Enchanted Prose

What a nearly extinct, mysterious, watery underworld wild animal teaches us (A year in search of otters in Scotland’s West Highlands; Devon, Cornwall, the Lake District, England; and West Wales): The biggest takeaway from this gorgeously written, hybrid memoir’s obsessive quest to discover the hidden world of otters is how it enriches a life, when you’re so fully immersed in the mysteries of the natural world.

You may be thinking otters? Who cares? A member of the Weasel family? Miriam Darlington’s “icon of nature conservation” will, then, take you by surprise as there’s much to learn from these creatures.

Otter Country is the kind of book that defies classification. A memoir woven into an unfamiliar animal tale mixing wildlife biology, ecology, geology, geography, chemistry (water pollution), conservation, restoration, and environmental sciences.

It’s also philosophical and meditative. A self-help book for living in the moment – as long as you’re willing to leave your comfort zone, like Darlington does time and again. Making her escapes into worlds so different than ours. You’ll feel her wanderlust to places you may want to add to your travel bucket list. Places to slow down, listen, sit in silence, daydream.

What’s amazing to a US reader is that even though the North American species of otter – one of thirteen Mustelid types – is seeing its population increasing, how many of us have ever noticed, heard, or thought about otters?

Why aren’t Americans thinking about otters, cherishing them like Darlington depicts the UK does? Otters have captivated the British for decades, leading to their protected status in the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

A remarkable, adorable, heartfelt characteristic of otters is their motherhood journey, in which her pup clings to her underbelly for as long as eighteen months. Signifying how much is needed to learn to survive their “knife edge” existence.

Otter Country is also about the meaning of a place. “Where a place has been home, has caressed our senses in a familiar embrace, carried us with its contours, nurtured us in a mutual and unspoken understanding, how do we deal with its loss?”

Literature and poetry integrated and cited often, add another dimension to the inclusive nature of what you’re reading, learning, sensing, feeling.

Prose-wise, perhaps if Darlington’s nature writing wasn’t as fetching the book wouldn’t be as inviting. What is it about people passionate about wild animals, wild landscapes, wildlife that translates into spirited writing? 

Passion is the key word. Darlington’s lyrical, poetic prose reveals her passion as an award-winning poet and creative writing lecturer at the research-oriented University of Plymouth, England. She lives on the stunning, tempestuous southwestern coast of Devon, England, and has also written an acclaimed nonfiction book on owls adapted into a BBC Radio Book of the Week series.

Otters tell the story of the health of an“entire aquatic ecosystem” from a UK mindset on changing waterways as a “Living Landscape.” In describing a farm two naturalist friends turned into a conservation Trust (one of many referred to), Darlington says that, “it isn’t about people. It’s not about any of us. It’s about what we invest and leave, and what is to come.”

The author describes herself as “fixated” on otters since childhood. An early influence was her grandfather, a famous biologist and geneticist, dubbed “the man who ‘invented’ the chromosome.” His collection of science books fueled her passion for science and literature, along with her mother’s love of poetry. Factors that fed into “the longest love affair of my life”: a British children’s classic, The Ring of Bright Water, about otters and the man who’s credited with saving them from extinction, Maxwell Gladwell.

Written in 1960, it’s Maxwell’s otter book that lets us see the underpinnings of why Otter Country is a must-read for appreciating the vital force of humans bonding with animals.

Maxwell’s isn’t the only author’s otter story discussed, but it looms large and it’s where Darlington’s UK “True North” journey started in Scotland’s northwestern coast, where the long Skye Bridge makes a dramatic sight crossing that connects to an ancient island, the largest of the Hebrides islands.

Maxwell feels larger than life but his raising of otters as pets with tragic deaths raises questions. Darlington visits the stone cottage he lived in that he gave a mystical name to – Camusfearna. She also pays a visit to Jimmy Watt, one of Maxwell’s “otter-keepers,” who lost two fingers from one of these so-called “pets.”

