In the first scene of An Yu's Braised Pork, Jia Jia opens her bathroom door and discovers that her husband, Chen Hang, has drowned himself in their tub. From that point to the final, dreamlike subaquatic scene of this poignant debut novel, water is both life-giving and a fearful void. Her husband left behind nothing but a crude sketch of a creature with a fish body and a man's head. Weeks earlier, on one of his infrequent calls to her while away on business in Tibet, he told her he had dreamt of a creature that was "barely a man" with the body of a fish. He never mentioned it again, and the sketch holds no clues. The fish-man becomes a touchstone as Jia Jia questions her place in the world.
Chen Hang's suicide upends Jia Jia's place in Beijing's patriarchal society. "He had betrayed her. Abandoned her. Failed to honour the one thing he had promised her." Although she veers between grief, embarrassment and anger, she prides herself on controlling her emotions. Strong feelings, nonetheless, emerge in her subconscious. She experiences dreams where water runs through her bedroom, like "the surface of a deep sea, as if she was sitting on the edge of a ship watching the reflection of the starless sky in the water." Time loses meaning, and she finds herself swimming toward "a tiny fish with a sharp tail, shining like glitter." Weeks later, she dreams a similar event, but this time the water "churned and threatened to sink everything in its path." She sees the same silver fish, although it bears no resemblance to her husband's sketch. This time she dives under the water and swims with the fish until her concentration is broken, and she finds herself leaning against a wall, crying. She's drawn to the water, and then disappointed in its inability to provide answers.
Jia Jia's attempts at empowerment combine with the quest for the meaning of her husband's sketch, and this takes her out of Beijing city to rural Tibet, where Chen Hang had his disturbing dream. Finally, there, the fish-man appears to her in a dream, too. As the story moves toward its resolution, Jia Jia thinks "she had begun a story with the fish-man long ago, before she could remember, something that had pushed her off her axis, something that demanded an ending now."
An Yu was born and raised in Beijing and now splits her time between Paris and Hong Kong. Her first novel is a moving, magical parable about a young woman's journey of self-discovery and empowerment. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.
Shelf Talker: This enchanting debut novel introduces a young widow searching for the meaning of a mysterious fish-man who appeared in her husband's dreams and, now, in hers, too.