This is the seventh collection in Hong Zeng's series of short stories: poetic, historical, and tinged with magical realism. The collection revolves around the central motif of history. In "Native Indian Museum", Ayla, a Native woman working in a museum, feels disconnected from her heritage as her culture is treated like an artifact. Through returning to her ancestral land and reconnecting with her lost language, she discovers that identity and memory still flow within her. In "The One Being Interpreted", Professor Arun Sekar, a scholar of exile and identity, finds himself increasingly transformed from a person into an object of interpretation by students, colleagues, family, and society. He struggles to maintain a self beyond their interpretations. The story explores how identity can become something created by the gaze of others rather than the self. In "Two Flames", Matthew Novak, an archivist studying historical violence, discovers that the past is not separate from the present but continues to repeat through patterns of fear, division, and blame. In "Bear", Native Indian identity is shown through the tribe's daily life. The protagonist learns these traditions and finds belonging among the tribe, while the bear symbolizes his connection to Native American ways of life and the wilderness that colonization threatens to erase. "The Sound of Pigeons in the Ruined Garden" follows Gu Yunshen, an old palace worker who looks back on his childhood as a member of a declining Qing aristocratic family and witnesses the collapse of an entire era. Through memories of the Forbidden City, his family's downfall, and the fading traditions of old Beiping, the story explores loss, change, and the persistence of memory through the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history. "Planetary Me" follows Lin Zhao, an archivist who discovers a recurring phrase across centuries of fragmented immigrant records: "I see myself from above, like a planet." As he traces the lives of Chinese laborers who crossed oceans and built railroads, he realizes the phrase reflects their loss of stability, identity, and connection to place. The motif of floating above oneself symbolizes migration, displacement, and the way people separated from their homeland struggle to find a sense of ground and belonging. "North and South" follows Lin Xi's life across Chengdu, Beijing, the American South, and Minnesota as she witnesses places being built, transformed, abandoned, and remembered. The motif of changing landscapes-rivers erased, cities expanded, factories decayed, and frozen fields preserved-reflects migration, impermanence, and the search for belonging. "Sand Bones" follows a descendant who travels to Deir ez-Zor to excavate the remains of Armenian deportees and discovers that the desert is not an empty landscape but a place where buried histories continue to speak. "Beneath Still Water" follows a narrator who arrives at a Midwestern college and slowly uncovers the invisible currents beneath its polished surface: the quiet disappearance of a former faculty member, the weight of institutional language, and the patterns of exclusion hidden behind procedures, evaluations, and numbers. Hong Zeng holds two PhDs in literature and served as a professor of literature at Carleton College and Hamline University in the United States. She is the author of five books of literary criticism published in America, several dozen critical essays on literature, and a bilingual (Chinese-English) poetry collection.
