Mobo C. F. Gao. Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China

c h in es e l it er a tu re to d ay v o l. 9 n o . 2 struggles for a new life in the church of Pastor Billy. After futile attempts to hide from her degraded past, she determines to confront shame and speak out. She cuts off her ties to Zhaohu, now an officer in training, and falls in love with Ian. However, along with Pastor Billy’s accidental death and Ian’s permanent return to America, Ah Yan is left alone at the end of the war. She gives birth to a mixed-race daughter that she has with Ian and settles back in her home village. As Zhaohu escapes from the Nationalists’ retreat to Taiwan, she takes him in and exhausts herself saving him from imprisonment and caring for him until the last moment of his life. Like many of Zhang Ling’s earlier novels, A Single Swallow adopts a non-linear narrative that creates gripping suspense. The souls of the three men recount their piece of personal stories in retrospect from a first-person limited point of view. Their narrations complement and sometimes contradict each other, presenting diverse perspectives and cultural clashes in a Chinese rural village during its first encounter with the West. In contrast, Ah Yan, also called Stella and Wende (“Wind”) respectively by Pastor Billy and Ian, is curiously silenced; her words can only be occasionally heard through the subjective lens of male narrators. The absence of Ah Yan’s voice betrays the invisible discursive oppression of women in a patriarchal culture. Various genres of letter, journal, county record, and newspaper article are included to add a historical sense to the novel. In a unique narrative style, A Single Swallow compels readers to reflect on innocence and humanity through the prism of war.