Swimming Back to Trout River by Linda Rui Feng

Author:Linda Rui Feng [Feng, Linda Rui]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

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Momo’s first letters to Cassia and to his parents were cheerful and full of detail and local color, but increasingly, he began letters that he didn’t know how to finish. His enthusiasm for reportage waned, and it was well into December before he understood the nature of his disquiet.

In China, collisions between people, desires, and trajectories were so constant that even jealousy of your neighbors resembled a kind of intimacy. There, simply by the changes in the smells of their cooking wafting in from down the hall in the cramped apartment buildings, you could tell which neighbor got a raise, was pregnant, or had digestive troubles.

In America, without having to jostle for elbow room, every person, idea, and object had its place to exist. Surely this spaciousness, this plenitude, was the most wondrous thing about America. But it was also its most terrifying, because at times, this wide-open, stake-your-own-claims space also resembled hollowness and oblivion: a vacuum. The air in America was pure and clean, to be sure. But it was also thin, the way the air of mountaintops made you gasp for breath. When Momo looked out from his lab window at the tail end of daylight, the sheer expansiveness of the unpeopled landscape exhilarated and tormented him in turn.

One evening before Christmas break when Momo worked late at his lab, he tried to take a shortcut through an unfamiliar part of campus and ended up on an unlit athletic field. The night was moonless and clear, and he was so stunned by the stars overhead that he lay down on the grass, wrapped his coat tightly around him, and just looked. Though the grass was covered with frost, what he saw transported him to that sultry summer night just before he turned twelve, when his whole family slept on the low rooftop to avoid the heat.

He knew that his mother was frightened by what happened, but his own memory of it was scintillating with excitement. It was the first time he woke in the middle of the night and noticed how the span of the Milky Way above him had shifted. The stars seemed so fiercely close that he could feel them on his face: a cold kind of hot. The Weaver Girl Star, across the Sky River from the Herd Boy Star: these were the brightest ones. He was the only one awake. His older brother, next to him, splayed out his limbs, and Momo scooted farther toward the edge of the rooftop to get away from his brother’s encroaching leg.

He remembered growing groggy again on that roof, and thinking that there was an eternity separating him and adulthood, and he could do nothing but wait. He dreamed that a meteor slashed open the darkness just above the horizon, blinking at him conspiratorially as if to say, It’s all right—you just wait. He was so pleased that he rolled over to his side for a more comfortable position.

In the next moment, he was in the air.

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