2.5**

Ji Ling is a prominent businessman. Born in America while his father was a student, he has lived in Shanghai since he was 10 years old and no longer speaks English. When he suffers a brain injury as a result of an explosion in the hotel where he has met his father for dinner, the result is loss of language … except for a few English phrases. Frustrated and frightened, his family brings in an American doctor, a neurologist specializing in bilingual aphasia (loss of speech), to help him recover his speech. Months later the physical wreckage of the explosion has been cleared away, leaving no evidence of the rubble through which Ji Ling crawled to safety. But there is plenty of evidence of the wreckage in the emotional scars Ji Ling and his family bear.

In her debut novel, Xu explores the most intimate of human interactions – communication. The loneliness and isolation of not being able to communicate our wants, desires, feelings, and hopes are evident in all the characters. Of course there is the obvious injury to Ji Ling, but the American doctor – Rosalyn Neal – is no more able to communicate than her patient (and not only because she does not speak Chinese). Meiling, Ji’s wife, is locked in a pattern of not communicating. His father, Professor Ji, is silenced by the conventions of society and his fear of interfering in his son’s marriage. Alan, the interpreter, manages to convey words without any feeling or meaning.

It’s the kind of story and the kind of novel that I should have loved. I like character-based novels that explore the intricacies of human interaction. But somehow Xu’s writing went too far in giving us the sense of isolation that comes from the inability to communicate. This reader could not connect with any of the characters. I felt their frustration, because I felt frustrated. But rather than empathizing and caring about their predicament, I felt so removed from them as to not care at all what would happen to them.