Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi [Paperback]

WANG PING was born in China and came to the United States in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include Aching for Beauty, The Magic Whip, and The Last Communist Virgin. She won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and the Minnesota Book Award and is the recipient of an NEA grant, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, the McKnight Fellowship for nonfiction, and many other honors. She is a professor of English at Macalester College.

There are only two ways to live our life, according to Albert Einstein: one is as if nothing is a miracle; the other, as if everything is a miracle.

Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is a book about how the impossible became possible—about things that happened in China and America to the people Wang Ping grew up with, met, and befriended along her journeys between these two distant rivers. This is also a story about water, alive with spirits and energy, giving birth to all sentient beings. We are water. The river runs through us. Those who live in harmony with water can ride the current of the universe—the secret of Tao, reaching all the way to the sea of miracles, one story, one droplet, and one wave at a time.

A miracle is a state of mind, a way of living: how we face hardship, pain, and tragedies, how we transform them into fuels for our journey and transcend them into joy and hope. This is a book about how ordinary people perform miracles every day; how we are touched, touching, all the time, across oceans and continents, across time and space, through our stories.