#BlogTour ‘Where Waters Meet’ by Zhang Ling

About the book…

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.

My biggest thanks to Katya and Rhiannon at FMcM Associates for inviting me to take part in the International Fiction celebration, and Amazon Crossing for my gifted copy of ‘Where Waters Meet’ by Zhang Ling.

This is an exquisitely constructed book that bears patience, perseverance and gentle handling. It begins in the immediate aftermath of Rain, Phoenix’ mother’s death in a nursing home. We, the reader, joins Phoenix’ journey to take her mother home, far from the place in Toronto where she died, back to China . We see her through the contents of the suitcase she brought with her, her memory case, which contains such deeply personal items it aches to read their descriptors. We see Rain and Phoenix through the eyes of George, her husband, as he relates their original meeting, their tentative steps to marriage, and how Rain ended up breaking the decades of living together, by being moved to a nursing home, post Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

So, originally you see these two women, from the viewpoint of a man who has met both at beyond the halfway point in their lives, where they have landed, fully formed and with trauma informed relationships with each other, from a country that George knows of only tangentially.

And as Rain , beautifully named Rain, disintegrates in plain  view, reduced to the person she was so long ago by the cruel ravages of mental ill health, it is time for Phoenix to rise, take her mother’s possessions and ashes back to her home. And in so doing, she becomes an altogether different person, a person with a past, a history, and a legacy.

What is so beautiful is the way in which this is the story of the immigrant from Phoenix’ own experience, how she holds onto who she is, who she will be, in a country that is not her own. She teaches English as a foreign language to others whilst it is not her first either. She navigates that boundary between the identity the country she lives in, Canada, allows her, whilst needing the traditions she remembers, and holds onto whilst her mother’s memory and past disappears in plain sight. This is conveyed in their meal time routines where George, Rain and Phoenix alternate their east versus west inspired meals, and find elements of each sneak into their recipes over the course of time.

It is thoughtful, beautiful, and a deeply wonderful meditation on the process of grief for an adult who has lost their parent. There are no guidebooks to how to act, or when, and the sense of palpable loss of a time, a place and a person such as Rain, is what guides Phoenix as a grownup orphan. And in the process of finding out more about her mother, the lives she and her family lived, she can find the strength to push forward into a braver, clearer future without her mother, but with her legacy intact.

Brave, heartfelt and deeply personal, by the time I had finished, I felt like these women and their experiences had been folded into my conscience and that I was bearing witness to them both as individuals, and as mother and daughter. It was a beautiful and moving experience which I would absolutely recommend without reservation.

About the author…

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986.

In the mid-1990s, she began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and Taiwan’s Open Book Award.

Among Zhang Ling’s work are ‘Gold Mountain Blues’ and ‘Aftershocks’, adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success at the time.

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