Heaven Lake: A Novel

By John Dalton

Heaven Lake is about many things: China, God, passion, friendship, travel, even the reckless smuggling of hashish. But above all, this extraordinary debut is about the mysteries of love.

Vincent Saunders has graduated from college, left his small hometown in Illinois, and arrived in Taiwan as a Christian volunteer. After opening a ministry house, he meets a wealthy Taiwanese businessman, Mr. Gwa, who tells Vincent that on his far travels to western China he has discovered a beautiful young woman living near the famous landmark Heaven Lake. Elegant, regal, clever, she works as a lowly clerk in the local railway station. Gwa wishes to marry her, but is thwarted by the political conflict between China and Taiwan. In exchange for a sum of money, will Vincent travel to China on Gwa's behalf, take part in a counterfeit marriage, and bring her back to Taiwan for Gwa to marry legitimately? Vincent, largely innocent about the ways of the world and believing that marriage is a sacrament, says no. Gwa is furious.

Soon, though, everything Vincent understands about himself and his vocation in Taiwan changes. Supplementing his income from his sparsely attended Bible-study classes, he teaches English to a group of enthusiastic schoolgirls -- and it is his tender, complicated friendship with a student that forces Vincent to abandon the ministry house and sends him on a path toward spiritual reckoning. It also causes him to reconsider Gwa's extraordinary proposition.

What follows is not just an exhilarating -- sometimes harrowing -- journey to a remote city in China, but an exploration of love, passion, loneliness, and the nature of faith. John Dalton's exquisite narrative arcs across China as gracefully as it plumbs the human heart, announcing a major new talent.

John Dalton was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children. Upon graduation from college, he received a plane ticket to travel around the world, and so began an enduring interest in travel and foreign culture. During the late 1980s he lived in Taiwan for several years and traveled in Mainland China and other Asian countries. He attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in the early 1990s and was awarded two fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as well as a James Michener/Paul Engle Award for his novel-in-progress, Heaven Lake. He presently lives with his wife in North Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Feb 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781439103876

John Dalton

John Dalton lives in Birmingham. He has two children and works as an adult literacy tutor. The City Trap is his first novel.

Book preview

Part One

The Volunteer

One

He was up by four a.m., such was his eagerness, and less than an hour later installed on a predawn, air-conditioned express train that hurried south from Taipei through long-drawn neighborhoods of shuttered store-fronts and faintly glimmering apartment houses. What little there was to see had to be viewed through a pall of damp, grainy fog. A few slumped figures were pushing carts of refuse through the alleyways. Flocks of ragged black pigeons settled on the metal boughs of nearby utility towers. And yet for Vincent every dark or shadowed feature of the landscape held a private luster that seemed, in some contrary way, hopeful, auspicious.

At first light he put his forehead to the compartment window and watched the countryside take shape as a steady plateau of cropland and industrial parks—not curtains of bamboo, he noted, not leafy barricades of Asian jungle, just neat fields of grain and rice, just factories and warehouses separated by rows of beech trees.

Several hours into his journey he began to feel the wry pinch of his predicament, all the commonplace symbols that were unavailable to him, the railway signs, for instance, with their columns of glinting white characters he couldn’t read. Nor could he make out the steward’s garbled announcements over the train’s PA. He leaned across the aisle and told a well-dressed, responsible-looking gentleman that he was on his way to Toulio for the first time and was unsure when to get off the train. From then on, after each announcement, he turned and sought the man’s guidance. Not yet, the man said with a single, restrained shake of the head. Not yet. Not yet.

And then, finally, Toulio. This time Vincent actually understood the steward’s announcement, Toulio, pronounced Doe-lay-oh, and, to be certain, he looked across the aisle to the gentleman and received a precise nod that might also have been a mark of personal encouragement, for Vincent, for the new ministry. The train screeched to a halt. He grappled with his backpack and duffel bag and hurried out onto the station platform.

It was by then nine-thirty on a Sunday morning. The open hall of the station was jammed with ticket buyers, the oak benches filled with travelers. Though a league of strangers inspected him from a safe distance, no one stepped forward from the crowd to greet him. He glimpsed, beyond the station’s entranceway, a vibrant wedge of Toulio’s town center, tall buildings and traffic, a carousel of activity both larger and more brash than anything he’d anticipated.

Outside the station he came upon three young men with their backs against the station wall. One was upright, on crutches, his legs encircled in thick metal braces. The other two were resting on the station steps. They had no braces, but their thin legs lay splayed out before them at odd angles like a clutch of toppled fence posts. They were each selling Wrigley’s chewing gum, Spearmint and Juicy Fruit. Could one of them be Shao-fei? His first assumption, entirely correct as it turned out, was no, not likely. Still, he stopped and bought one pack of gum from each young man. As an act of quiet consideration, as a way of inaugurating his time in Toulio, it pleased him to meet their shy gaze and drop two coins into each of their paper boxes.

A moment later he turned his attention to the station parking lot, where a wiry boy was motioning to him from the open door of a taxi.

Hello? Shao-fei? He shambled forth with his heavy bags. The taxi’s trunk was roped shut, and he wound up dumping the bags into the empty passenger seat. Hello, he said again. How are you? Thanks for getting up early. Thanks for coming out to meet me.

You’re welcome, the boy said. He wore thick-lensed glasses through which he seemed to study Vincent with a pained sobriety.

How are you? Vincent asked once more.

And how are you? the boy returned.

Good.

Me, too, Shao-fei replied. At once his expression grew tighter, more businesslike. Excuse me, he said. But I feel it’s a bad way. To buy the thing. To pay the money.

What thing?

"The gum, he said. My feeling is that it’s not good because the three boys, they make you pay the too-high price."

I paid them fifteen yuan each, Vincent said. Is that too much?

You can buy the gum for ten yuan at the store.

Well, yes, I guess I could have.

So why did you pay the too-high price?

Vincent, at a loss, shook his head dumbly. Already it felt as if he were tiptoeing, blindly, along a narrow ledge. I didn’t know, he replied. My mistake. He shrugged and held out the open palms of his hands, a conciliatory gesture, a peace offering.

