The River in the North

In the winter of 1983, Su Ning, a temporary worker at Northern Film Studio, was slapped by Li Meifen, the daughter of the director's deputy director, during an audition. She was born with underdeveloped vocal cords and her speech was like sandpaper polishing an iron pipe. Everyone thought she should disappear from the expulsion list next month. But she stayed with her thirty-second silent performance. In order to keep the only quota, Su Ning must complete a movie script adapted from Zhang Chengzhi's novel of the same name "The River in the North" within seven days. She wrote about a woman who "won't tell": waiting for her brother to come home on the frozen river bank, without a single line from beginning to end. The script has been reviewed, the final review has passed, and the movie is finished. But the story doesn't end there. There's a late notice from the Locarno Film Festival and an old film that has been tampered with. Su Ning started to walk back. Along the frozen northern river, she discovered the traces left by her father on the river bank: iron sheets, negatives, keys, and carvings on stones. It turned out that my father had photographed the same beam of light ten years ago, and more than one person on the other side of the river was photographing him. This is not a novel about "counterattack". This is a mute woman who reconstructs the narrative of the entire river using bubbles frozen under the ice, counterclockwise water patterns and a key that sank to the bottom of the river. The whole novel has more than 300,000 words and 145 chapters. Each chapter is doing the same thing: picking up the fragments of a river, putting them back together, and letting it continue to flow.