A Shimmering Sea

A vivid and lyrical sequence of narratives tells of a quest for home. Sophronia Liu chronicles first her beginnings in 1950s Hong Kong. Her parents – each an indigenous inhabitant of a clan village – had very different life-experiences from each other. Her father attended prestigious King’s College as a scholarship student; her mother, an illiterate peasant, was fully occupied in raising ten children. Among the episodes, some tell of her growing up during the 1960s: of a grade school classmate’s tragic suicide, the arrival of a rambunctious and feisty domestic helper from the countryside, plainclothes detectives who came to her home to solicit her father for a bribe. She tells of her mother’s long illness, of turmoil and quarrels among family members. Some twenty years later, when Liu was a student in the American Midwest, memories of these people and places flooded back to haunt her. Responding to their call, Sophronia eventually returned to Hong Kong in 2006, to live near her native village and continue to write.