It seemed to work well enough. The boy’s intense earnestness began to dissolve. He managed a welcoming smile of sorts. Before long they were lodged beside each other in the taxi’s rear seat, inching their way between columns of idling cars and motorcycles. Vincent rolled down the window and allowed the heavy air—still humid and summerlike in mid October—to wash past him. This, his first close-up view of Toulio, proved disheartening. From the town’s knotted center, its clamorous hub, arose a brand of stolid architecture, beamy department stores and offices, an actual high-rise bank—or was it a hotel?—thick-ledged and drably grand. The main avenue made sense to him only as fragments of a discordant puzzle: mirrored glass and throbbing loudspeakers, a modishness that seemed pirated, misplaced; here, a flashy music store; there, the facade of a hamburger shop litigiously similar to an American franchise. Above the avenue hung a cascade of flickering signs, a profusion of signs, so many that the great tangle of them seemed to render each, individual one meaningless. Below, on the walkways, a throng of inured pedestrians twined their way through a maze of haphazardly parked motor scooters.

All of this burdened his resolve. All of this he regarded with an ache of betrayal, though the treachery was his fault entirely. Stupid to have imagined unpaved roads and quaint hilltop bungalows when the real Toulio appeared as densely quartered as any district of Taipei.

Only a few kilometers from the town center, the tall buildings abruptly subsided, replaced by long rows of connected homes. Beyond these homes, he was relieved to see the countryside open up, flat and vigorously green, beneath a muddled, gray sky.

A few rules of my family’s house, please, Shao-fei said. Mama asks that you eat your meals in the kitchen or in the parlor. Drinks, hot or cold, you can have upstairs in your room. But don’t take the hot bath late at night. Mama must have the hot water for pulling out the chicken feathers. He paused to remove his glasses and wipe a loose strand of hair from the lens. With his glasses off, the angles of his face were less severe. Unmasked, he had a rather sweet and permanently startled face. Lock the front door but not the back door when you come in at nighttime. Maybe you don’t stay out late. Alec always stay out late, so maybe you don’t have to care about the locking of the door.

Alec, Shao-fei explained, also boarded at the house. He came from Scotland and not from England. Alec had helped him to learn English and was, in Shao-fei’s words, a great, big brother friend. He was currently the only foreign resident of Toulio and had lived in Shao-fei’s home for nearly two years. But not all the time, Shao-fei added. "Sometimes he there, and then sometimes he go away, and then surprise and he comes back again, like that."

He then asked Vincent a string of polite yet tritely familiar questions, the very same questions that had been posed to him repeatedly—often by strangers—during his apprenticeship in Taipei. Do you like Taiwan food? How tall are you? Which province in America do you come from?

A small town called Red Bud, in the Illinois province, Vincent answered.

Yes, Shao-fei said, I hear about this place before. It’s a good one. I know that. He asked Vincent how old he was.

Twenty-four.

It appeared to please him, this fact. Yes. He grinned. I already guess that you are twenty-four in the minute before you tell me it’s true. He went on to explain that he himself was sixteen years old according to the Chinese lunar calendar, or fifteen when his age was tallied in standard years. After this, he quieted and watched the road’s gravel shoulder race by. His eyelids fluttered heavily. He yawned. Don’t make the telephone call to America before you first ask Mama, he said.

I won’t, Vincent promised. He’d pried a stick of Spearmint gum from its wrapper. It seemed only courteous that he offer the boy a piece. Courteous, too, that he begin speaking in the boy’s native language. Yao bu yao? he asked. Want or don’t want?

No, thank you, Shao-fei replied in English. He looked at the gum and mumbled.

What? Vincent asked.

Lazy boys, he mumbled. Make you pay the too-high price.

•    •    •

Shao-fei’s home was set amid a circle of a half dozen other tan, two-floor houses and one corner store, an enclave connected to the main roadway by a stretch of single-lane blacktop that ran for a kilometer through open rice fields. Beside the house stood pyramids of feather-flecked wire cages. From its screened windows came the scent, not unpleasant, of chicken broth on the verge of boiling. By the time Vincent had hoisted his bags onto his shoulders, the boy had made his way to the front step and was holding open a pair of ornate sliding doors.

Shoes, please, Shao-fei reminded him.

Without setting his bags down, Vincent stepped against the heels of his shoes and pried loose his feet. Shao-fei, already free of his sandals, shuffled barefoot across a foyer and began clambering up a railed staircase. Vincent followed. For the first time that morning he was able to look upon the boy’s disfigured legs.

There was nothing frail or unusual about Shao-fei’s hips and thighs. The trouble began at the kneecaps, where the legs bowed outward along the shin. Both his feet were turned inward, the right foot especially, so that it twisted around and pointed almost to the left heel. The result was a reckless side-to-side lurching. He didn’t limp up the staircase, but rather tottered back and forth with such swift, careening staggers that it seemed almost possible he might topple sideways over the rail.

In the upstairs hallway, the boy halted and rapped his knuckles against a closed door. This one belong to Alec. I’m knocking to see if he wants to come talk.

They waited. Vincent shifted under the weight of his bags. Maybe he’s not in.

He’s there inside. Listen. Shao-fei knocked once more. Big brother?

They heard a mattress squeak, a drawer slide open and close, then the faint click of a cigarette lighter.

If he wants to talk, he opens the door. But now I’m thinking he’s not in the right mood for talking, Shao-fei said, and continued down the hallway.

Vincent’s own room contained a low bed with a mattress, a dresser, a desk, a mirror, and a chair. He didn’t mind its sparseness, the humble beginnings from which future accomplishment might arise. His new room lay adjacent to Alec’s. An open window allowed a thin stream of cigarette smoke, expelled from Alec’s room, to slip evenly along the side of the house and enter Vincent’s. Mixed with the smoke was a sweet, musky fragrance, richer and more potent than tobacco smoke alone.

If you don’t like the smell, close the window, Shao-fei suggested.

Do you know what he’s doing in there? Vincent asked.

Smoking.

Do you know what it is, though?

Yes. Shao-fei fanned his hand across the window screen. He wrinkled his nose. It’s bad air, he said.

Bad air? Vincent believed there might be other names for it. An opiate, perhaps, a narcotic, though when he recalled the few open-air rock concerts he’d attended in college, the odor seemed closer to scented marijuana, hashish.

