Linda Rui Feng was born in Shanghai and lived on the west and east coasts of the United States before moving to Toronto where she is a professor of Chinese cultural history at the University of Toronto. Feng hold a BA in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University, and both an MA and PhD in East Asian Languages & Cultures from Columbia University. In addition to academic writing, Feng writes fiction and poetry.
Fiction
Swimming Back to Trout River
Simon and Schuster, 2021.
Forthcoming in May 2021.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.
What Junie doesn’t know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three members of the family before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.