Otters are water creatures. While sea otters are found in sea locks and oceans, most of Darlington’s tales are to remote water areas the Eurasian otter is known to inhabit – rivers, streams, pools, marshes, the “roots, peat and bog” of wetlands – with the occasional spotting of their “musky” dens or holts.

An immensely adaptable animal, “otter’s skills and beauty have been translated into some of the most captivating film, prose, and poetry ever written about a wild creature,” Darlington writes. You’ll be introduced to a good number of literary and visual art mediums.

Armed with intense curiosity, a wealth of knowledge, and preparedness for raw, unpredictable weather conditions, to the extent she can, Darlington explains that the first step is to know what you’re looking for: evidence otters have left their marks, such as droppings or “spraints” on walking paths, and acute listening for an otter’s sounds or calls like “huff” and “yikker.” 

Chapter 1, “Spirit Level,” sets the tone for the otherworldly landscapes and places most of us will never traipse through. Certainly, not with the fervor and daring of the author! On one adventure, for instance, she realizes she’s entered “some of the wildest, most impassable woods I have ever seen.” Mind you she’s venturing alone, wild camping, “sleuthing,” especially at nighttime when there’s the greatest likelihood she’ll spot a rather clever, rapidly-moving, camouflaged predator hiding and disappearing in a flash.

What Darlington doesn’t know she asks, phones, meets, researches: British authors of otter books, like-minded naturalists and preservationist friends, otter experts, and intrepid souls she encounters on her numerous escapades. Welcomed everywhere, showing us how well humans connect through common passions.

Although otters are no longer hunted down for their thick, “double-layered,” valuable fur, land development has torn down their private hideaways; industries have polluted their waters, such as Cornish coal and tin mining; and the larger ocean predators. None, though, as frequently lethal as being hit by a car when dashing across a road.

Darlington’s patience is also inspiring. Willing to “spend a good amount of time finding nothing: then and only then, perhaps an ambiguous sign will turn up.”

A British artist whose passion for painting Cornwall landscapes, Kurt Jackson, reflects Darlington’s overall passion and wide-ranging account.

Maxwell’s fairy-tale invented name for his isolated homeplace is Celtic. “Celtic people, whose spirited life was rooted in stories of transformation, drew their mythology instinctively from the land and its creatures.”

A poetic way of describing Darlington’s quest for “transference” and imagination.

Lorraine

Titanic obstacles to true love (Glasgow, Scotland, 1878 – 1879; Seattle, Newcastle, San Juan Islands, Washington Territory, 1879 – 1981): How long can you hang on to a promise of love?

In A Wild and Heavenly Place, Robin Oliveira lets us feel the ache of an unlikely love between two people separated by Britain’s social class system: Hailey from the upper-class, and Samuel, the lowest. Each eyed the other from segregated levels in a Glasgow, Scotland church. She sitting higher, he staring up at her.

Herculean barriers – societal, historical, man-made, environmental – thwart two seventeen-year-olds from being together. Their story can make the naysayers believe in instant love, first love.

The central question driving Oliveira’s fourth historical novel is whether Samuel and Hailey ever come together? Can two people navigating the “edges” of two worlds on two continents ever find their way back to each other when people, events, disasters conspire against their love? Can profound love conquer all?

Oliveira goes to great lengths to delve into the truths and emotions of her stories, well-informed by her wide-ranging research, heritage, and life experiences.

The novel is this blog’s fourth review of all four of her creative historical works, in which humanity always shines through her flowing, glowing prose:

• My Name is Mary Sutter, set during the Civil War, drawn from Oliveira’s experience as a registered nurse.

• In Winter Sisters the nurse becomes a physician and activist for marginalized women. Set in Albany, New York, where the author’s from.

• I Always Loved You is about a conflicted, passionate love between two famous artists, Mary Cassatt and Edward Degas. Set in Paris, a place Oliveira loves. 

All her novels are set in the 19^th century.

A Wild and Beautiful Place is about soulful love, as well as a passion for a place of “spellbinding” beauty and wildness – the Pacific Northwest – from an author who lives on Cougar Mountain near Seattle. Near one of the novel’s important historical settings: Newcastle, a pioneering coal mining town people headed for with a gold rush mentality as there was money to be made.

