Swimming Back to Trout River

 by Linda Rui Feng

This is a book set in China around the time of the Cultural Revolution. 

It starts with a young couple, Momo and Cassia, who have a handicapped child.  The woman decides to give her child to her in-laws to raise.  They love her and care for her very well.  First the grandfather makes her a wheeled cart that she can propel with sticks.  Eventually he makes her some prosthetic legs.  The father loves the girl and wants her to learn to play the violin but when he gives her a small violin and tries to teach her to play she throws it away.

We later learn that the girl's mother had loved a young man who died and she feels she was punished for this illicit affair by having the handicapped child.

Another character in the book is Dawn, a young chinese violinist, who has achieved acclaiim.

Momo has received permission to go to the U.S. to study.  He hopes to have his wife and daughter join him.  The daughter doesn't want to leave her grandparents.  His wife does make it to San Francisco but decides to stay there rather than join her husband.  She becomes a nanny for a little boy and has been told to only speak to him in Chinese.

Eventually Mom and Cassia develop relationships with other people in the U.S.

Momo has written Dawn telling her how impressed he is with her work and also telling her a bit about his life and his wish for his daughter to play the violin.

Dawn travels to the U.S. with a Chinese orchestra and then seeks asylum in the U.S.  She has left a man she reluctantly married behind in China.

In the end of the book Momo has learned how to drive so that he can drive to San Francisco to try to convince his wife to join him and for them to get their daughter to America with them.   The woman tells him she has a lover.  They go for a drive and are killed in a car accident.

The book ends with Dawn arriving at the daughter's home in China with her violin and a child-size violin.

It was an interesting story, sad to see how the mother didn't care for her own child but could bond with someone else's.  However, I think I would have to read it again to understand the relationship between Dawn and the family,