All the Rivers Run South

This is supposedly the fictional biography of a street storyteller by the name of Ah Sin, active during the gold-digging days of the 1850s and 1860s in Victoria, Australia. The story is told by Zhang Baohui, a mainland Chinese student working on a PhD thesis in creative writing at Laurendal University, under the supervision of Professor Stacey Ahsin.

As Baohui delves deeper into Australia's past, he weaves the story of Ah Sin with his own by turning the academically required exegesis into a hodgepodge of his thought bursts, diary entries, carefully reported memory lapses, mini-historical stories, fragmentary pieces of poetry, philosophical musings on history and fiction, and his own story of illness, sexual ambiguities, and love or the impossibility of love.

"The easiest way to approach history is through figures", Ouyang Yu writes. His new novel offers many: figures of speech, figures of history, figures real and imagined, and all of that which is silent, evasive, buried, and cannot be figured.

All the Rivers Run South asks tough questions about language, accommodation, and what happens when a community's cultures receive the kind of love its people never do.

— Declan Fry