Master storyteller continues to delight

Cover of Aftershock. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The distance has given her the room to both refine the language and delight the reader.

Her peer writer Yan Geling said: "Zhang Ling has a special talent for words, and what's more, she's polished each to shine like a gem. Her sentences are gilded; she brings hope to Chinese literature."

Zhang believes that a certain separation from the geography of the story and from her birth land and its history gives her a sharper insight.

"You can't see the full mountain when you're on it," Zhang said with a typical philosophical twist.

Her lectures and talks to hundreds of her loyal and devoted readers in Beijing and Shanghai were warmly welcomed. The recent talks in clear well-pronounced tones, were presented as if to make her audience see how her mind works to get the right word for a particular situation.

The author of five novels and five collections quotes liberally from Franz Kafka, Susan Sontag and Alexander Pope during the interview, as if she had just met them for coffee. A successful career as an audiologist in Canada has been dropped to focus on her writing.

"I decided to be a novelist when I was 7," she said. " Later I found that I needed to create a favorable environment to do justice to that devotion."

It wasn't easy at first, as thousands of writers have discovered. "I did not believe initially that I could make a living being a writer. A writer needs to feed herself; she needs to have a room like what Virginia Woolf said, both physically and mentally, and she needs not to worry about everyday stuff, like food." Hence the safety net of audiology, a branch of science that relates to hearing and balance.

Hence, no doubt, the importance she attaches to clear diction and possibly it also accounts for the balance in her stories. Nothing is one-dimensional.