•    •    •

And yet, of course, it was not for him to say. It wasn’t his home. He was a boarder in another family’s house, a diminished family at that, a family of two, a fifteen-year-old boy and his mother. They were Chinese. It was not for Vincent to decide what would be tolerated under the roof of their house. No to hot baths at night. Yes to the use of illegal drugs. Instead, he swept the floor of his new room and stowed away his clothing. He taped twin maps of Taiwan and America to the walls. Later he joined Shao-fei in the kitchen for a dinner of boiled chicken and spiced cauliflower. It wasn’t until nine o’clock that he met the boy’s mother, Mrs. Chen, a ruddy, determined woman, who ushered him out to the patio that adjoined the house to warn him against changing the settings of or otherwise touching the three huge gas cauldrons she used to prepare chickens for market. Afterward she led him to the family parlor and graciously accepted his first month’s rent. Before bidding him good night, she helped him place a collect call to the Good Shepherd Church office in Taipei.

In the seconds before his phone call was accepted, a sudden and wholly irrational embarrassment came over him. How strange it was in those few moments, how uncomfortable, to be himself, to be Vincent, sitting alone in another family’s parlor.

It was a great relief, a great assurance, to hear Reverend Phillips’s voice on the line, to hear his patient Yes? and then his winsome exclamation, Ah, Vincent!

Hello, Reverend.

You’ve arrived safely, have you? And had a look around?

It’s a much bigger town than I thought.

Well, yes. In America it would be a small city, wouldn’t it? Ninety thousand people. I don’t know if I actually heard that or if it’s a guess. It’s bigger, certainly, than the town you come from. Much bigger. I suppose it must be twenty times the size of … of Bloomfield, is it? … No, no. That’s not it. Wait a minute….

Easy to picture the Reverend at this moment, a stout man in his late fifties, a pale, tolerant face, one eye closed in concentration. He was an articulate and precise teacher, an exacting speaker and writer of the Chinese language, and yet often the lesser details eluded him. During Vincent’s month of apprenticeship in Taipei, the Reverend would periodically look him in the eye and call him Richard. Where did we leave off yesterday, Richard? he sometimes wondered aloud, and Vincent, who fretted over the Reverend’s faulty memory, would answer patiently to the wrong name.

… Never mind, the Reverend said now. I’m hopeless. You’ve settled in, I take it?

I have. My room is furnished. I should be comfortable here.

They’re good people, the Chens, willing to board a foreigner, a stranger. And Shao-fei, the boy, I met him once, a year ago. Very good-natured, bright, too, speaks some English as I remember.

And I appreciate their help. I’m just anxious now to get accustomed to the town, to find a house for the new ministry.

That’s right. You’re eager for it all to begin. I know the feeling, but I’m going to remind you that these things take time.

Yes, he said. Time. I know.

I hope you do know, Vincent. No doubt you’ve heard me speak of these things before, but it’s worth remembering, I think, especially now that you’ve arrived. The people of Toulio will have no particular interest in Christ or the Presbyterian faith. Most will be small-town farmers and merchants, factory workers. Not very worldly folks, maybe, yet they can spot a phony a mile away. It may sound strange, but you’ve got to convert the never-believers as well. I’m talking about the people who’ll never become Christian, never even set foot inside your Bible study class. They’ve got to see you as legitimate. If you can do that, then you’ll have set the stage for other volunteers who’ll minister in Toulio long after you’ve returned to America.

The long-range view, Vincent said and nodded to the Chens’ empty parlor. I’ll try to keep things in perspective that way, especially when I run into difficulties.

That would be a very good idea, the Reverend said. And there will be difficulties. The difficulties of being an outsider. Plus the difficulties you’ll bring upon yourself; the mistakes you can’t quite keep yourself from making. But don’t imagine dramatic confrontations with the towns-people. Mostly it’s a matter of outlasting their ambivalence. I could say you’ll win them over with your conviction or your friendliness, but really the most important thing comes down to a talent you already have, a kind of sincerity, a patience for dealing with people.

Thank you, Vincent said. Thank you very much. These words, though, did not convey the pride he felt or the slight flush of shame. Secretly, he’d worried that the Reverend’s sporadic forgetfulness might somehow undo the entire Taiwan ministry. Now, sitting in the glow of his approval, Vincent was overcome by an ardent, full-hearted loyalty.

I’d just begun my evening prayers when you called, the Reverend explained. Since you interrupted, I’ll invite you to join me.

Join in prayer? Is that what the Reverend meant? Vincent had never prayed over the telephone before. Yet once they started there was a charged gravity to the Reverend’s words and a sense of communion between them that felt perfectly right. Oh Lord, hear our prayers, Reverend Phillips said in an office two hundred kilometers away, and then began, as he always did, with a panoramic regard for world events: for those left homeless along the Carolina coast by a raging Hurricane Hugo; for those drowned recently in a boat collision on the Thames River in London; for Nelson Mandela, let the portents be true and his twenty-seven years of imprisonment come to an end; for the tragedy at Tiananmen Square, now four months old, for the dead and wounded students and those still hiding out. Next, he prayed for those who were ill in the parish, spoke their names and the names of more fortunate parishioners blessed with new babies. His prayers then turned to Vincent. How thankful he was for Vincent’s dedication to Christ’s work. How pleased he was with the progress they’d made in language and Bible study. Last, he gave thanks for that which, be it knownst or unbeknownst to each person, lay at the very center of all human lives: the sweet miracle of Christ’s eternal love.

Amen. Rest well, Vincent. A new place—it’s never what you expected. It always feels odd the first few days.

"Thank you, Reverend.

Good night."

Good night, he said. God’s grace.

•    •    •

The final thing Vincent did that evening was set out his language books and practice speaking Chinese. He’d taken several Mandarin courses at Southern Illinois University and even after graduation stayed on for an eight-week intensive language program. Since coming to Taiwan and beginning his apprenticeship at Good Shepherd, he had studied daily, three hours in the morning at a Taipei language school, one or two hours more with Reverend Phillips, and then, companionless in his dorm room, he’d given himself over to a compulsive style of review involving flash cards and pronunciation guides. He found the written characters beautiful, but far too complex, far too tedious, to sit for hours and practice the exacting strokes. Because of this, he’d turned his attention to spoken Chinese. And the language itself, the lively falling and rising tones and the smooth, elegant cadences of spoken Mandarin, appealed to Vincent. Already he had memorized an impressive array of words and phrases. Somewhat less impressive was his ability to reproduce the language’s precise tones. Fortunately, there were drills to remedy this. Tonight, for example, he brought forth his cassette player and inserted a conversation tape upon which Reverend Phillips had intoned many of the terms and phrases necessary to ministry work. On the tape the hurried rhythm of the Chinese language had been slowed and the elusive tones of each word given a clear, dulcet emphasis.

