Spotlight: Where Waters Meet by Zhang Ling

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 crystallized 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

Pp. 17 - 24

The suitcase retrieved from Pinewoods had remained in Rain’s old bedroom, untouched for two days. Phoenix waited till George left town for a clinical seminar to open it. The time had come, she realized, for her to have the conversation with Mother. Alone, face to face, soul to soul. 

Mother’s room was kept exactly the same, as if she had never left. The last rays of the sun raged through the half-rolled curtains like a mad bull, smashing themselves against the wall, leaving behind a trail of angry dust. It was probably new dust, dust that had never seen Mother. The bed was neatly made, every corner of the quilt stretched out smooth and flat. Phoenix noticed a hair on the pillow slip, a fine thread of silver against the dark blue fabric, left there before Rain’s departure for Pinewoods. Still breathing, it seemed. 

Can a hair live on when its root has expired? 

Kneeling on the floor, Phoenix buried her face in the pillow, astonished at the dogged lifespan of someone’s smell. It was nearly three years since Mother had moved to Pinewoods. A faint mixture of sugar and sweat, like some overripe fruit. It was the smell, it suddenly hit her, of age and decay. 

She felt strangely connected to Mother, though fully aware that they, the hair and the smell, were just what Mother had left behind, like the skin shed by a snake. The real Mother was lying on the dresser, inside the metallic urn glittering with a detached coolness made absolute by death, mocking the futile efforts of all the mortals who, regardless of how far they had fled, would all inevitably return to it in the end. 

Rain’s initial signs of dementia had been minor and harmless, an occasional mixing up of dates, a rare instance of a door left unlocked, or a pill-time missed. Then, one day, Phoenix found a shoe in the fridge. Standing before the fridge with its door open and cool air blowing at her, she began to shudder. She had finally found herself face to face with the beast. 

Then George came along. 

They shared everything, or he thought they did, the bumps and bruises in life. He let her into his memory of Jane, who had died of pancreatic cancer ten years ago, and spoke to her about their daughter Kate, now teaching English in Japan, and of his father, a political science professor in Cincinnati, too liberal for his time, who taught him to read beyond what was taught in school. 

Father’s bold ideas had nearly cost him his teaching position at the university, when one day the FBI made a surprise call to his office, inquiring about a box of propaganda mailed to his home from the Soviet embassy, at the request of his son George, then an eighth grader. In a letter addressed to the ambassador, George had written that he didn’t “quite believe what the history teacher says in class about your country.” Father was astounded by George’s reckless naiveté́, but never, in any way, discouraged or prohibited it. 

Several years later, when Vietnam started to drain the cream of the crop from America, Father helped George plan the move to Canada as a draft dodger. That was the last time they had seen each other. When the pardon finally came a decade later, Father had been dead for years. 

Phoenix shared her story with him too. Her childhood in Wenzhou, a little town about five hundred kilometers south of Shanghai, the things her mother had endured while bringing her up, “three lifetimes’ dose,” in Rain’s words, her father’s experience fighting three wars, still winning no peace on his deathbed, and the heartbreaking spring night in 1970 when Mirs Bay, the body of water between Hong Kong and mainland China, took away the man she loved and left her a sudden adult. 

She told him about everything but her fear. 

She was driven to him by that fear. The fear of taking care of an ailing parent all by herself. The prospect of being a part of Mother’s aging process, a realm totally alien to her, horrified her to her core. She had never witnessed a close relative growing senile before her eyes, as her father hadn’t made it to his golden years and she never met any of her grandparents. 

When they moved into George’s house, Rain’s symptoms had, for a while, seemed a little alleviated. It had done Mother good, Phoenix thought, this new living environment; Mother’s every muscle had to tense up to adapt, as she had done for every major change in her life. It kept her alert and sharp. 

Then, when they had finally settled in, over the course of a year or so, Rain’s defense system gradually relaxed. Dementia, having ground its teeth impatiently, now launched a full-scale attack, leaving ruthless bite marks, first on her memory, then on her emotions, reducing her to a sodden wreck, forgetful, unpredictable, and impossible to reason with. 