Coal mining and the shipbuilding history fueled by coal in both Glasgow and Seattle are two industries that altered the fates of Samuel and Hailey. Most of the novel takes place journeying to and in Washington Territory before it became a state in 1889, eight years after the novel ends.

The San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound inspired the novel’s title, a summer place the author has the fondest of memories. Referred to as the “Mediterranean of America” in an 1879 news clipping introducing the last chapters of five parts.

Robin Oliveira has a way of telling the most difficult of circumstances in tender, compassionate prose using history to guide the storytelling. In this novel, exploring “the very truth and nature of love.” Or as Samuel said to himself in Glasgow (Part 1), “What a strange thing desire is . . . it teaches you all you need to know”; and also declares to Hailey his boundless love that he’ll go, “Anywhere, anytime, anything. If you need me …” You’ll be amazed and heartened at what that turns out to mean.

A few words about the context of Hailey’s and Samuel’s lives when they enthralled one another in Scotland, where the author’s ancestors hailed from. Hailey’s father, an engineer who owned a coal mine when Glasgow’s coal (and shipbuilding) industries were thriving, on the heels of the Industrial Revolution. When Samuel immediately picked up on how Hailey “radiated happiness.” What he perceived was someone with all the comforts of wealth but not any experience with the downtrodden.

Samuel and his beloved five-year-old sister Alison, clinging to him, are orphans. Hailey has a younger brother, Geordie, also five; he plays a pivotal role in how Samuel meets her parents: a loving father repressing his guilt that it was his mine that blew up, whereas her mother is cold-hearted, uppity, distasteful. Geordie’s role expands dramatically, showing us the depth of sisterly love and devotion, mirroring Samuel’s brotherly love.

Yet their lives have been the polar opposite. Samuel’s intensely focused on finding food to nourish Alison, revealing from the start his selflessness after being subjected to the cruelty of an historic orphanage, Smyllum. When we meet them they’ve escaped the abuse, but living in a different type of inhumane conditions: overcrowded, squalid, disease-spreading tenement housing. Not too far away, shipbuilding alongside the River Clyde is where Samuel earned little monies enduring backbreaking labor shoveling coal to power ships. You’ll feel the poignancy and irony of his filthy, dangerous job while he dreams of building and owning his own ship. For him, the “lines and elegance” of a ship were “G-d’s gift to man so that we could see the wonders of the world.”

What marvelous spirit Samuel has despite the life he’s had! The same spirit witnessed when the story crosses an ocean to Seattle, where most of it is set. A city recently burned down but not deterred. A “collective boosterism” seen in the rebuilding and shaping of a city enveloped by “unspoiled beauty.”

Steamships propel Samuel’s re-making of himself. In assured prose that makes the crafting a “mix of bible and suggestion,” its authenticity forged, in part, from the author making sure she knew “how to drive a boat, read nautical charts, plot routes.” (Excerpted from a conversation with her publisher). Most of the paddlewheel steamers referenced were real ones, like this one:

The “forgotten history” Oliveira writes about is also seen early on with the historic collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank – “one of the most severe tests of the British banking system … but hardly known.” We see how it indiscriminately impacted families, including Hailey’s. One of many examples of how history penetrates fiction.

The drenching, raw weather in Glasgow and the Pacific Northwest is embodied in larger environmental issues. Especially toxic coal dust and coal waste piles, or “slag heaps,” that are cancerous and under the right conditions explosive.

The discrimination seen in Glasgow between societal classes is also recounted in Seattle’s prejudice towards Blacks and Chinese migrant and immigrant workers. The hypocrisy of double-standards exposed as exceptions were made for those who contributed greatly to Seattle’s growth and industry. An example, Chin Gee Hee, who provided the labor force that built the first railway enabling people to move easily and swiftly to the coal mining towns outside the city – the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad.

Fictionally, two Black characters – Pruss born a slave and his son John Salvation (perfect name) saved from the shackles – add so much richness, warmth, and friendship to the story. Samuel met them on a steamship shoveling coal headed for Washington Territory. To Hailey.