Shiwang, the Reverend said. Hope. A word that began in the high first tone and ended in the plummeting fourth. Grace. Devotion. Joy. I place myself in Christ’s loving hands. Who else but Christ knows my secret heart?

Just before eleven p.m. he glanced up from his studies and found that a small and mostly silent crowd had come together in the lane outside a neighbor’s house. The men wore white armbands. The women had covered the tops of their heads and their hair with tented, white hoods. Each member of the party brandished a pair of long sticks in his or her hands. More surprising still, a sizable bonfire blazed away in the center of the lane. Thick tongues of flame spiraled up as high as the balconies of nearby homes. From Vincent’s vantage point it all appeared fairly outlandish. But what was it? Impossible to say except that, judging from the dogged conduct of the participants, an earnest ceremony of some sort was under way. A devotion? Before long the crowd convened in a circle around the fire and beat their sticks in a drubbing rhythm against the pavement. The sound was like the swift galloping of a dozen wooden-legged horses.

Granted, he was tired, too drained from his long first day in Toulio to think with any real clarity. There was no way now, it seemed, to hold back his verdict: the town was garish and strange, the Chen family woefully lax, his unseen Scottish housemate a loafer at best, at worst a drug addict. These were, he knew, uncharitable views, graceless to the core.

In bed, with the lights off, he noticed how the glint of bonfire light made the furnishings of his new room appear paltry, forlorn. He closed his eyes and listened to the steady thrum-thrum-thrum of sticks beating the pavement. He mouthed the name of the town. Doe-lay-oh. It was an odd place, truly.

He’d no more than indulged in this thought when a billow of hashish smoke, released from the room next door, drifted through his window screen and spread its cloying odor about the room.

He leaped from his bed and slammed the window shut. The sharp smack of it caused those gathered around the fire to cease their drubbing and look up.

Vincent, shirtless at the window, stared back. A deep and private reluctance gripped his heart. Oh God, he thought. What strangeness. For this he’d journeyed seven thousand miles from home? Could it be a mistake? The most extravagant of his life?

Two

There then began a time, several weeks’ worth of uncharted days, when Vincent roamed the various quarters of Toulio, its labyrinthlike open markets, its unruly business district, both its shabbier and more privileged residential neighborhoods where the homes were crannied together and forked by slim, winding alleyways. He was trying to form an articulate opinion of the town, one he could set to paper and pass on to his parents and a few longtime acquaintances at St. Mark’s Church in Red Bud. The shape of that opinion, though, proved to be something of a problem. Yes, the buildings were all formed of pearl-gray concrete rather than wood or brick. Yes, the traffic was unreasonably loud. But these were only the obvious differences. The real difference proved harder to detect. The real difference, Vincent believed, had something to do with the climate itself. Call it a variation of latitude, maybe, a subtle inflection in the atmosphere. Familiar objects seemed to weigh a few ounces less here. Odors were sharper. The air—how to describe it?—was oddly textured, foreign, its foreignness most noticeable in the scattered, coppery light of sunrise and dusk.

As for the town’s citizens, he had imagined them regarding him with an air of indifference or suspicion. Much to the contrary, his presence in Toulio’s markets and restaurants caused a stir. Children squealed in surprise and called out American or outsider. Waiters and store clerks bristled with anticipation when called upon to serve him. Initially, they were all taken by his height. Vincent was six feet, four inches tall. When he revealed his height in centimeters, a more impressive 193, people dropped their jaws and uttered a breathy and keening exclamation, Whaaaa! Their attention could also turn flattering. In a darkened tea house a half-circle of rosy-cheeked housewives asked him to lean toward the window so that the sunlight would strike the blond strands of his otherwise brown hair, an effect the women described as golden. Later, alone in his room, he looked into the mirror and examined his own green eyes, his boyish lips and chin, and understood that here, in Toulio, his bland Midwestern handsomeness had ripened into something exotic.

And were the townspeople, the Chinese, inversely exotic, attractive by virtue of their tapered eyes and sable hair? In this matter, too, he could not form a definite opinion. At times he thought the broad and rather flat composition of their faces homely—or could it be a whole new dialect of human beauty? Other such pale notions came and went. What to make of their cryptic gestures and unabashed willingness to stare? It was strange how loosed from himself he felt, how unmoored, whenever a crowd turned and made him the target of its fastidious gaze. And what a relief to sense that it was Christ drawing him back, grounding him with the consoling tenor of His voice. Not a voice of actual words—words weren’t always needed to converse with Christ; often His best advice sprang from Vincent’s heart as the most steadfast of intuitions. This was never more true than during moments of unforeseen distress, like the morning he’d forgotten his passport at the bank and rushed back frantically to retrieve it, or the occasions, three so far, when a perfectly agreeable meal had lain serenely in his stomach a few hours before turning traitorous. After the spell of vomiting he shuffled to his room and propped his head on a pillow. The intuition that came to him then was assuasive and confidential. Were he to give it words, they might be, Easy now, careful with yourself, or better yet, We should have expected something like this. We’ll know better next time.

We. Us. Ours.

Here were the pronouns that lay closest to the intimate voice of these intuitions, the private language, as if they’d arrived together in Toulio, he and Christ, and were now both a little perplexed, a little shocked, by the things they saw.

The good news, though, the gratifying discovery was this: in the tented markets and tea houses, in the bank and convenience store, people listened to his carefully phrased Mandarin—he’d been faring better lately with the seesawing tones—and judged him fluent. Or misjudged him fluent. Upon entering these establishments he could not extract from the general whir of conversation any meaningful sequence of words. He relied instead on the outright predictability of their inquiries, the questions concerning his age and height, his country of origin and reasons for coming to Taiwan. In response he would curtsy his head in a slow, discerning nod and deliver one neatly practiced answer after another. His longest sustained conversation occurred in a motorcycle repair shop with a sprightly middle-aged mechanic who waved Vincent indoors and offered to share a pot of tea. They pulled up a pair of wicker stools and discussed, among other things, the humid fall weather and the price of American gasoline. After tea, the mechanic presented a row of secondhand motorcycles and singled out a special bargain, a restored Taitung motorbike with a patched seat and rusted fenders. Buoyed by the ease of their conversation, Vincent made an impulsive purchase. He paid the mechanic 2,500 new Taiwan dollars, less than one hundred U.S., and rode home feeling unexpectedly hopeful.

