A sad story....written by the husband of a woman named Fu Li who was hurt very badly in a car accident near Niagara Falls on June 4, 1993. She suffered a traumatic brain injury. (I just thought how this story must be similar to Gabriel Gifford's...how one moment changes lives forever.)
The author had fled China after the horror of Tiananmen Square. He was considered a "criminal" as he had written "the script for a six-part television series, River Elegy, which probed so deeply into the core of Chinese beliefs and values that it galvanized the entire country in an explosion of intellectual debate."
He left behind his wife and young son Su Dan in China and came to the United States. They joined him a few years later and then the accident happened. This book is a love story, a grieving, a search for what might help Fu Li; it is a tale of regrets and recriminations, written in Chinese and translated into English, and most of the references are to Chinese writers and poets.
Meanwhile his son becomes an American teenager: "Fortunately, the kid can still speak Chinese with a perfect accent, thought he slips into English grammatical forms, which makes it sound weird. He's not going to walk out. After all, his mother is there. He surfs on the Internet, has his own website and home page, and calls himself Zen in that world. I asked him why Zen. He said no reason, he just liked the word. I wanted to ask him the meaning of Zen; then I thought to myself, Why bother? Possibly it has something to do with the Qigong and karate he started practicing after the accident. An unconscious reaching out for the East, I guess."
The writing is the inner dialogue of the author as he perseveres in his family's misfortune...
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