The first major incident, to be followed by many more, happened on a night close to Thanksgiving, during the second year of their marriage. After dinner, when Phoenix was marking student assignments in the kitchen, she heard a string of odd cries, more like the muffled wail of an injured animal, from Rain’s room. Pushing open the door, she found Mother on the floor, curled into a tight ball, hands cupping her ears, shoulder blades sticking out sharp as blades. The TV was blasting, showing a miniseries drama about the Second Sino-Japanese War, on a new Chinese language channel Phoenix had subscribed to for Rain to view in the privacy of her room. 

The first thought shooting through Phoenix’s mind was a heart attack. “George!” she screamed frantically, blood rushing to her head, pounding it like a mad war drum. Hovering over Mother, she shook uncontrollably with fear, unsure whether it was safe to move her. Then the tight ball on the floor relaxed, squirming slowly towards her, cradling itself on her lap. 

“Liars.” Rain lifted a fist, feebly, in the direction of the TV, now showing a deafening battle scene. Something white and fluffy caught Phoenix’s eyes: they were cotton balls stuffed in Rain’s ears. 

It suddenly hit Phoenix that this was one of Mother’s little tricks, to wring the nerves of the household to extract attention. She remembered countless evenings of heated discussions hurled across the dinner table, between her and George, two damned gullible fools, about Mother’s enigmatic hearing loss and the need for hearing aids, while Mother sat next to them, quietly listening, with an innocent smile and the occasional timid interjection of “me no English, not understanding.” 

“Ma, are you playing some sort of prank on me?” bawled Phoenix in exasperation, while reaching for the remote from the nightstand to kill the TV. 

“What’s up?” Hearing the commotion, George had rushed upstairs from the basement where he was doing his laundry. 

Startled at the sight of George, as if he were a complete stranger, Rain became agitated again. Pointing to the door, she growled, in a strange tongue, “Get the hell out of the house, you!” 

During the last few months, Rain had largely abandoned whatever little English she had picked up over the years in Canada, reverting, almost exclusively, to her local dialect. Dementia, like a plaster trowel, had scraped off the top layer of her memory, leaving only a base coat, the language of her birth, intact. 

“Ma, it’s his house,” Phoenix reminded Rain, wearily, also in dialect. “Out, him,” insisted Rain, ignoring Phoenix’s attempt at reasoning. 

“She wants to be alone with me, for a few moments.” Phoenix motioned George to leave, carefully picking out the barbs from Rain’s tone. 

“Tell them, you, tell them . . .” As soon as George had left the room, Rain clutched at Phoenix, sobbing like a child terribly wronged by some unreasonable adult. 

“Tell whom what?” 

“Them, the soldiers, on TV. They should have saved their bullets, not wasted them like this. They should save the last one, always, for . . .” Rain suddenly stopped, with a petrified look, as if she had just seen a ghost drifting around. 

“For what?” Phoenix finally managed to get Rain up from the floor and sat her down on the bed. A little wrestling match, leaving her sweaty and drained. She wasn’t even halfway through the marking due the next morning. 

“For himself, the last bullet,” replied Rain, stressing each syllable. 

Later that night, while in bed, Phoenix told George about Rain’s earlier behavior. “Probably a bad memory of the war,” sighed George. “I know a Korean War veteran, once a POW, still can’t bear the sight of an Asian face in a white coat, fifty-odd years later.” 

A dreadfully morbid way to comfort somebody. George immediately regretted it, but his occupational habit wouldn’t leave him alone. 

“What happened to her during the war, do you know?” 

Phoenix shook her head in the darkness. “Ma says she doesn’t remember much, but I know Auntie Mei joined the resistance forces at some point. They lost their mother in an air raid.” 

“We always remember what we want to forget, and forget what we want to remember,” muttered George in reply, his breathing growing guttural and groggy. 

Mother’s room was dead quiet now, but the beast still lurked in the dark. That polymorphous, heinous beast, coming in the form of a refrigerated shoe, cotton balls, phantom soldiers and bullets, and perhaps, at some point, a house on fire. The world war was behind them now, but the war against the beast might have just begun. Phoenix’s own war, fought alone. Sure, she had George, but how engaged was he? She wasn’t sure. 