There’s also the role of Salish indigenous tribes who owned the land that became Seattle. The Duwamish and Suquamish peoples Henry Yesler, a legendary figure in Seattle’s early history, employed, but to tell their full story decades afterwards deserves another historical novel.

There’s never enough of Native American “forgotten history.” Might the author craft it? Once again uncovering and creating moving stories to enlighten and captivate.

Lorraine

Foxy storytelling: transforming foxes into humans and what that says about us (Northern China, Qing dynasty, also Japan; 1908 – pre-1911 when China became a Republic): “I’ve always been fascinated by old Chinese tales of fox women (and men) who tempt and beguile humans,” notes Yangsze Choo in her bewitching novel, “The Fox Wife.”

Foxes are “charming tricksters.” Prepare, then, to meet a most graceful and cunning character – Choo’s mythical Snow who claims she’s a fox capable of “shape-shifting.” Appearing as an exquisite narrator concealing her true self. A twenty-three-year-old “foxy lady” who effortlessly shifts between her animal and human forms when she’s out for revenge. Animals and humans seen bearing deep wounds of grief. By page four, you’ll know the cause of Snow’s wrath.

Set in Northern China, the “ancestral home of the “fox cult,” The Fox Wife opens in 1908, at the end of China’s last dynasty, this one ruled by Manchuria. Snow flees her home named Hu, or Fox in Chinese, located in the Manchurian grasslands, with the mindset of a fox hunting her prey yet appearing as a lovely, delicate young woman pursuing a Manchurian photographer who killed her child. Interestingly, this historical time dovetails with the “the new art of photography” that had reached this remote part of the world.

The deception starts with the elegant cover. Our attention is drawn to the beauty of a young woman, too lightly-clothed in a Manchu-style dress called “changyi,” wearing dainty shoes walking in the snow. Already we’re charmed and tricked! You can stare at this image many times and not notice her mirrored reflection of a rare white fox, seen mostly in frigid, northern landscapes.

Malaysian-born Choo of Chinese ancestry is fascinated with the Chinese culture’s “fox spirits.” She wraps a fox’s story with a detective’s: sixty-three-year-old Bao investigating the killer of an alluring “courtesan” found frozen on the doorstep of a restaurant in the “wealthy and fashionable” city of Mukden, once Manchuria’s capital. Today, it’s the Chinese city named Shenyang, and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Mukden Palace.

Bao, though, wasn’t one of the well-to-do. Perhaps he could have been. Seen wrestling with how his life might have turned out differently had he not sighted a rare black fox when he was seven, along with his young female companion. An arrangement his mother made to soothe his grief when she suddenly banished his nanny. The two made a “fox shrine,” theirs built from bamboo and its leaves. Then one day she too disappeared. He says he’s never been the same. Both Snow and Bao carry their sorrow, though his is buried deeper, quieter. It will surface in unexpected ways in this twisty tale dominated by foxes – animals and fox-like human beings – and those like Bao who believe foxes condemn, curse. “Foxes make our living beguiling people.”

Snow’s and Bao’s alternating storylines are exceptionally well-crafted. Intentionally designed so the ending of one connects to the beginning of the other. Connections become clearer, eventually merging. Which makes for some unique historical, mythological, and mysterious literary craft steeped in Chinese culture, folklore, and secrets. Magnetically and cleverly so, because foxes are used as a metaphor for the complexities, disparities, and duplicity of humans.

Literary-wise, one of the novel’s intrigues is why Snow’s voice is told in the first person whereas Bao’s is relayed in the third?

Ancient Confucian philosophy may be one reason. Symbolized by the Yin and Yang black-and-white circle of darkness and lightness, representing opposite traits and energies, the life force or “qi,” considered essential to balancing all living creatures. Foxes, like humans, “lie in between darkness and light.”

Interestingly, two characters’ names mean white and black, indicative of the importance of names Choo points out in her illuminating notes.

