Description

In the writer of the beloved best-seller Balzac and the Small Chinese Seamstress, a haunting story of love and of the beguiling power of the lost language.When Puyi, the final emperor, was exiled to Manchuria in the first 1930s, it's stated that he maintained an eight-hundred-year-old cotton scroll written with a lost sutra constructed by the Buddha. Fundamentally the scroll would be distributed illicitly to an odd French linguist called John d’Ampere, in a deal that would land him in jail, where he'd dedicate his life to learning the ineffably gorgeous historic language of the overlooked text.Our unnamed narrator, an American scholar in China in the 1970s, learns this tale from the greengrocer Tumchooq—his title just like that of the language when the scroll is written—who has returned from 3 years of re-education. She'll come again and again to Tumchooq’s store close to the gates of the Forbidden City, attracted from the child and his tales of an alienated dad. Nevertheless when d’Ampere is murdered in jail, Tumchooq vanishes, leaving the narrator, now pregnant together with his kid.