Where Waters Meet

by Zhang Ling

Things have a strange way of working themselves out, he concluded. Force and reaction, pressure and endurance. In the sphere of marital science, one needs chemistry to kick open the door, but after that, it’s physics that governs the running of it.

It was that little glow in her eyes, the shimmer of childlike longing for good food, for a chance to know the world, for a moment to be kind, that had fended off the erosion of time.

There was a time for everything, a time for a traffic light to turn green, a time for streets to wake up, a time for trees to bud and a river to swell, a time for him to know her, and for her to know him. All in good time.

“We always remember what we want to forget, and forget what we want to remember,”

for everything she wanted, there would be something else she had to give up, as the price.

A different world it was, in the woods, Yuan Feng concluded, with its own noises and its own quiet. The rules of the city didn’t quite work here.

Writers are murderers: we give life and then take it away, in a most premeditated way.

Revelation is indeed cruel, and truth is expensive. At times I wonder whether I can afford it.

It would take twenty more years for her to wise up and accept the plain truth that every daughter in the world loathes but nevertheless ends up living: the life of her mother.

What revolution leaves behind, commerce will readily pick up. Nothing ever goes to waste.

There is nothing safer than keeping the key to someone’s secret. It wasn’t a great love story by any measure, nothing to stand out and tickle one’s heart or to lose nights of sleep over, but it was a fine story of trust. Trust rises above emotions and mood swings, so it would last.

Every night is a tiny death, Mother used to tell her, and every morning a tiny rebirth.

No, a ghost doesn’t need a door. A ghost is a door by its own right, leading to another world.

To outlive the rain that dug holes into the skin, to outlive the bayonet that hissed in her dreams, to outlive the long nights infested with mosquitoes, bedbugs, and penises, and to outlive the gawky, cruel age of sixteen.

Who can go through a war unscathed, after all, without suffering some sort of sickness of the soul?

It was hard to decide whether he was enraged or awed by her ruthless honesty.

How could anyone explain hell, in a few cursory words, to someone who hadn’t been there? And the shame. “A long story.” She gave up trying.

The vulnerability, the solitude, the shame, and the fortitude, this woman had it all—a cold, cold heroism that made them shudder.

Stop thinking your bad thoughts. Bad thoughts lead to bad luck, they are the root of all the bad things.

It was another day, another world, and another life.

The war had jabbed its finger, with tumescent ferocity, into her adolescence, messing up the natural progression of life’s cycle, making her an imperturbable mother to all men before she was a shy girlfriend and a callow wife to one.

War had cut short everything: niceties, empathy, psychology, philosophy.

So many what-ifs, so many probable causes and unpredictable effects, the fate of man tweaked by an unseen, enigmatic, whimsical—some call it divine—hand with which no one can reason or negotiate.

What’s the purpose of life if she was to waste all the wrangling and wrestling that had gone into the outliving, when she didn’t even know what to do with the living?

Story alters geography.

Home. A word so common, yet so evasive.

After all, if one has lived during one’s lifetime in several places that can be loosely termed home, why should death restrict one to a single and final resting place? It would be discrimination against the soul, as a liberal mind might argue.