But I Smile Anyway…

Today I am bringing you a beautiful story written byZhang Ling, Where Waters Meet.

The Blurb

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.

My Review

Where Waters Meet by Zhang Ling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Where Waters Meet is a heartwrenching story about a daughter and her journey to discovering the truth about her mother’s life after her death.
Phoenix, or Yuan Feng, travels from Canada to China in search of answers and peace for her mother, Rain, or Chunyu, from the only living relative left on her mother’s side, her mother’s sister.
The novel is told in a bit of a disjointed manner, moving back and forward from the present to various times in the past.
It took me a while to realise that the ‘past’ chapters were based on a manuscript that Phoenix is writing and sending back to her husband, George, in Canada, about her mother’s life and her own.
Once I got into the swing of it, I was intrigued.
I wanted to know the secrets of Chunyu. I felt the trauma of a young woman during the war-torn era in China, with the communist regime, facing famine, with a young daughter and a husband who couldn’t help due to injuries while in service.
I feel like I wanted to know more from Phoenix about how she felt when hearing about the most shocking parts of her mother’s past, which is not revealed until the final quarter of the book, as it is not something any child would expect to hear.
But I was invested in the story and felt the raw emotion of adult Phoenix and the young Chunyu before she could leave China with her daughter.

About the Author

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of
novellas and short stories, including A Single Swallow, translated by Shelly Bryant;
Gold Mountain Blues; and Aftershock, which was adapted into China’s first IMAX
movie with unprecedented box-office success.
Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986 and, in the mid-1990s, 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 China Times’s Open Book Award. Where
Waters Meet is her first novel written in English.