Li Jing, a happily married businessman, is dining at a grand hotel in Shanghai when a gas explosion rips through the building. A shard of glass pierces Jing's forehead, obliterating his ability to speak Chinese. He can form only faltering phrases in the English he spoke as a child in Virginia, leaving him unable to communicate with his wife, Meiling, or their young son. Desperate, the family turns to an American neurologist, Rosalyn Neal, who finds herself as lost as Jing--whom she calls James--in this bewitching city, where the two form a bond that Meiling does not need a translator to understand.
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With gorgeous prose and a dazzling sense of place, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai introduces a brilliant storyteller, who shows us the power of language in both our public and our private relationships.
A bizarre accident leaves a piece of glass in a Chinese man's brain, disconnecting his language center and rendering him incapable of speaking anything but snatches of English obscurely embedded in his memory. The terrible condition estranges Li Jing from his cherished wife in THE LOST AND FORGOTTEN LANGUAGES OF SHANGHAI, Ruiyan Xu's unusual novel about love and the tenuous thread of words that ties us together. When Li's wife seeks help from a Western specialist unused to life in China, patient and doctor find a bond in their different but mutual disorientations.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Themes, Fiction + Literature Genres
- Subgenre: Literary, Psychology, Types of Characters
- Publisher: Griffin
- Pages: 340
- Edition: Reprint
- Language:
English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date:
October 11, 2011
- Date Published:
October 11, 2011
-
Author: Ruiyan Xu
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- Online Item #: 13611187
- Store Item Number (DPCI): 059-04-1076
- ISBN: 9780312614157
- Item can be gift wrapped.
- Made in the USA or Imported
