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    The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai: A Novel
    The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai: A Novel
    The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai: A Novel

    Written by Ruiyan Xu

    Narrated by Angela Dawe

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    Li Jing, a high-flying financier, has just joined his father for dinner at the grand Swan Hotel in central Shanghai when, without warning, the ground begins to rumble, shifts, then explodes in a roar of hot, unfurling air. As Li Jing drags his unconscious father out of the collapsing building, a single shard of glass whistles through the air and neatly pierces his forehead. In an instant, Li Jing's ability to speak Chinese is obliterated.

    After weeks in a hospital, all that emerge from Li Jing's mouth are unsteady phrases of the English he spoke as a child growing up in Virginia. His wife, Zhou Meiling, whom he courted with beautiful words, finds herself on the other side of an abyss, unable to communicate with her husband and struggling to put on a brave face for the sake of Li Jing's floundering company and for their son, Pang Pang.

    Rosalyn Neal, a neurologist who specializes in Li Jing's condition-bilingual aphasia-arrives from the United States to work with Li Jing, to coax language back onto his tongue. Rosalyn is red-haired, open-hearted, recently divorced, and as lost as Li Jing in this bewitching, bewildering city. As doctor and patient sit together, sharing their loneliness along with their faltering words, feelings neither of them anticipated begin to take hold-feelings Meiling does not need a translator to understand.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 20, 2010
    ISBN9781400189328
    Author

    Ruiyan Xu

    Ruiyan Xu was born in Shanghai and moved to the USA at the age of ten. She graduated from Brown University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is her first novel.

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    Reviews for The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

    3/5

    25 ratings23 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book is based on an intriguing idea; How do you communicate with your loved ones when you suddenly lose the ability to speak with them because you can't speak or write in the same language. Li Jing is in a terrible accident which results in the loss of his ability to speak or write Chinese, although he can still understand it. He is left with the ability to speak English which he learned as a child, but he lives in China, owns his own business and is married to a Chinese woman who doesn't speak English and has a young son who also does not speak Chinese. The answer, in this story, is to find a specialist. The one found happens to be an female American doctor, recently divorced, adrift in her life. I won't say I didn't like the book, It gave me a lot to think about. However, I was disappointed. SPOILER ALERT-don't read farther if you don't want to know more about the ending of the story. There was a lot of cliche and stereotyping. The boorish American who tramples all over foreign culture. The stoic Chinese, unable to break thru their walls of silence even to help save themselves or their child. The shattered female who needs a man. I felt let down by the easy road taken. I was also extremely put off by the seemingly cavalier way Dr. Neal enters into a personal relationship with her patient. Not once is there any discussion of how unethical it would be for Dr. Neal to cross that patient-doctor boundary. I disliked the wrap up to the book. We are given quite a bit of the inner thoughts of Dr. Neal but once the affair happens and Li Jing and Roysalyn's relationship disintegrates she basically disappears from the story. The epilogue provides virtually nothing of her fate.My underlying feeling was more of a question. How might the story have played out if there had been no relationship between Dr. Neal and Li Jing?
    • 3/5
      Interesting, quiet story of a Chinese stockbroker whose brain is damaged in a bizarre accident and who becomes unable to speak Chinese ... he can understand it, but can only speak English, the language he learned as a child in America.
    • 2/5
      2.5**

      Ji Ling is a prominent businessman. Born in America while his father was a student, he has lived in Shanghai since he was 10 years old and no longer speaks English. When he suffers a brain injury as a result of an explosion in the hotel where he has met his father for dinner, the result is loss of language … except for a few English phrases. Frustrated and frightened, his family brings in an American doctor, a neurologist specializing in bilingual aphasia (loss of speech), to help him recover his speech. Months later the physical wreckage of the explosion has been cleared away, leaving no evidence of the rubble through which Ji Ling crawled to safety. But there is plenty of evidence of the wreckage in the emotional scars Ji Ling and his family bear.

      In her debut novel, Xu explores the most intimate of human interactions – communication. The loneliness and isolation of not being able to communicate our wants, desires, feelings, and hopes are evident in all the characters. Of course there is the obvious injury to Ji Ling, but the American doctor – Rosalyn Neal – is no more able to communicate than her patient (and not only because she does not speak Chinese). Meiling, Ji’s wife, is locked in a pattern of not communicating. His father, Professor Ji, is silenced by the conventions of society and his fear of interfering in his son’s marriage. Alan, the interpreter, manages to convey words without any feeling or meaning.

