Where Waters Meet, page 1
PRAISE FOR A SINGLE SWALLOW
“[A] unique premise of ghostly rendezvous among soldiers, combined with first loves for all three men . . . Clever uses of newspaper accounts, military reports, and letters to loved ones advance the plot and complement the dialogue effectively and interestingly . . . superb . . . highly recommended.”
—Historical Novel Society
“[Zhang] Ling deserves all the credit for communicating the universal language of love and war, but credit is also due to Shelly Bryant, the translator, based on how vividly and movingly the novel reads.”
—Enchanted Prose
“Zhang Ling helps the reader see events through a distinctly Chinese perspective in which characters speak from the afterlife and natural objects have human agency. A thought-provoking work of fiction.”
—KATU-TV (Portland, OR)
“As a writer of perception and sensitivity, Zhang teases out the many layers of the devastating weight that the war had been putting on the individual, especially women . . . creates gripping suspense . . . In a unique narrative style, A Single Swallow compels readers to reflect on innocence and humanity through the prism of war.”
—Chinese Literature Today
“Themes of gender, memory, and trauma are woven throughout the narrative . . . the story is not just about friendship; it is also about one woman, a single swallow, who changes the lives of three men forever.”
—World Literature Today
PRAISE FOR ZHANG LING
“I am in awe of Zhang Ling’s literary talent. Truly extraordinary. In her stories, readers have the chance to explore and gain a great understanding of not only the Chinese mind-set but also the heart and soul.”
—Anchee Min, bestselling author of Red Azalea
“Few writers could bring a story about China and other nations together as seamlessly as Zhang Ling. I would suggest it is her merit as an author, and it is the value of her novels.”
—Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“[Zhang Ling] tackles a work of fiction as if it were fact . . . with a profound respect for historical truth as it impacts the real world, she successfully creates characters and stories that are both vivid and moving.”
—Shenzhen and Hong Kong Book Review
“Zhang Ling’s concern for war and disaster has remained constant throughout the years as she delves deeply into human strength and tenacity in the face of extremely adverse situations.”
—Beijing News Book Review Weekly
“[In this novel] we see not only the cruelty of war but also humans wrestling with fate . . . the novel blends the harsh reality of war seamlessly into the daily lives of the common people, weaving human destiny into the course of the war . . . A Single Swallow puts the novelist’s ability and talent on full display.”
—Shanghai Wenhui Daily
ALSO BY ZHANG LING
A Single Swallow
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by Zhang Ling
All rights reserved.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Creation of this work was funded in part by an Ontario Arts Council grant.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781662510380 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781662509001 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662509018 (digital)
Cover design by David Drummond
Cover image: © suns07butterfly / Shutterstock; © Beliavskii Igor / Shutterstock; © white snow / Shutterstock
First edition
CONTENTS
Chapter I A DEATH, A MEMORY BOX, AND AN OYSTER WITH A PEARL
Chapter II THE MEMORY OF A FAMINE AND A DUMB HEAD
Chapter III THE MEMORY OF A YOUNG TEACHER AND TOSSING WATERS
Chapter IV SISTERS
Chapter V THE MEMORY OF A CATACLYSM
Chapter VI WHERE DREAMS MEET
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter I
A DEATH, A MEMORY BOX, AND AN OYSTER WITH A PEARL
1.
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 p.m.
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 th
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 dryly. “She was tired of being a ma, she just wanted to be a child.”
2.
George had met Phoenix seven years ago, in the winter of 2004, when she brought her mother in to see him. By then he had worked as an audiologist for nearly thirty years, first in Edmonton, then in Toronto. A fossil, he later told Phoenix, self-mockingly, referring to his long work experience relative to the brief history of his profession.
“She shouts on the phone, and the TV is loud,” reported Phoenix, a complaint George had heard so often from a family member.
Rain understood little English. Other than a demure “Good morning,” she remained silent for the most part. In the shadow of her daughter, she smiled a sheepish smile, a thin line appearing and disappearing, then appearing again, between her eyebrows, in anticipation of a change in facial expression. Despite the central heating, she left her coat on. It was a nondescript plaid coat, colors faded by years of diligent washing, but still clean and neat, every button gleaming. Obviously suffering from a cold, she sniffled and wheezed, unaware of the noise she was making.
The receptionist was off that day because of a family illness, so George had to run the front desk as well. He handed Phoenix the patient chart, which she began to fill out by writing down her mother’s name, “Chunyu,” followed by “Rain” in brackets.
An explanation, more elaborate than necessary, followed. The difference, and the connection, between the two versions of the name, linguistic, cultural, content aspects, et cetera. “Yuan is her family name, but in Chinese, family name is placed before the given name. Our friends here just call her Rain—so much easier.”
“It makes sense, family first,” he concurred affably, while conscious of the people waiting at the reception area.
“Sorry, I ramble.” She apologized half-mindedly, sensing, with a little pleasure, that the voluble teacher in her had found a not-totally-unappreciative pair of ears.
She does not wear a wedding ring. He couldn’t believe himself for noticing such a detail in a woman he knew practically nothing about, other than her name. Phoenix in English, Yuan Feng in Chinese.
Phoenix’s English was nearly flawless, if one could ignore an occasional omission of the s at the end of a verb in third-person singular form, a subtle sign betraying the acquired nature of the language. Later, he would come to know that she had, by then, lived in Canada for seventeen years.
His clinic was located near the intersection of Birchmount and Finch, an area with a vibrant immigrant population. He had seen, over the years, quite a number of Chinese women walk through the door. She was a little different from them. While most of them avoided direct eye contact, and refrained, timidly, from talking unless spoken to, Phoenix looked straight into his eyes, attentive and communicative. When she talked, her lips, her lashes, the tip of her nose, her hair (a lustrous abundance tied up in a casual knot), and even the buttons of her magenta cardigan all bounced briskly, a vivid picture of life.
There was something else in her eyes when she smiled, which he would later come to understand as sadness. But then, when they stood face to face, in an office messy with patients’ files and phones ringing off the hook, he didn’t know what it was. He just felt her smile and voice had a texture and substance to them, wrapping him up in some sort of a glow, making breathing a task. It was a very strange feeling, reminding him of his gawky adolescent years in Cincinnati that he had thought long forgotten. In an inexplicable and fatalistic way, he knew at that moment he had fallen for this woman.
He showed them into the soundproof booth and explained the procedure of a hearing test. Closing the booth door behind him, he discovered, to his astonishment, that his mind went completely blank. This was a procedure he had performed thousands of times over the past thirty years, every step wired into him like a memory chip, which he could retrieve, at any given moment, even in sleep. But today, all of a sudden, it eluded him.
It was that magenta presence in the booth, serving as an interpreter, who had distracted him.
He finally finished the test, with no memory of how. It was the muscles that had executed the movements, the old, reliable, mechanical backup system when the brain bailed out on him.
“There is some sensorineural hearing loss, mixed with a conductive component.” The words came out of his mouth sounding alien to him, formal, stiff, esoteric.
Detecting the confusion in her eyes, he switched to plain layman’s terms. “A great part of the hearing loss is caused by the cold that’s affected her middle ear function.”
“What can we do, then?” she asked, eyebrows knitted into a soft knot.
He was suddenly moved by the concern in her voice. His mother had died when he was twelve, from a long-term kidney condition. His memory of her was vague, mainly revolving around prescription bottles, long days of bed rest, doctor’s house calls, and the labored breathing in her last days. She didn’t get to grow old, like Rain, to be taken care of by her child.