Sleep refused to come. George’s roaring snores poked hole after hole in her eardrums. Cotton balls—now she knew what they were for. 

During the next little while, Rain seemed to succumb, more and more deeply, to the fear of being left alone. She would suddenly stop eating in the middle of breakfast, turn towards Phoenix, and gaze, intently and teary eyed, as if her daughter, instead of going to work, was about to embark on a journey of no return, and their parting an act of final farewell. 

It rubbed a raw spot in Phoenix’s heart watching Rain, once a fierce woman who would walk through fire to save her family, now a helpless child. 

But Phoenix was fooled again by Rain, even with her Alzheimer’s. That fierce woman was not gone but in hibernation, and she would suddenly leap to life when least expected, breaking loose from the shell of a meek child. 

One night, feeling thirsty, Phoenix got up to fetch a glass of water. On her way downstairs, she stumbled into something and nearly fell. It was Rain sitting where the stairs turned, eyes glittering in the faint night light. 

“I heard you, Ah Feng.” Rain still called Phoenix by her baby name. “You and him, in the room.” 

Speechless, face throbbing with heat, Phoenix felt the sting of shame of someone standing before a crowd stark naked. 

Groping at the wall for support, Rain slowly got herself up and put her arm around Phoenix’s hip, her cold, gnarly hand against Phoenix’s soft flesh beneath the nightdress, warm and moist from lovemaking. The air grew thick with Rain’s foul breath, now on Phoenix’s neck. 

“Here,” Rain hissed, pinching Phoenix on the fullness of her but- tock. “You need to exercise, to be stronger. It’ll hurt less when he does that to you.” 

Recoiling from her touch, Phoenix grew stiff. How many times had Mother sat here, outside their bedroom, with ears that grew eyes and a nose, so intent, that no hearing loss could impair? Phoenix fled as fast as she could without saying a word. 

She didn’t tell George about this incident, but sex was not the same afterwards. Whenever George made a suggestive move, she would see Rain’s faceless eyes floating in the room, glittering, watchful, all knowing, instantly drying up the surging of her moistened womanhood. 

A fastidious person till her last day, Rain normally took her shower around eight o’clock in the evening, with few exceptions. Over time, this fixed routine began to deviate—or rather, expand—from once a day to twice, sometimes even three times. Phoenix noticed, one Sunday, that it had reached a peak of four showers, spaced out through the day. 

One evening, shortly after Rain slipped into the bathroom, Phoenix, while clearing away the dishes, heard her mother singing over the shower. Rain had a good voice. “A gift from heaven,” as Auntie Mei would say, not without jealousy, “even her first cry from Mother’s womb was musical.” 

Phoenix remembered falling in and out of sleep as a little girl, listening to Mother humming to her. Lullabies and nursery rhymes in the beginning, then revolutionary war anthems, Mao’s praises, later popular love songs from Hong Kong, whatever Mother could pick up from the radio as the tide changed. 

But this time it was a song alien to Phoenix’s ear, with strange lyrics woven into a string of strange melody. Later, in one of Rain’s more lucid moments, Phoenix asked her what it was. Rain, after a long pause, said she didn’t remember. 

The singing eventually stopped, but the water didn’t. It kept running, splashing against the tiled floor, uninterrupted and sinisterly loud. Phoenix looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It’d been over an hour since Mother entered the shower. 

Rushing into the bathroom, she found Rain standing under the showerhead, frantically scratching her scalp, covered in a rich lather of shampoo, so hard that her body shook. Cold air bursting through the door thinned out the dense vapor, revealing a wet, thin figure with sagging breasts and a hollow belly creased by dark stretch marks. 

The room suddenly grew quiet as Phoenix turned off the tap. Rain’s lips opened in the smile of a child, knowing neither shame nor hurt. 

“Filthy, so filthy . . . ,” Rain murmured, a feeble defense. 

Incidents like this happened over and over again, raising the level of tolerance, soon to be reached and broken, becoming the new norm. Then one day, came the last straw. 

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About the Author

Zhang Ling (張翎) 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 A Single Swallow, The Sands of Time, Gold Mountain Blues and Aftershock, which was adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success. Where Waters Meet is her first novel written in English.