Book Review: Swimming Back to Trout River by Linda Rui Feng

Swimming Back to Trout River by Canada-based Linda Rui Feng is a questioning about how parents´ choices may influence children´s fate, particularly when it comes to relocating in a different culture and language.

The debut novel is written in the third person and manages an impressive cast of characters, covering at least one generation timeline, from the time of the Mao´s cultural revolution until the nowadays San Francisco. Surprinsingly, despite the long historical and personal accounts, the story is very concise, covering less than 300 pages, made of small plots which lately may join the main story of three main characters: Cassia, Momo and their daughter Junie, born without lower legs and feet. As Cassia and Momo are leaving China, one after the other, for the USA, Junie is left with her ailing grandparents, and stubbornly opposes the idea of joining her parents. If they will finally win, warns she, she will swim back to Trout River, the small village where her grandparents live. 

The story is densely built, both in terms of the autonomous action as for covering a multitude of politically internal and external encounters - from the oppression of the Cultural Revolution to the Chinese-Russian rift. 

The decision of leaving the country, splitting families and destiny is explored from a very novel point of view, from the perspective of the consequences into the lives of those who are unable to decide their future. And there are those political decisions taken which traumatized generations after generations. The individual is insignificant in a world on the move and in the making, a perspective which is very much familiar to the Eastern philosophy. Like the way in which Junie was born. Or the victims of the horrible Cultural Revolution - a phenomenon not enough explored literarily in my opinion. 

What I particularly loved in Swimming Back to Trout River were the musical references present not only as the love for playing an instrument or for a score, but as a seamless connection between the performer, the instrument and, last but not least, the score. It also transcedes questions about the political identity of a musician - entangled into the oppression of the Cultural Revolution who intensively fought against professional musicians whose instruments were destroyed, among others, but also assumed during the musician´s presence outside his or her homecountry realm. Again, we have to deal with the individual caught into the nets of history. 

Swimming Back to Trout River is on my top list of the debut novels I´ve read this year. It is not only beautifully written and built, but it also raises questions about identity and humans facing decisions and the blindness of history. 

Rating: 5 stars