      It’s the kind of story and the kind of novel that I should have loved. I like character-based novels that explore the intricacies of human interaction. But somehow Xu’s writing went too far in giving us the sense of isolation that comes from the inability to communicate. This reader could not connect with any of the characters. I felt their frustration, because I felt frustrated. But rather than empathizing and caring about their predicament, I felt so removed from them as to not care at all what would happen to them.
    • 2/5
      I should say upfront that if I were reviewing this book for my normal circle of friends, I should give it 1-star, as it contains little of personal interest; however, I am willing to believe that there are other people who probably would enjoy this book, and for that speculative audience it is probably quite well done. I picked this book (I already count too many "I"s in this review, but in this case I really need to distinguish between my own preferences and that of the author, for they differ) because the cover blurb promised a spirited dive into the interface between Chinese and English languages, a thought-provoking jaunt into the subtle mechanisms by which language can influence culture and thought.

      Perhaps this could take a long historical view on how the silkily sibilant languages of the orient indirectly led to those cultures' uniquely non-dualogical viewpoint. Or it could have been an intensely personal experience of the ontological shift between ideogrammatic and alphabetical written tongues, of the dichotomy between word-as-image of the thing itself, the referent behind the name, and word-as-abstraction, an occasionally unique permutation of arbitrary and increasingly dehumanitized character bytes. Or best of all, it could have painted an entirely new and unexpected perspective on the many different ways in which East meets West in philosophy, paternal obligation, self-image, notions of achievement, and love.

      But this was none of these, not really. This was a romance, and a depressingly tragic one at that. In the end, everyone ends up unhappy. Everyone makes poor decisions throughout, which bring predictable grief and trauma to their loved ones. Maybe this is real life, but I don't need to read a book to find tales of misery -- I can get that on any page of the Metro I find crumpled in the trash-bins of workaday city life.

      I will not go so far as to say there is no room in literature for tragedy: for instance, I admit a fondness for King Lear, especially Kurosawa's oriental adaptation Ran. But this novel did not engage me in any sense of universal suffering, other than reaffirming the tired aphorisms that men are insensitive, workaholic, violent, selfish pigs; women are downtrodden, self-sacrificing, unappreciated martyrs; and white women, even ones with PhD's, are closet succubi who use their unwholesome curves to bewitch and corrupt Asian men proud and true. I've heard that before, and didn't really need to hear it again.