Yet still there were difficulties, though never quite the ones he anticipated. Simple things proved difficult. Pay phones were an unsolvable riddle. He did not know which of the three peculiar-size coins to use, or whether to feed the slot before or after dialing. Traffic lights were baffling, dangerous. Drivers glided impassively through both green and red signals. The lingering heat, which Reverend Phillips had compared favorably with a Midwestern summer, was actually quite worse. The blanketing humidity held constant. The sun fell at a more potent slant.

The town newspaper, he learned, contained no listings for rental properties. Houses were leased by word-of-mouth or by flyers affixed to courtyard walls. He could only squint dumbly at such flyers. And when a considerate stranger read an address aloud, he wasn’t able to hold it in his head long enough to locate the neighborhood, the lane, the house number. Time and again he stopped and asked for directions.

Another stranger, a stocky woman shouldering a bag of oranges, asked him what he was looking for.

A house to rent, Vincent replied.

She turned and pointed to the outskirts of town. You need to find Mrs. Chen and her crippled son. She’s the one who lets foreigners stay in her home.

•    •    •

Who else in all of Toulio understood an outsider’s frustrations firsthand? Who else but the Scotsman, Alec?

At night, working his way through the Psalms, translating each line into whispered Mandarin, Vincent found himself pausing to listen for his reclusive housemate. The thick, concrete wall that partitioned their rooms allowed only dull, cloistered sounds: a muffled cough, light snores, the strum of guitar chords though never a full song. Most frequently, he heard the workings of a door latch, especially the lock mechanism sliding shut.

One afternoon he heard the turning of Alec’s lock and hurried into the open hallway, where he saw a tall, bare-chested figure bent toward the door. Vincent stopped short and feigned surprise. Hey, he said.

The Scotsman turned, raised a dark eyebrow. He mumbled something low and broadly accented, something that might have been, Hey yourself.

I’m Vincent Saunders. I’m rooming next door.

Yes, you are, Alec said, and tucked a key into the waistline of a faded sarong that hung in frayed edges below his knees. He looked to be in his late twenties, his bare shoulders and arms leanly muscled, his hips narrow. He had a narrow, shrewdly alert face as well, and a slippery expression poised on the brink of either ridicule or sly humor. I saw your shite motorbike parked round the back. You’re staying on then?

Yes, staying here for a while. I’ll be in town two years.

Two years, he said, exaggerating Vincent’s flat, Midwestern drawl. Golly, that’s a long time. Are you a Boy Scout, by any chance?

Excuse me?

A Boy Scout. I heard you were. I’ve seen Mormons pedaling round the streets of Taipei. They all look like Boy Scouts to me.

I’m not— Vincent said, and bit down on his response so that it passed through his lips in a dispirited sigh. He lowered his gaze and studied the hallway’s tiled floor, a ceaseless pattern of triangles and squares. I thought I’d say hi, thought I’d introduce myself. I’m not going to be led into an argument.

All right then, Alec said, less self-satisfied. Right. No arguments. We shouldn’t have arguments. He surveyed the distance between his bedroom door and Vincent’s. Then he shrugged and descended the staircase.

Was this an apology? Not likely. In Vincent’s mind, the question of comradeship had been settled. Alec would be a hindrance rather than a confidant. Now at least a certain glum pleasure could be taken in noting how often wisps of hashish smoke trickled between their window screens. The Scotsman had a formidable habit; he smoked after waking late in the morning, once or twice more throughout the afternoon, then even more prodigiously during the night. All that ingested smoke, the steady flux of mind-deadening narcotic. It was a wonder he could think coherently, a wonder he could rise from bed and manage to meet the demands of a single day.

Yet, astoundingly, Alec did manage. In fact, he earned a living teaching English to businessmen who would assemble nightly in the Chens’ downstairs parlor. These meetings were loud, sometimes rowdy affairs. The most surprising thing about them, aside from Alec smoking hash before the onset of each, was that he turned out to be a meticulous and rather severe schoolmaster. In class he spoke the stringent litany of business. Invoice, he demanded. Productivity, tariff, first-class, third-class, merchandise, receipt. He dropped his Scottish brogue and in a more neutral voice—the same one he’d used to mimic Vincent—overarticulated each syllable. The students trailed behind, struggling with the difficult vs and ths. He then drilled each separately, raising his voice, bullying with impatience until a student at last recited a word to his satisfaction. Far from taking offense, these same students called or dropped by during the day bearing half-understood office faxes from their American buyers. Alec translated. And while his Chinese vocabulary may not have been broader than Vincent’s, his ease with the language, his unforced inflections and offhanded asides, were probably better, truer.

Twice Vincent had seen thousand-yuan bills pass between student and teacher. He tried not to dwell on it, though he would like to have known Alec’s approximate salary. He would like to have known how one went about finding students and what constituted a fair price for lessons. Just lately he’d begun to feel the needling obligation of money. Not that his present finances proved insufficient; he got by well enough on the modest monthly stipend provided by the Overseas Christian Fellowship. No, the problem had to do with school debt and family duty. He’d accrued his fair share of student loans during four years of study. Most of those loans had been deferred. But in his junior and senior years he had also borrowed money from his parents and older sister, Vanessa, and later, once their budgets had been stretched thin, he’d sought help from other relatives. The amounts weren’t especially large: eight hundred from a widowed older cousin, fifteen hundred apiece from his uncle Clark and uncle Hayden, both of them veteran soybean farmers. These lendings burdened him more than others because he knew they’d been scraped together, knew also that though his relatives often extolled the virtues of higher education, neither they nor their children had ever attended college. Uncle Clark, in particular, was puzzled by the unusual path Vincent had chosen upon graduation. Why the Orientals? Why not put his education degree to good use and teach at Red Bud’s middle school? Or if he wanted to minister in the Church, weren’t there congregations all over southern Illinois looking for help? To this Vincent could only say that he preferred to minister abroad. But even the word he’d used, preferred, caused Uncle Clark, a man of frugal habits and point-blank speech, to squint and look away. Preferred. Why had Vincent used such a word? All he could do was stand there pink-faced, humbled, while a rift widened between himself and an uncle who had done him a sizable favor.

