Ling Zhang was born in Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, China but grew up in the small town Wenzhou. She graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai with a bachelor degree in English and moved to Canada in 1986. Zhang earned an M.A. in English from the University of Calgary, and another M.A. in Communication Disorders at the University of Cincinnati. She now lives and writes in Toronto. Zhang has published at least eight novels and numerous short story collections in Chinese. Gold Mountain Blues is the first of her novels translated into English. Her novella about the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake was made into a block-buster Chinese film Aftershock in 2010.
Fiction
Aftershock: A Novel
Translated by Shelly Bryant.
Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis
In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonizing decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal.
Thirty years later, Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer living in Canada with a caring husband and daughter. However, her newfound fame and success do little to cover the deep wounds that disrupt her life, time and again, and edge her toward a breaking point. Xiaodeng realizes the only path toward healing is to return to Tangshan, find her mother, and get closure.
Spanning three decades of the emotional and cultural aftershocks of disaster, Zhang Ling’s intimate epic explores the damage of guilt, the healing pull of family, and the hope of one woman who, after so many years, still longs to be saved.
Fiction
Gold Mountain Blues
Translation by Nicky Harman.
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2011.
PS8599 .H36 G65 2011
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
Gold Mountain Blues is a rich saga chronicling the lives of five generations of a Chinese family from Guangdong Province, which are transformed by the promise of a better life in Gold Mountain, the Chinese name for Canada’s majestic West Coast.
Fiction
A Single Swallow
Translated by Shelly Bryant.
Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2020.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
On the day of the historic 1945 Jewel Voice Broadcast—in which Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces, bringing an end to World War II—three men, flush with jubilation, made a pact. After their deaths, each year on the anniversary of the broadcast, their souls would return to the Chinese village of their younger days. It’s where they had fought—and survived—a war that shook the world and changed their own lives in unimaginable ways. Now, seventy years later, the pledge is being fulfilled by American missionary Pastor Billy, brash gunner’s mate Ian Ferguson, and local soldier Liu Zhaohu.
All that’s missing is Ah Yan—also known as Swallow—the girl each man loved, each in his own profound way.
As they unravel their personal stories of the war, and of the woman who touched them so deeply during that unforgiving time, the story of Ah Yan’s life begins to take shape, woven into view by their memories. A woman who had suffered unspeakable atrocities, and yet found the grace and dignity to survive, she’d been the one to bring them together. And it is her spark of humanity, still burning brightly, that gives these ghosts of the past the courage to look back on everything they endured and remember the woman they lost.
Fiction
Where Waters Meet
Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2023.
Publisher’s Synopsis
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.
Anthology (Short stories)
Toward the North: Stories by Chinese Canadian Writers
Edited by Hua Laura Wu, Xueqing Xu, and Corinne Bieman Davies.
Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education, 2018.
Zhang, Ling. “The Abandoned Cat.” Translated by Zoë S. Roy, 32-47.
Zhang, Ling. “Toward the North.” Translated by Zoë S. Roy, 212-281.
Links
Publisher Penguin Random House Canada