      So: two stars, for an admittedly well-written and evocative story of romance, tragedy, and betrayal set amidst the hospitals, tea rooms, and boardrooms of bustling, ancient Shanghai; if you're into that sort of thing. Nothing higher, because while I'm far from expert in this type of novel, I didn't see anything that struck me as exceptional (unless the bar for this genre is even lower than I'd guessed).
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this. An interesting and painful account of the effort to regain language after brain damage suffered by Li Jing when a building collapses on him. He loses completely his capacity to speak or re-learn Chinese, yet retains basic English, which he had learned as a child. An American neurologist, Rosalyn Neal, comes to help. A close bond develops between them, while Meiling, Li Jing's wife, feels totally excluded and jealous. It destroys the marriage, but Meiling cannot abandon him. The book ends on a very slightly hopeful note. She may try to learn English, even if she cannot forgive his betrayal, and so be able to be part of the relationship Li Jing and Pangpang, their child, (who learns English at school) still have.
    • 2/5
      At times, novels set in a different culture from my own feel a bit inaccessible to me -- distanced. Culture, like a language, can sometimes be a barrier. The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is, essentially, a novel of barriers. Culturally between Americans and Chinese, older generations and younger generations, and even expats and visitors. But the major theme is that of language.After Li Jing is injured in the collapse of a large hotel, he is diagnosed with aphasia, leaving him unable to communicate in his native Chinese, although he can understand it.More bizarrely, he is left both able to understand and speak English, the language of his childhood, although he has not used it for many years. A specialist in what is known as bilingual aphasia is flown in from the United States in the hopes that her experience in the field, as well improving Li Jing's English, will help him re-learn his Chinese.I liked that the novel made me contemplate the intimacy of communication, as well as the barriers the lack of it can put up. As the narrator was 3rd person omniscient, I experienced the interesting frustration of knowing what each character was thinking and seeing the consequences of their inability to express themselves.I enjoyed contemplating what a lack of language might do to my own relationships. At first, I was almost puzzled by the difficulties Li Jing and his wife Meiling had communicating. After all, they had translators, both human and computerized. But slowly, I began to appreciate the intimate things that can neither be spoken to a human outside that relationship, nor fully communicated through a clumsy computer translator.Meanwhile, Li Jing's doctor, Rosalyn Neal, has arrived in Shanghai on the heels of a painful divorce, and finds that being one of the few English speakers, she and her patient are beginning to share a very inappropriate bond facilitated by the fact that they are often living in their own private world of two.While the premise is interesting and thought-provoking, the execution left me feeling as if there was a failure to communicate. After briefly considering that the differences may have been cultural, I rejected the idea. After all, Meiling, the most Chinese character in the whole novel was also the character I connected with the most.Unfortunately, Li Jing and Rosalyn are simply not deep characters, nor are they particularly likable or understandable. As the novel is largely character and not plot-driven, this lack of depth creates a barrier between the reader and the story almost as insurmountable as a lack of common language.More depth and even length (to give the author time to more fully delve into each character) may have been the answer here -- or at the very least a stronger plot arc. I see potential in the writing, and, as stated, really enjoyed the questions the story raised, but was ultimately left unsatisfied.
    • 3/5
      I love the premise of this book. The notion of losing one's primary language but retaining another was fascinating. The characters, however, kept me at a distance. I don't know why, exactly--I wonder if it's because the omniscience of the narrator gave me too many perspectives and in the end I couldn't identify with any of them.
    • 2/5
      I'll admit that the book makes the reader think about the importance and intimacies of language, and finds a lot of ways to do this. It also highlights how damning or compelling it can be to have someone who either encourages or discourages self-sabotaging behavior when your in crisis. So, I can't call the book crap. But I found it painfully over-written (as if a book about language can't be composed of simple, straight-forward words and sentences—pretentious), slow and boring and I disliked almost all the characters almost the whole time, Rosalyn especially.
    • 1/5
      This book sucked. I was really looking forward (for years!) to reading it, it has such a beautiful title.. and it's got no depth, is populated by cardboard cutouts instead of characters (and not even terribly likely bits of cardboard: the neurologist turns into a sorority girl?). The writing wasn't terribly bad, but it wasn't anywhere near the calibre that would have been needed to rescue this tale.
    • 3/5
      I liked the aspects of this book related to aphasia. I thought the accident and the consequences to the main character were fascinating. However, most of the behavior of the characters was appalling and frustrating to read about.
    • 4/5