For Choo, everything has a purpose. Maybe the difference in narrative styles is due to Bao’s belief the black fox caused his shadow to be fading, disappearing. Troubled by what could foretell his impending mortality while foxes can be “immortal”? Or, since he’s more discreet compared to foxes who “can’t help but sticking our noses into everything,” Snow has more energy, passion, and fearlessness so she reveals more? Or, for a long time Bao “can’t puzzle things out,” while Snow is confident she can?

Revolution is in the air. First in the aftermath of the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War cited, when Snow is well-served by speaking many languages including Japanese. Becoming a maid for an “Elder Mistress,” widow of the first master of a legendary medicine shop, who asks her to also be her confidante listening in and translating private conversations between her beloved grandson Bohai (son of the current owners) and his Japanese friends. Fits since Snow is a rather curious creature who can’t help eavesdropping, a lot. Her relationship with her mistress makes her far more human than she cares to be since foxes cannot afford to let their guard down, or appear weak.

You’ll also read of revolutionaries, who bookend the historical period of the novel before the Chinese Revolution of 1911 ended empires, when China became a Republic until it was overthrown by the Communist Party in 1949.

Above all that transpires and you learn, The Fox Wife is foremost about the many forms of Love. Love lost, due to the death of a child. Forbidden love between a young boy and the playmate he never forgot. Love in marriage, and the lack of love in arranged ones. Love questioned in the ancient practice of polygamy when the patriarch had many wives, mistress(es), and concubine(s). (Their differences complicated by status and treatment, royalty or wealthy, see here). Love ran away from, yet feelings resurfaced. Familial love between multiple generations of families living together.

This artful novel also tackles loneliness from the standpoint of the actions all creatures take, man and animals, so they’re not as alone. Snow and Bao are terribly lonely, concealing their feelings when they set out on their journeys. Other characters as well, emerging as good and evil.

Morality heightened in a scene discussing the “Thousand-Year Journey,” or “righteous living.” Choo explains it as a “spiritual pilgrimage that probably has roots in a mixture of Daoist, Buddhist, and folklore traditions” for achieving “enlightenment.” Foxes and humans aspire to that lofty notion, though differently.

Choo acknowledges she was concerned “nobody would want to read a book written from the point of view of a fox.” How utterly, wondrously untrue.

Physically, the novel is also special in its printed format. Published with extra-wide margins that ease reading (and a reviewer’s note-taking). This, too, not by accident. “Marginilia,” Choo notes, is “an old Chinese literary tradition.” Aimed at encouraging women access to literature in China’s traditionally male-dominated society when they were excluded from “literary salons.” A 1000-year-old Chinese practice.

Beyond the myths, Bao’s fox sighting leaves him with an unusual ability to tell lies from truths. How useful for a detective, and for today’s world!

Lorraine

Self-discovery straddling between two different American cultures (Puerto Rico and Western Massachusetts, 1958 – 1990): There’s many things the perceptive voice of the narrator, Andrea Rodriguez, doesn’t know (as well as us), distinguishing The Things We Didn’t Know from other migration stories.

Most significantly is that this coming-of-age displacement story originates from a territory of the US, Puerto Rico, not a foreign country. When we meet Andrea she’s spent four, young years in New England’s rugged Western Massachusetts, yet she and her younger brother Pablo didn’t know they were US citizens.

Most likely, we didn’t know their arrival during the fifties represented a “wave of Puerto Ricans” who came to the US mainland, which felt like a foreign land and culture, numbering around 700,000 by 1955, 1 million by 1960.

What also distinguishes this historical novel, perhaps not uniquely, is it’s told over thirty consecutive years. From the time Andrea was seven in 1958 to thirty-nine in 1990. Thus, a hard knocks story of hardships, acculturation, bilingualism, and hard-fought self-advocacy that reaches us someplace deep.