As for Uncle Clark’s question, Why not southern Illinois? Why not Red Bud? any honest answer would only wound his family and friends. And it wasn’t merely Red Bud’s size or its population, hovering just under three thousand, or its Midwestern sparseness and dawdling pace, all of which Vincent or any other townsperson could openly poke fun at. What couldn’t be said was that Red Bud’s more complicated and ambitious sons and daughters always defected—to St. Louis, to Chicago or beyond. The timid and the dutiful stayed. With the exception of his sister, Vanessa, Vincent’s family had stayed. His uncles Clark and Hayden stayed. His aunts and cousins stayed. His parents stayed on in a two-floor, canary yellow farmhouse, a dash of sprightly color when viewed from Route 3, but less alluring, shabbier, the closer you got to the front door. In late middle age they had surrendered a certain poise, a certain gameness for small-town life. Seven years earlier they had lost their jobs at the Singer plant, where, over the course of two decades, they had assembled air conditioners and both risen to the rank of production line supervisors. But the factory had shut down, the production moved to Asia. They’d accepted a series of lesser jobs elsewhere. Vincent’s mother, Marion, now worked for minimum wage in the kitchen of a Red Bud nursing home. His father, Carl, drove to Alton, Illinois, each weekday and repaired vending machines. Evenings they sat out on the back patio drinking coffee and brooding, each in their own dissolute manner. Still, they were pleased that Vincent would be volunteering for the Presbyterian Church, that he had held firm to the faith in which he had been raised. Pleased, yet a little perplexed by his decision as well.

Why Taiwan? Why go halfway round the world? Why commit himself to something so … well, extreme? What couldn’t be said was that if you understood the true meaning and import of Christ’s Word (instead of viewing it as something less, a soothing influence, a bit of Sunday-morning consolation) then ministering in Taiwan was hardly extreme. What couldn’t be said was that Vincent had long harbored the suspicion that he might be complicated and ambitious. He might have the ability to see deeply into other people’s lives and offer them a love and wisdom they might not even have known they were seeking. He couldn’t possibly say such things, however. Regardless of his debts, monetary or otherwise, he could not, in the months leading up to his departure, offer anyone he knew or loved an entirely truthful explanation.

•    •    •

There was no broaching the subject of Shao-fei’s disfigured legs, either. The boy’s very demeanor forbade it. Even when his stagger was at its worst, when his movements became reckless, pendular lurches, he labored not to let the strain of it show on his face. Nevertheless, his eyes sometimes teared from the physical effort. He perspired. Lips drawn to the pale of his teeth, he tottered about the house, one lopsided step after another, without ever glancing down at his wayward ankles and feet. His knees and shins were scarless. Vincent guessed the defect was congenital, possibly the result of rickets. What kept him from asking was the memory of Shao-fei meeting him at the train station, seeing the lame pan-handlers and declaring them lazy. It didn’t matter how his legs came to be twisted. The point was stoicism in the face of difficulty. The point was pride.

So it was startling to return home midmorning and find not only that the boy had stayed home from school, but that he’d littered the parlor floor with juice cartons and candy wrappings and cast himself adrift on his mother’s sagging wicker sofa.

Not feeling well? Vincent asked.

The boy cringed. Clearly pained by the interruption, he lifted and resettled his head against the armrest.

Your mother knows you’ve stayed home? She knows you’re sick?

Not sick, he mumbled. Tired.

Tired of what?

No answer. He let his glasses slip down his nose. A few feet away a muted television flickered. He had yet to glance in its direction.

Tired of what? Vincent asked again. Tired of school?

Tired … of how long it takes.

How long what takes?

Everything. Everything takes so long to happen.

Vague explanations, a lethargic manner—for a moment he thought the boy had stolen, or been given, Alec’s hashish. Yet when he drew close to retrieve a cellophane wrapper from the floor, he could detect nothing remotely musky or smoke-laden wafting from Shao-fei’s clothing.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with missing a day of school, Vincent said. As long as it doesn’t become a habit.

Habit.

Yes. Habit. When you do something often.

Often.

That’s right. Exercise would be a good habit. Lying, gambling would be—Is this a word game, Shao-fei? Is this a game we’re playing?

Playing, the boy mumbled.

If there’s a problem you have, I’d be happy to listen and tell you what I think. Sit up now. Take a deep breath. At least look at me when you’re speaking.

He sat and placed his feet on the floor, obediently it seemed. But then he rose and shambled out the parlor toward the staircase.

Hold on a minute, Vincent called after him, yet by then Shao-fei had begun climbing to the second floor, hoisting himself from one step to the next with the lethargy of someone five times his age. He reached the upstairs landing and like a stunted, world-weary monarch gazed down upon his guest.

Go away, the boy scolded, before veering into his bedroom, where he closed and locked the door behind him.

•    •    •

And there he remained for the rest of the morning, the afternoon, the long, eventless evening. It was puzzling, this morose behavior, this contradiction. Shao-fei was supposed to be good-natured; Reverend Phillips had said as much. Therefore it seemed fundamentally wrong, even a bit irritating, that he should lock himself away. Shortly after nightfall Vincent tried luring the boy from his room with the promise of a trip into town for dinner. Shao-fei did not respond. Even so, it was hard not to prowl close to his room and eavesdrop during the later hours of the night. From behind the closed door came a series of faint, spiritless exhalations that might have been the cadence of sleep or the mark of a deepening despondency.

Either way, the boy did not emerge from his room the next morning, did not shower or eat breakfast or attend school. Vincent, who hadn’t slept well, sensed the situation shifting from peculiar to ominous. He summoned Mrs. Chen, easily the hardest-working person he’d ever met. She sold chickens six days a week in the town market, setting out for her stall at three a.m., returning at noon. Afternoons and evenings she blanched and defeathered the birds in her patio workshop behind the house. She, too, was denied entrance into Shao-fei’s room.

This strange mood again, she complained to Vincent. How can I help him or send him to school if he won’t open the door?

I believe if the boy had someone to talk to, he said, choosing his words carefully. A man, maybe, an older friend. Boys can be shy sometimes, talking to their mothers.

He wished he’d been more direct. At the suggestion of an older friend she had brightened noticeably and recommended the Scotsman. Alec, she reported, had gone to Taipei the day before to extend his visa. When he returned home this evening, he should be the one to speak with Shao-fei.

Without quite realizing it, Vincent had been sentenced to a day of thankless waiting, a vigil of sorts, fitful and mostly silent, which he kept outside Shao-fei’s locked door. At various times throughout the afternoon a swell of indignation would arise and crest over him. The dull hours became a tedious chore. On this account, at least, the boy had been cryptically right: things did sometimes feel as if they took forever to happen.

He was home by eight that evening, the Scotsman, in time to teach his class and afterward loiter about downstairs, the parlor radio trickling out staves of breezy, piano-rich melody. Beside his sofa chair, in a pail of chipped ice, sat several bottles of imported beer he’d brought back from Taipei. He plucked one from the ice and offered it up to Vincent, who, while not opposed to a single cold beer after dinner, refused anyway.