      Li Jing is a successful Chinese businessman with a loving wife named Meling and a wonderful son. But one sunny afternoon, his life is changed forever. While dining with his father at an upscale restaurant, a gas explosion rips through the building, leaving him with a massive brain injury that robs him of his ability to speak his native language. The only way that Li Jing can communicate is through the English that he learned as a child growing up in Virginia. Despite their wealth, Li Jing and Meiling are unable to obtain the rehabilitation services he needs, leaving him socially isolated, as no one understands the rudimentary English he speaks. After hearing about her remarkable achievements in the areas of speech and cognition, they eventually hire Dr. Rosalyn Neal to work with Li Jing in China. Rosalyn, fleeing from a painful divorce and at a standstill in her research, comes to China with great hopes for both Li Jing and her career but finds herself lost in the busting world of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Li Jing's inability to communicate with his wife drives the couple further and further apart, leading to many awkward moments and explosive arguments. Under the guise of therapy, Rosalyn and Li Jing begin to form a tenuous relationship that further threatens to rip the family apart and which leaves Meiling bristling and resolute. In this lyrically moving and emotional new novel, Ruiyan Xu defines the inexplicable power of the words we say and the strength and enormity of the things we leave unsaid.While this book initially left me feeling a bit lukewarm, I found that the further into it I got, the more resonant and heartbreaking the story actually was. The majority of the first section was a bit mired in description and scene setting, and while I found it interesting, I did feel like it was a slow ramp up. I got the feeling that Xu had to warm up to her story a bit, and that as an author, the world she created took some time for her to fully inhabit. When the layers started peeling away and the carefully crafted scenes took center stage, I was blown away by the potency and hidden undercurrents in this book.One of the things that made the biggest impression on me was the way Xu really got down to the nitty-gritty with her characters. They could be cold, obnoxious, and oh so flawed, and their resemblance to real people was something that I appreciated, but that at times made me squirm. This was particularly the case with the female characters in this book. Rosalyn and Meiling were such different kinds of people and I found that different parts of my psyche reacted in a wildly divergent way while I was reading about them. In Rosalyn there was a high-spiritedness that sometimes bordered on hysteria and a lack of self-consciousness that, while making her friendly and approachable, seemed to also make her oblivious to social niceties and propriety. Meling, on the other hand, was an ice queen. Very driven and proper, she could also be unforgiving and malicious. When the two interacted, the fireworks shot right off the page, and frankly, their reactions to each other made me a little uncomfortable.The story of what happens to Li Jing was strange but also very realistic. What does one do when the old ways of communicating are no longer valid and the only person that can understand you is alien and strange to you? Xu does a great job examining this, and in her creation of Li Jing she manages to fashion a character that is confused and alienated, yet still desperately wants to make himself and his wishes understood. This is a particularly moving situation, especially in the way it impacts his relationship with his young son. As Li Jing's life falls away piece by piece, it's only the husk of his former self that remains and he finds himself taking extraordinary risks both emotionally and physically. It was hard to watch Li Jing become so impotent and powerless, and this is a situation that never really rectifies itself, becoming anguishing to experience as the story turns the final corner.One of the ways that Xu really stands above the crowd in terms of her writing is her ability to construct tightly focused scenes that are somewhat emotionally restrained, yet devastating. Longing and desire juxtaposed with rage and pitilessness; capriciousness interposed with desolation: these are the emotions that come screaming out at the reader, despite the fact that the language used to interpret them is fairly restrained and subdued. There are scenes that brought me to my knees in unexpected sympathy and at times my stomach dropped with desolation at the humbling rendering of this now devastated family. Xu is a powerful writer, but she kind of creeps up on you, and in the end, it makes the impact of her story all the more striking.In terms of emotional complexity, this book excels. It's deep and nuanced and it really surprised me. Although it does start out a bit slow, the buildup is intense, and by the time I had finished it, I was left feeling some very complex and contradicting feelings about its characters and the situations they were forced to live in. If you are the type of reader who gets easily engrossed in well-constructed dramatic stories, I would highly recommend this book to you. If you leave yourself open to it, it might just take you to some unexpected places.
    • 2/5
      Ruinyan X Li's debut starts off in a flurry of similes and, to my mind, flowery language. And as the book goes on, "The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai" doesn't get much better.The basic plot, the story of a Chinese man who loses his ability to speak his native language after an explosion, is a promising one. But Li fumbles the ball and lets the story drift into chick lit land with her sloppy characterizations, especially the female ones.I had a very hard time sticking with this book, especially as Rosalyn and Li Jing's relationship shifted. The author shows promise if she can ditch her tendency to over-describe and focus on creating characters more in line with the elderly Professor Li.
    • 4/5
