Dudu Zhanqing Du

China Lake Dudu Zhanqing Du

China Lake is a nickname for Silent Lake residential neighborhood which locates in the suburban city of Wo-Cun (Homonym: "the Village of a fictional city" or "Our Village" in short in Chinese). The nickname was spread out jokingly in the Chinese community because there is a high ratio of Chinese inhabitants living in the neighborhood. Dudu's "China Lake" is an epic drawing from life of the contemporary Chinese immigrants in their new homeland - Canada. As an immigrant herself, Dudu explores to set her focus on what happened in a couple of Chinese immigrant families, who had different background and went through the different paths to become well-off middle-class. Unlike the uneasy and bitter life of the immigrants which was described in most of the immigration fictions popular in China, the characters in her book already passed the preliminary period of struggle for easing off the cultural shock, ridding of the language obstacles, and repositioning themselves in the new society with a profession that they proudly pursued like in their motherland. In her book, she conglomerated and intersected many stories of which many are based on incidents happened in local Chinese community during her over 20 years' living in Ottawa - the national capital city, for instance, the high-tech engineer's sudden death in exercise, the domestic violence, the extramarital love affairs, the suicidal case of a senior, transgender people's marriage and teenager's death of hit by a bus etc. Instead of a simple facade of storytelling, Dudu has opened our eyes to look into the characters' life by furnishing them with flesh and blood, and to touch their internal worlds. The conflicts in this book cover various aspects of politics, relationship, religion, morality and meaning of life, embodying the well-off middle-class Canadian Chineses' happiness, sorrow, and perplexity of their feelings and stress in life.