Cheers, Alec said. Cheers just the same. He took a yawning swallow and in the lull that followed bobbed one knee to the music and let his gaze wander the room. What? he asked, focusing on Vincent in a canny, amused way. Still holding a grudge?

Maybe.

All right, so I’m a prick then, he said cheerfully.

You mean to say you’re obnoxious. But you admit you’re obnoxious, so I’m supposed to chuckle over that. I’m supposed to see it as honest.

That’s the general idea, yes.

I’m not falling for it, Vincent warned.

Look here, Shao-fei told me you were a missionary. Then he said you didn’t like me having a smoke. So I imagined you sitting in your room listening to me and making certain judgments. Is that what you were up to?

I couldn’t hear much.

Did you hear me call out Margaret Thatcher’s name? I do that sometimes when I’m wanking off. He grinned and waited for Vincent’s reaction. Hey, he said, are Mormons allowed to have a wank now and then?

Vincent shook his head and sighed.

Don’t make the long face. Tell me to fuck off if you like.

And what good would that do?

No good at all. Or a world of good. Give it a try.

I’m not the prude you think I am, Vincent said. Again a swell of bitter emotion, hard-edged and truculent. He wished—longed for—the Scotsman to be absent from the house, painlessly removed. For the record, I’m not a Mormon or a missionary. I work for an overseas fellowship, a Presbyterian organization. I’m a volunteer.

"A volunteer?" The word had been given a droll twist.

Whatever you might think, it’s different from a missionary. Less intrusive. We’re not forcing our beliefs on anyone. He made himself stop. A futile effort, trying to shape a distinction for someone whose purpose was ridicule. About the boy, he said, changing course. Mrs. Chen wants you to speak to him. He’s stayed home from school, locked himself in his room. I’m not sure what the problem is.

He’s feeling blue, Alec said.

Could be. It’s odd, though. It doesn’t seem like him.

Oh, but it’s exactly like him. He gets down and mopes about in his room and lets everything go to hell. Then he bounces back, cleans his room, cleans and mops the fucking house while he’s at it. It’s part of the cycle. A day or two from now he’ll be shuffling off to school like a real trouper. Alec flitted his fingertips through a patch of dark hair on his chin, a scraggly, unsculpted goatee. You thought you had him sussed out, didn’t you?

Vincent puzzled over the question a moment. I never said I had Shao-fei figured out. I’m just surprised.

He’s bound to surprise you because he tries so hard most of the time. Twice as hard as he should. But he’s strange sometimes, too. And he’s clumsy in a way that’s got nothing to do with his fucked-up legs. If you see him trying to cook, keep an eye on him because he’s liable to burn the house down. He’s hopeless on a motor scooter, really just hopeless. No control over the throttle and hand brake, Alec said. Then he drained away the last swirl of beer and rolled the empty bottle between his hands. He’s good-hearted, though, Shao-fei is. He’s been level with me since the day I arrived. Try finding someone else in town who’ll speak their mind to an outsider.

He looks up to you, Vincent said. That’s why Mrs. Chen thinks it’s best that you speak to him.

How long’s he been in his room?

Yesterday and today.

Two days, Alec reasoned. That’s long enough. Two days for feeling blue. He uncapped another beer, took a gulp, and raised the bottle aloft. Attention all shirkers and layabouts! he crooned at the ceiling. Two days is what you get! That’ll be the rule from now on!

Very early the next morning, a fraction past six, Vincent heard an alarm sound in the next room followed by a low, broguish curse. He rose from bed and leaned into the hallway. Alec was there, stumbling barefoot with his sarong gripped about his waist. He squeezed his free hand into a fist and slammed it against Shao-fei’s bedroom door. ENOUGH! he shouted. ENOUGH! GET YOUR ARSE OUT OF BED AND OPEN THE DOOR! You WILL go to school today! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME!

The bolt rattled and the door swung inward. Shao-fei emerged still heavy-lidded from sleep, fumbling with his glasses. He gaped at Alec and then ducked past him toward the bathroom. Alec followed him there and gave the bathroom door several booming pounds of the fist. Twenty minutes and you’re off to school, he threatened. We’ll make sure you get there, too. He turned toward Vincent and grinned. Vincent will make sure. He’s an early riser. He’ll take you to school.

Vincent accepted the duty with a shrug. In truth, he had been on the verge of volunteering. He pulled his clothes on and waited downstairs in the foyer. Minutes later Shao-fei descended the steps dressed in his autumn uniform, a crisp white shirt reined in by dark trousers and a coal black blazer.

Ready, Shao-fei?

To this no answer. The boy, balanced on the downstairs landing and immersed in thought, merely lifted his eyebrows a bit and blinked sheepishly at the sound of his own name.

•    •    •

Should he have done more for the boy? Offered more? Vincent could not decide. He was never sure how far he should go, especially when the line between benevolence and insult varied with each person. Even with his own sister, Vanessa, he did not know. She worked in Chicago as a curator’s assistant by day, a music booker by night. In the months prior to his departure she had twice driven home to Red Bud so that the two of them might discuss his decision. And yet no matter how intricate or prolonged their conversations, they arrived, always, at the same point of impasse, the same unbridgeable questions. Did she not think that people in other countries deserved the opportunity to know the Word of God? Did she not believe that Jesus Christ was the one true Lord and Savior? In reply she screwed tight the corners of her mouth and looked upon him with an air of magnified patience. She was twenty-nine years old, even-tempered, self-reliant, pretty. In Chicago she had friends who were playwrights and installation artists. It didn’t matter what she believed or didn’t believe, she said. They were talking about the course of his life. What good were divisive questions? No good at all, she said. She wouldn’t answer them.

Of course, he knew all too well what her refusal implied. It saddened him. As children they’d both been more studious and devout than all their many cousins, and now, when his family came together at the dinner table and he bowed his head and asked Christ to open their hearts and minds to the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, he looked up and caught Vanessa, his only sister, gazing back at him with a great personal weariness, a smile so stagey and clenched it might as well have been a frown.

