Ling Zhang Knihy

A catastrophic disaster in China triggers a mother's heartbreaking choice and a daughter's reconciliation with the past in a powerful novel by the author of A Single Swallow and Where Waters Meet. 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.

A heart-breaking family saga in the epic storytelling tradition of Wild Swans chronicling the lives of five generations of a Chinese family transformed by the promise of a better life in Canada.

The eagerly awaited English translation of award-winning author Zhang Ling's epic and intimate novel about the devastation of war, forgiveness, redemption, and the enduring power of love. 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.

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 crystalized 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.

The narrative delves into the consequences of human-engineered flooding along China's Yellow River, examining its profound impact on the state, the environment, and the local population. It highlights the interplay between natural forces and human intervention, revealing the complexities and challenges faced by the region's inhabitants as they navigate the aftermath of these environmental alterations.

The book explores the global expansion of bamboo, examining its processes, impacts, and management practices. While not classified as traditional invasions, bamboo's growth has significant ecological consequences, such as altered element cycling, changes in soil microbial communities, and reduced biodiversity. The text addresses the unclear mechanisms behind bamboo's successful expansion and highlights the need for a deeper understanding of its ecological effects, emphasizing the importance of considering these impacts in environmental management strategies.

The first history of the human-engineered flooding of China's Yellow River, and how the creation of the delta affected the state, the environment, and the inhabitants of the region.

Intonation Effects on Cantonese Lexical Tones in Speaking and Singing Ling ZHANG The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Cantonese lexical tones are preserved in both speaking and singing (which can be regarded as a special kind of speech style). Through three phonetic experiments, the present thesis studies the intonation effects on Cantonese lexical tones in speaking and singing. An innovative theoretical framework was proposed, which is a two-dimensional matrix of pitch configuration (slope, register and span) and pitch domain (syllable level and utterance level, including utterance-body and utterance-final portions). Data analyses with this framework identified an updrift intonation in singing speech style, which stands out to be a reference for the universal declination intonation in speaking speech style. Further studies were conducted in speaking speech style with an interdisciplinary approach of phonetics and syntax: declarative and interrogative utterances with and without sentence-final particles (SFP, henceforth) were systematically compared. The results suggested that the utterance-final intonation is a kind of segmentless SFP. This study enriches the knowledge of intonation typology and provides further insight into the interrelated concepts of tone, intonation and SFP. ISBN 978 3 86288 699 9 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Phonetics 16. 246pp. 2016.