      Received for review from Bookbrowse First Impressions Program.This is a beautifully written novel exploring the intricacies and dependency humans have on language and how their limitations can project into daily choices. The characters are well developed and layered with subtlety, and the story proceeds at a comfortable pace. Xu's style is lyrical and full of imagery and symbolism. Unable to return to life as he knew it, Li Jing, turns to the most welcoming option available to him after a freak accident robs him of his ability to speak Chinese. Rediscovering his life through the English language he knew as a child alienates him from his wife and child, and cripples his ability to function in his city and his formerly successful life.Unable to express himself with the nuance and subtlety that is integral to the Chinese language, Li Jing is attracted to the unsubtle but comprehensible American doctor who has been brought over to treat his Aphasia. She is the antithesis of his wife Meiling, fire to ice. And as he is drawn to her nurturing warmth, he becomes more and more alien to his former life. Li Jing must make a choice: to live in utter isolation while his frighteningly competent wife charges ahead; or escape to a situation where he can communicate his needs in English and leave his family, language, and culture.
    • 4/5
      Li Jing was born in the United States and spent the first ten years of his life there. His father, a Chinese college professor, had come to America to start a new life, but he decided to return to China with his son after the sudden death of Li Jing’s mother. Two decades later, Li Jing is a hardworking Shanghai investment banker, head of his own firm, and he barely remembers the English he learned as a child. That will change when a traumatic brain injury leaves Li Jing suffering from an unusual form of Broca’s aphasia. He loses all ability to speak or write in Chinese, although he can still understand what is said to him in that language, but he has retained the uncanny ability to express himself in simple English. That his wife and young son speak not a word of English is a problem. Just as threatening for the longer term, Li Jing knows that his business will certainly fail unless he regains the ability to maintain his intimate connections within the Shanghai business community – something impossible to do for a man who can no longer make himself understood in Chinese. Desperate for the breakthrough her Chinese doctors are unlikely to achieve, Meiling (Li Jing’s wife), agrees to bear the expense of an American neurologist to come to Shanghai to work with her husband for a number of weeks. Newly divorced Oklahoma doctor, Rosalyn Neal, looking for any kind of fresh start, accepts the job. Rosalyn Neal, however, is prepared neither for the energy-sapping complications of trying to make herself understood in a country whose language she does not speak, nor for the challenge presented by her new patient.Li Jing, unable to speak Chinese, and refusing to speak English, remains silent for so long that Rosalyn begins to talk about herself as a way to fill the silence in his hospital room. Something in her story stirs Li Jing’s own memories of his American childhood and the two grow closer despite Li Jing’s continuing failure to recapture the Chinese language. Almost too late, Meiling realizes she will have to compete for her husband’s affection with the very doctor she brought to Shanghai to help cure him."The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai," Ruiyan Xu’s debut novel, is an ambitious one in which she explores the importance of language and culture in human relationships. Li Jing loses more than words when he loses his ability to speak Chinese. He can only communicate with his wife in the simplest of terms, completely unable to express in any depth the fears, doubts, and other emotions he feels. Meiling grows weary of the process and begins to lose hope and, finally, interest, as her marriage begins to fall apart."The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai" is more, though, than a novel about loss. It explores whether a common language (and the inherent ability to communicate deeply) might be more emotionally important to a relationship than common culture and shared past. It is a novel about misunderstanding, despair, betrayal, forgiveness, and recovery. It is a beautifully written first novel that offers an intriguing look into modern Chinese culture and reminds the reader just how important words are.Rated at: 4.0
    • 4/5
      I can't imagine losing my ability to communicate. And as much as I think I would be determined to hold on to relationships, hobbies, daily life - I don't know if I could avoid the anger and resentment that would come with being constantly misunderstood. In this story, all the characters are out of their comfort zones, out of one another's control, out of patience; all are both betrayers and betrayed; all need to escape, but to what? The story is about understanding and misunderstanding, adapting to change versus fighting to hold on to what was. The writing is moving, full of rich details of daily life for a Chinese family, and of the front put up to entertain foreigners. A good read - solidly enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      (This review contains major spoilers.)After an awkward start (overlong descriptions of the explosion, where less would have been more powerful), this book really drew me in, to the point where I worried about the characters even when I was not reading the book. It's been a long time since a novel has done that for me. So I was surprised when I logged on here and saw the negative reviews. I was listening to the audiobook, and the excellent reading really brought the characters to life; perhaps I would have felt less connected to the characters if I'd read the book with my eyeballs.My favorite chapters were the ones from Pang Pang's point of view. He saw things so differently. His chapters were magical. And out of all the characters, he takes the most ownership of his actions.The chapters from the doctor's point of view highlight the excuses people make to justify their actions to themselves. The doctor goes off on vacation with a married man, and his son, "because she guesses she can't refuse this man anything"? She is reluctant to leave Shanghai on schedule because she'll never get an artisanal cocktail in Oklahoma? She betrays the woman