This is also a story of how a mother’s abandonment at a critically vulnerable time – when Andrea and Pablo were lost between two different worlds, languages, values, traditions, when they only knew basic, informal Spanish and hadn’t learned English yet – is seen as the catalyst of the family’s breakdown. Raquel’s spiraling relationship with her children from the beginning is foretelling, refusing to even try to adjust and learn English so she could help her children navigate two worlds. Andrea is most affected since she’s expected to assume all her mother’s responsibilities, while the impact on Pablo evolves differently. There’s a line in the novel that captures Andrea’s longing for a mother, commenting on her school classmate and neighborhood friend, Sally, whose parents “spoiled her with toys … But the best thing she had was her mother.”

There’s no shortage of books published over the past few years on how hard motherhood can be, and making the decision not to become a mother. Raquel angers us not because she’s stubborn and self-centered. Emotionally detached, abusive, achingly neglectful, she isn’t nurturing. The kind of person who should never have had children. What psychologists call Toxic Mother Syndrome.

The novel’s authenticity stems from Pérez’s own story, having lived in Puerto Rico and grown up in Western Massachusetts in the same isolated town, Woronoco. Pérez acknowledges she knows the same Puerto Rican community the Rodriquez family lived in named Beehive. A name that stood for industriousness. Fitting as Andrea’s father, Don Luis, raised on a farm in the mountains of Utuado, Puerto Rico, knows hard labor.

Landing a factory job at the Strathmore paper mill, the company also offered cheap rental homes. The mill and the Beehive are gone – the inspiration for the novel – but if you’re an artist or dabble in the medium, you know the company has endured.

The Rodriquez migration story depicts the primary reason Puerto Ricans left their homeland after WWII: the promise of jobs. Orchestrated between the Puerto Rican and US governments to reduce poverty levels in Puerto Rico while helping to fulfill America’s labor force needs.

Sprinkling Spanish words and phrases throughout the plentiful dialogue adds to the novel’s realness. Initially, you might stop reading to look up the English translations, which I did, until you realize if not spelled out you can often guess. Some words sound better in Spanish than the English slang or swear words; others don’t interfere with the storytelling. Their use also shows us how alienating you can feel when you don’t understand the language spoken.

As the controlling patriarch of this household, Don Luis brings a hard-working ethic and ultra-conservative values he demands of his kids. Out-of-step with American stateside culture in the fifties when children had free time to play games on neighborhood streets, ride bicycles, visit friends at their houses and invite them to yours. Andrea and Pablo are painfully cooped up inside watching their childhood disappear. Until they finally got bikes that gave them a taste of freedom and woodlands. Quite different, though, from their lush, tropical Caribbean island homeland.

The town mercilessly lacks public transportation, aggravated by Raquel not knowing how to drive. She didn’t need to in Puerto Rico, nor is she allowed to get behind the wheels of Don’s pride and joy: an Oldsmobile, quite popular back then.

A dramatic opening scene takes place inside that Olds: Raquel’s desperate-to-escape attempt to flee from her lonely misery. Endangering her kids doesn’t cross her mind. They don’t get far, to a nearby cliff, in this rocky terrain. The natural world delights two young, curious kids but it’s poison to a mother used to the ease of hopping on a public bus to do her errands and visiting. Raquel is miserable and unconcerned about making her family miserable too. In her early thirties, she still hasn’t figured out who she is at the expense of her children. 

Her second attempt succeeds. Dragging her children, unbeknownst to their father, landing in Puerto Rico at Raquel’s stepsister Cecilia’s house. Scrapping by, Andrea and Pablo are starving, but they’re hungrier for a mother.

Cecilia is a modern-day woman who owns her identity. She identifies as a man, dresses like one. The children’s sweet innocence recognizes their Aunt is different, could care less, embrace her love, strength, resolve, mothering. They also warm our hearts as Cecilia’s skin is darker than theirs, her father a Black man. They don’t harbor any prejudice, but you’ll see others in the family do. The complex history between Latinos and Blacks is depicted too.

An orphaned boy who brings food and friendship to Cecilia, Andrea, and Pablo is also endearing. He teaches the siblings how to playfully enjoy the beauty of the island. Meanwhile, no surprise, Raquel abandons them again, for weeks and months, until they feel she’s not their mother. When she suddenly shows up, whisks them away to a dangerous neighborhood elsewhere in Puerto Rico, you’ll wonder if they’ll ever escape that nightmare. 

