In Conversation: On Swimming Back to Trout River: A Novel

Born in Shanghai, Linda Rui Feng has lived in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto. Her prose and poetry have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, and Washington Square Review. Swimming Back to Trout River: A Novel (Simon & Schuster) is her first published work of fiction. In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, 10-year-old Junie receives a letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: Her father promises to return home and collect her by her 12th birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future. She doesn’t know that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. For Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three family members before Junie’s birthday – even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light. The New York Times noted that “With lean prose and assured storytelling, this debut novel describes a family fractured by geography, ambition and the ripple effects of China’s tumultuous 20th-century history.”

Weike Wang is the author of Chemistry (Knopf) and the forthcoming Joan is Okay (Random House). Her fiction has been published in literary magazines including Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares, and in 2019 Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.