who has paid her way to Shanghai and paid her salary -- she betrays the Hippocratic oath ("first do no harm") -- and she does not even have the decency to feel shame. I think some of the negative reviews stem from disgust with this character and her lack of personal growth or even awareness. However, I have definitely known people like her, who believe they deserve what they want, regardless of who they hurt.The chapters from the husband's point of view highlight the anger he can't control; his overwhelming need for control; and perhaps, how he manipulates the doctor because of his need for control. But in the end, when he almost loses his son, perhaps he accepts his lack of control, and accepts that he has to start over and build a new life. He realizes he needs his wife, so he focuses on being present for her, being grateful to her, without being pushy. Taking over the responsibilities at home. Accepting her decisions about work and money. Patiently waiting her out. This is, I am afraid, a pretty unrealistic development for a man like him, but it's nice to imagine that it could happen.So then it all comes back to Meiling. The most sympathetic character. The least self-destructive character. But someone who needs to find her own voice. Be real, and not just an ideal. She has made steps towards that, at the end, selling the apartment and the business, going back to her poetry. She is helping to build their new life together too, she just needs to find the strength to face it. It really is a beautiful ending, when you think of it like that; the three of them facing up to their life together.
    • 3/5
      The premise is interesting - a Chinese man (Li Jing) suffers a freak head injury that leaves him unable to speak Chinese. He did, however, live in America as a child and is able to speak some English. A specialist is brought in from the US to try to help him regain his language skills.However, in the absence of communication, his marriage and relationship with his son suffer. His wife, Meiling, is stoic in even the best of times, so she carries on but is suddenly enigmatic to Li Jing. Meanwhile, something more than medical seems to be happening between Li Jing and his American doctor, who of course happens to be a redheaded woman.I liked the middle of the book the best, I think. I found the choppy writing style of the beginning (probably a stylistic choice to depict the confusion of Li Jing's accident) more distracting than effective. The end felt like it ran out of steam before the book ran out of pages. But in the middle, there are some very interesting ideas about how a common language can create intimacy, and the lack of one enforces distance.I found myself thinking about how well I think I'd be able to do at only using non-verbal clues to understand other people's intentions. I agree that, like the characters in the book, I'd be prone to misinterpretation and frustration....Two somewhat nitpicky notes that completely took me out of the story, though (and will hopefully be corrected before the final printing). Early on in the story when a doctor is trying to get Li Jing to pronounce his own name, his name is written in pinyin with each word having the symbol for a third tone (falling, then rising). However, the doctor tells him that he should be pronouncing it with the fourth tone - coming down at the end of the syllable. And at the end, there is a sentence written in pinyin that uses the word "shou" when it should be "shuo." The latter means "talk," which is what is given in the English translation and although I have no idea what the former means, I'm pretty sure "shuo" is what should have been there.
    • 3/5
      Li Jing is a Chinese businessman with a wife named Meling and a young son. But one afternoon, a freak accident changes his life forever. A gas explosion in a restaurant leaves him with an inability to speak his native language. The only way he can communicate is thru the English language he learned as a child growing up in the states. The family hires Dr. Rosalyn Neal to work with him. She is running from a painful divorce and came to China to escape. Meanwhile, Li Jing's inability to communicate with his wife drives the couple further and further apart, leading to many explosive arguments. During therapy, Rosalyn and Li Jing begin to form a bond that further threatens to rip the family apart.This book drew me in with it's vivid descriptions of China but the story was missing something. I did not like any of the characters especially the female characters, who were a bit cold and flawed. Rosalyn was a wild, selfish person who forgot she was supposed to be a doctor and Meling was an ice queen who abandoned her sick husband. I could not identify with either of them. Overall, the writing is full of rich details of daily life for a Chinese family and it was an okay read.
    • 4/5
      Lyrical and moving, Ruiyan Xu’s debut novel, The Lost & Forgotten Languages of Shanghai revolves around Li Jing, a young man who has incurred brain damage in an explosion. The accident leaves him with a rare type of aphasia: He is unable to speak or write in Chinese, his dominant language, but has the ability to communicate in limited English, the long forgotten language of his early childhood spent abroad in America. Xu poignantly portrays Li Jing’s futile attempts to communicate with his wife without a common spoken language. The stoicism of the Chinese culture, where emotions are not readily revealed, exacerbates the painful misunderstandings between the couple. Then a young, exuberant American doctor, Roselyn Neal, arrives on the scene. Li Jing finally has someone he can talk to, and Roselyn, recently divorced and lonely, is attracted to him as well. At times heartbreaking, The Lost & Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be able to truly communicate with another human being. The prose is lovely, the characters convincing, and the story compelling. Heartily recommended!
    • 3/5