Almost miraculously, they do. When they return to their father, his brothers and a sister have also come to the factory town, the men promised jobs at the mill. The importance of family and extended families in the Puerto Rican culture is captured. It makes a difference in the trajectory of Andrea’s life, but not Pablo’s. Considered to be the more intelligent of the two, but all the smarts in the world are wasted if you don’t apply yourself.

All good reasons Pérez’s novel was the first winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us contest.

Acceptance is an all-powerful theme. Tied to one’s self-image, part of the tough road to self-discovery and identity. Accepting who you are, as seen in Aunt Cecilia. Acceptance and then commitment to becoming who you want to be and what you want to do with your life in Andrea’s sacrifices and steadfastness. In Don Luis’ slow acceptance of Andrea’s life choices. Lack of acceptance of what you’ve done in Pablo’s case, and how there might still be a chance to accept and save yourself.

Yes, a winning story on how to overcome.

Lorraine

What’s lost and what can be saved after severe psychological trauma (China, northeast/southeast cities, and Toronto, Canada; 1968 – 2006): “In 1976, the sky over China collapsed.” So begins the newest, English-translated, searing novel by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian author Zhang Ling. Poignantly asking, “What can you hold onto forever?”

In 2010, Ling’s Aftershock novella was adapted into a movie that skyrocketed her to literary fame. By then, she’d immigrated to Toronto and was working as a clinical audiologist treating patients who were victims of wars and disasters. Her Chinese and Canadian experiences gave her first-hand insight into trauma. The movie became the “highest-grossing domestic film in China’s history.” Available in subtitles on some streaming platforms, be forewarned that even this short video clip is intense and disturbing:

Aftershock, turned-into-a-novel, is dedicated “To 1976, the most eventful year in my memory.” Psychologically focused on the aftermath of the worst 20^th century “natural disaster in the entire record of earthquakes,” Ling writes, killing an estimated half-a-million people and leaving survivors “numb and heartless.”

The emotionality of Aftershock may be the closest a non-psychologist/psychiatrist reader gets to understanding the mental anguish of a deeply-rooted, complex psychological illness: post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

Penetrating storytelling centers on one family living in a “simple, residential” community in China’s northeastern, coastal city Tangshan, in the Hebei province. You’ll see how some survivors cope, dramatically contrasted by one whose heart and soul are so broken she becomes an emotional shell of her former self. Xiaodeng is that mentally, dispirited main female character who essentially died in that epic earthquake too.

Ling’s piercing prose and storytelling deeply moves us, displaying why she’s been awarded multiple, prestigious Chinese literature prizes. A mere two-and-a-half opening pages, following an even briefer Foreword about that fateful 1976 day, may be one of the most compelling literary hooks you’ve read.

The story of a family of four primarily revolves around the mother, Li Yuanni, and her two twin children: daughter Xiaodeng and son Xiaoda. Twin psychology is also at play. Their father, a former soldier, drives a truck on “long-haul” journeys. Long-haul well-describes the novel’s journey from Before and After the earth exploded onto them. Mother-and-son are the more resilient ones, yet still dealing with their survivor guilt; Xiaodeng is the one who cannot move forward because of her mother’s in-the-moment, life-or-death decision when she realizes she can only rescue one child. A fleeting, excruciating decision with monumental, life-altering consequences. Why she chose her son over her daughter will haunt you.

There’s so many BIG themes packed into this slim historical, soulful novel (208 pages). The soul that’s left is what happens after unbearable sacrifice and abandonment. The depiction of Li digging through the “rubble with her our own fingers after the earthquake” leaves a mother and son with emotional and/or physical scars, yet overpowered by the left-to-die daughter.

Xiaodeng’s mental suffering is witnessed over thirty years. How do survivors of extreme emotional trauma get on with their lives? How tormented are their psyches? How well do they sleep? Have nightmares? Paralyzing anxiety? Unrelenting headaches? What are their relationships – familial, marriage, children, occupational – like? At one point, optimistic Xiaoda says, “Good days are coming,” and you can’t help but wonder when, if ever, that outlook will apply to his long-lost sister, who could be dead as far as mother and son know.

