its young leaves cast a dancing shadow on the lawn in the rustling evening breeze. Baby dandelions were popping up, here and there, amid the grass in its first growth spurt, unruly but full of life. This season’s grass had never known Rain, her life, or her death—to it, her absence was a mere irrelevance.
“She was in a fetal position when she died,” muttered Phoenix drily. “She was tired of being a ma, she just wanted to be a child.”
About Zhang Ling
Zhang Ling is a former senior audiologist and fiction writer in Toronto, Canada. She was born in Wenzhou, China and came to Canada in 1986 to pursue her MA in English at University of Calgary. She obtained her second MA degree in Communication disorders at the University of Cincinnati.
Zhang has published nine novels and several collections of novellas and short stories in Chinese and received numerous literary prizes, including the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and China Times’ Open Book Award.
In 2009, Zhang’s novella, Aftershock (2010 film), a tale about the survival of the horrific 1976 Tangshan earthquake, was made into China’s first IMAX movie, directed by Feng Xiaogang. This movie became the highest-grossing film in China at the time.
Her novel, A Single Swallow, was translated into English, French, and German and became Amazon’s #1 Kindle bestseller in Chinese literature and WWII historical fiction. The novel also was the winner of AudioFile Earphones Award and was featured in The New York Times‘ Globetrotting section.
Where Waters Meet, published in May 2023 from Amazon Crossing, is her first novel written in English. For this work, Zhang received support from both the Canada Council for the Arts and an Ontario Arts Council grant.
Many thanks to Over The River PR for having me. Check out posts from other reviewers:
Be First to Comment