      "Hurt people hurt people." That's the phrase that comes to mind when I consider this story. In Shanghai, a man suffers a debilitating injury impairing his ability to speak his own language. In his emotional pain, he distances himself from his wife, with whom he can no longer communicate. The medical specialist called in to consult on his case is a doctor from the States, hurting from a recent separation from her husband, but in her pain, apparently hell-bent on making bad decisions in a foreign country.The Chinese characters seemed real. The doctor read like a bad cartoon of an ugly American. Much of her part of the story felt completely unrealistic. The setting, though, was very 'real'. The author wrote compellingly about the medical condition around which this story revolves; those portions and the sections on language were fascinating, not too medical-y, and very well written; 4 star. The story itself, though an interesting premise, felt contrived and awkward; 2 stars. Read it for the medical sections! Overall - 3 stars.
    • 3/5
      There were things I loved about this book and things I didn't. I got it free from Library Things Early Reviewer program and I always like to support new writers. I love the unusual plot and design of the book. It is a fascinating concept to me, as a therapist, that our love for other people is somewhat born out of our ability to communicate with them -- that if we could no longer communicate ourselves to our loved ones, we might find ourselves loving them less. I think the author does a remarkable job fleshing out this concept in this tale of a man who loses his ability to speak Chinese after a brain injury, and is left speaking only his childhood English. Since he lives in Shanghai, is married to a Chinese woman and owns a successful business, this is a problem.My problem with the book, and why I struggled reading it, is that I hated almost all the characters. I thought that Li Jing, the main character, was a self-pitying depressed mess. Not that he didn't have a right to be, but the wallowing in self pity didn't dispose sympathy on my part. The American Dr. Neal just drove me CRAZY -- I'm afraid this is how many of us Americans are in a foreign culture, just like a bull in a china shop. Even if true, it's SO unattractive. And, on the other side of that coin, I wanted Meiling to stop being so darn stoic Chinese, and talk about her feelings for crying out loud!! Great writing, annoying characters. Of course, their annoying-ness was also part of the plot, but still.....
    • 3/5
      In this debut novel, Ruiyan Xu writes deftly about the frustrations that develop when communication is not possible. Li Jing becomes aphasic when he suffers a traumatic brain injury, rendering him no longer able to speak or understand Chinese. His relationship with his wife and son suffers, and his business begins to fail until his wife learns to run the firm in his absence. His reversion to the English he learned as a child is facilitated by Dr. Rosalyn Neal, a neurologist from Oklahoma, who is hired by Li Jing's family. Her personal life becomes incorporated into the story line, and she and Li Jing eventually develop an inappropriate relationship.I found Meiling, Li Jing's wife, to be the only likeable character in this book. She alone maintained dignity and integrity while the world as she had known it crumbled around her; however, I had to suspend disbelief when she rather seamlessly took over as acting president of her husband's investment firm. Rosalyn deteriorated from her initial professional persona into someone with few inhibitions and a desperate need for attention. For me, the story line took on a "soap opera" quality as it progressed, and the promise of its early premise was never fulfilled.
    • 4/5
      Language shapes us - how we communicate, how we express emotion, how we articulate our internal thoughts and feelings are an intrinsic part of who we are as individuals. To loose language is to loose our sense of self. This absorbing novel explores just such a case. Li Jing, is a successful financial entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai with his wife Zhou Meiling and their young son Pang Pang. One evening, whilst dining in a big old-fashioned hotel restaurant with his father, there is a massive gas explosion and the whole Swan Hotel collapses into a morass of metal, concrete and glass. Li Jing is badly injured in the explosion – a shard of glass pierces his forehead causing severe brain trauma. He survives but requires brain surgery, and when he eventually awakens from the coma he has been in, he is no longer able to speak Chinese. The few words he is able to utter are English, a language which he has not spoken since he was a ten year old when he and his father returned to Shanghai after living in the USA for some years. Meiling and Pang Pang cannot speak English, nor can the doctors treating him. Shock, frustration and distress drive Li Jing into complete silence.Li Jing is diagnosed with the brain disorder Broca’s aphasia; none of the speech therapists or neurologists in the Shanghai hospital are able to treat his condition, and eventually an American neurologist, who is a specialist in this field, is persuaded to come to Shanghai with the intention of coaxing Li Jing back into speech. Rosalyn Neal –who cannot speak Chinese - finds that she is disorientated by her new environment where she, like her patient, is unable to communicate with the people around her.Meiling finds herself in a place she never expected to be, trying to keep her husband’s business going, carrying the family single-handedly whilst sensing that doctor and patient are forging a relationship that seems to exclude her.Born in Shanghai and moving to the USA aged 10, the author Ruiyan Xi has obviously experienced what it is like to live in a place where you cannot speak the language, and the problems that arise as a result. It is hard to believe that this her first book, she is a wonderful writer who makes the reader really think about how we rely on words, and how the lack of mutually comprehensible language can cause immense misunderstanding and mistrust between different cultures.