In a recent interview, Ling discusses how important the “mother-daughter relationship is,” which she’s explored in other novels. Aftershock delves into three mother-daughter relationships: Li’s and Xiaodeng’s; Xiaodeng with her adoptive mother (her adoptive father also influences feelings of betrayal); and when Xiaodeng marries and has a daughter of her own. An exceedingly strict, overprotective mother.

“Xiaodeng,” her husband Yang Yang says, in tears. “I can’t get inside your heart. I’ve been trying to for eighteen years, but it’s no use. You’re wrapped up too tightly.”

“What if I told you my heart was wrapped too tightly even for me to get in, would you feel better?” Xiaodeng replies. 

Yang Yang’s tears replace Xiaodeng’s who hasn’t cried since the earthquake. “Her eyes like ice caves.” Tears, a treatment goal. Her mother Li’s tears are of “only despair.”

Ling helps us understand why Xiaodeng is helpless at modifying her behavior for the sake of her daughter’s and husband’s happiness. Even love and tenderness cannot fix this family’s oppressive tension. “How could she give what she didn’t have?”

We don’t meet Xiaodeng in the Before. Instead, when she’s thirty-seven, when the damage has become ingrained, arriving by ambulance at a real Toronto hospital, whispering into the ear of a psychiatrist, “Save Me,” having tried to commit suicide. Can she be saved?

To fully absorb Ling’s heartrending words, Chinese history (ancient and revolutionary swiftly blended in), culture, and intentions calls for pacing yourself, despite riveting you. Otherwise, you may need to pause to get your bearings, as I discovered. Owing to the novel’s creative structure told in one fell swoop: one long chapter broken up by subparts or scenes that do not move chronologically over the decades and vary from place to place in China and Toronto. If you don’t pay attention to the dates you might get confused as Xiaodeng’s name changes from Chinese to North American and the storylines are multi-leveled depending on the time period. Time and place melt, creating the sense there’s no exit, no reprieve. The foreverness of mental illness, especially when you suffer inside and don’t let others know how badly you’re hurting should jolt even those who stigmatize mental disorders rather than appreciate how the mind influences people’s behaviors.

Like A Single Swallow, one of Ling’s earlier novels, Aftershock was also translated by Shelly Bryant. Released in 2020, its forceful prose conveys the same science and art of translation found in Aftershock that’s sure to remain vivid long after you finish it.

Earthquake survivors today are nearing their forties, Ling points out. How many others are quietly suffering to the degree Xiaodeng has? To Ling’s credit, she brings their debilitating psychological duress out in the open.

Atmospherically, the “force of the wind” blasts throughout, adding to the “crisp pain”and fantasy of being swept away escaping the pain.

It’s impossible not to reflect on how much of Zhang Ling’s personal experiences are blended into the novel. Like Xiaodeng, she came to Toronto, staying in China ten years after the earthquake. After the Cultural Revolution she depicts, launched and ended by Mao Zedong, the Communist founder of the People’s Republic of China, who also, strikingly, died in 1976. Another similarity we learn on page one is that Xiaodeng, like the author, is a famous writer. When she’s wheeled into the hospital, the staff know she’s just been honored with a Canadian literary award. The dichotomy between triumph and devastation is enlightening, like when we get shocked that a celebrity has taken his/her own life. Outward success conceals inner demons.

Freedom is another BIG theme. Freedom from mental agony, tyranny, and feeling free to express oneself. In another interview, Ling discusses what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution, “when a wrong opinion could lead to unimaginable consequences.” Her literary recognition happened after she left China.

Healing Fiction is both a literary subgenre and the name of a groundbreaking book by American psychologist, James Hillman. His therapeutic work was referred to in the above linked-to fascinating article about Aftershock, the movie.

If Xiaodeng can make “space for feelings” as her dedicated psychiatrist says, then the novel is a triumph, too, offering hope and healing through artful fiction.

Lorraine