That, he supposed, was disappointing enough. Still, given her life in Chicago, he might have expected it. What was far more surprising was to see an even fiercer and more tangled resentment show itself in, of all people, Carrie Ann Whitlinger, his girlfriend, or rather former girlfriend, of nearly three years. Carrie Ann had been a Christian, albeit a Lutheran, since grade school. She had grown up in Red Bud, and he had known her, distantly, in middle and high school, where she’d been a year behind him. And then she’d shown up for Bible study at the campus ministry house his second year of college. She had a bright, celebratory spirit. It took several months for him to recognize her pixie-featured good looks and understand that a portion of her goodwill was directed personally at him. By then she had a large circle of ministry house girlfriends on whom she liked to lavish greeting cards and elaborate surprise birthday parties. Few of them knew that her mother was dead and that her father, bedridden in a nursing home, had been a lifelong alcoholic. Had they known these facts they might, like Vincent, have wondered where, beyond the expected optimism of a Christian life, her hopefulness came from.

A good many of their mutual friends had also come together during campus ministry house functions and formed romantic partnerships. Nearly all these partnerships led to engagement and even, in a few instances, marriage before graduation. These early-marrying couples were thought to

Reviews for Heaven Lake

[maryreinert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I must admit, I found this a little slow getting into; however, after about 30-50 pages, I was hooked. Heaven Lake really does touch on so many subjects. The travel in China was so interesting and so well depicted that I could easily see, hear, and smell the surroundings. The portrayal of the Chinese I found to be respectful yet not sugarcoated. The characters truly became people I felt I knew.Vincent's transition from an overzealous Christian volunteer to one who fully learned to realize (if not understand) God's grace is not an easy one; he has no epiphanies; he just slowly grew into another person. In the middle of the book (page 304 -thanks to the Amazon search feature), the author so clearly and succintly summarizes Vincent's growth, his realization, that "you could navigate your life without knowing. Even more, you could occasionally be awed by the mystery. You could sometimes love the mystery as devoutly as the believers loved their gods."The book is certainly not short on plot either. The twists and surprises easily keep the reader interested. Overall, this book is certainly worth a read. Anxious to read more from this author.

[feign_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The story of a young American missionary who arrives in a small city in Taiwan in 1990, falls into some unsavory liaisons, and is talked into a sham marriage with a woman in northwestern China, along the way, of course, losing his innocence but not his sense of wonder. The middle third of the novel is worth the price alone--a journey by train and bus across the mountains, plains and deserts of China. You could read it purely for the evocative, rich descriptions of landscapes and people, but it's also a spiritual Odyssey, written deftly and without judgement or pronouncements, through changing geography and perceptions. The rest of the novel is equally well-written, with excellent characterizations of Chinese and expatriates. Some of the characters are almost obligatory types--the overly-earnest female missionary, the cynical foreign backpacker-teacher--but each was rounded out well enough to make them believable. As other reviewers have said, by the end of the novel I wanted to give the main character, if not a hug, then a reassuring pat on the back.I did catch a few sloppy errors in descriptions of Hong Kong--trams in Kowloon (there aren't any), bank closing times, taxi colors, and several others--which a little bit undermined the credibility of the travelogue aspect of the book.Otherwise, a richly satisfying reading experience.

[bryanthomass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although the book has its moments, I was disappointed with its inaccuracies. It definitely captures the Asian culture in which it is set. The characters and world are quite vivid. It's obvious the author has experienced the culture and done his research. But the main character is represented as a fairly conservative missionary type, and his transformation from saint to sinner seems very cliché. It's perhaps the view a Liberal would take of a conservative Christian -- always questioning the sincerity and integrity of the person without really understanding who they are. But it does not accurately represent the real such people I know and have experienced my whole life. Thus,I had trouble buying it. I also thought the story's paced waned in the middle. The end left me empty because of the character issues above. Still, the prose is well written.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A young, rather naive man comes to Taiwan as a missionary and English teacher, and is launched by a chain of events – beginning with his affair with one of his underage students – on both an internal spiritual journey and a literal journey across China to bring back a wife for his employer. This novel is always quiet, in both its moments of beauty and despair, of spiritual insight and despondency, and so culminates in a reading experience that is quietly but powerfully moving.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In times like these, when so many people are slaves to their Blackberries, PCs, iphones and e-mail, few of them are apt to want to read a book that exceeds 200 pages. But every now and then a big fat novel comes along that is well worth the time it takes to read. Heaven Lake is one of those novels. I will admit that the very thickness of this book was a bit intimidating when I first picked it up, and then, in the first few pages, when I learned that its protagonist, Vincent Saunders, was a young Christian missionary fresh out of college, come to spread the Word to the people of Toulio, Taiwan, I was again a bit put off. Oh no, I thought - one of those dull, preachy, way too-Christian tomes that I learned long ago to steer clear of. But the book was a swap. I had traded one of my own books for it with its author, John Dalton, so I figured I should at least give it a chance, and I am so glad I did. Because Vincent quickly turns out to be a very human, very fallible young man, who soon begins to question his beliefs and proves to have feet of clay when it comes to all the normal temptations of being young, lonely and far from home in a foreign land. Less than a dozen pages into the novel Vincent's moral opposite appears in the person of Scotsman Alec McGowan, a fellow roomer in the house he initially occupies. Alec is a devotee of hash-smoking and loose living, who has been tramping about the Far East and the Indian subcontinent for nearly a decade. And yet he possesses a kind of cosmopolitan well-traveled charm that Vincent tries hard to resist, until, that is, Vincent himself becomes embroiled in an affair with a teenage student in one of his English Language and Bible classes. True, the student, Trudy, is extremely forward and definitely the agressor in the ill-advised relationship, but after several weeks of never touching another human being, Vincent guiltily succumbs to Trudy's advances and the fleshly comforts of her warm young body. Of course he gets caught, receives a vicious beating from the girl's brother, and is flatly warned to "get outa Dodge," prompting him to accept the terms of a shady deal from a local businessman, Mr. Gwa, which sends him on a picaresque, adventure-filled journey across the breadth of mainland China to bring back a "bride" for Gwa from the far western industrial town of Urumchi, which is near the title's Heaven Lake, a real place, located high in the "mountains of God." Vincent's faith is sorely tested from the very outset of this story, even before he gets himself into trouble. He is secretly ashamed, for example, for not interfering when his neighbors set upon a homeless, probably retarded man in the street in front of his house and beat him cruelly and then haul him away. Vincent is reminded daily of his inaction as he skirts the lingering bloodstains on the sidewalk. Disturbed by this episode, Vincent reflects upon it, trying to understand it -"It did seem, truly, that there were voids into which the light of Christ or Buddha or any other hopeful belief could not travel. There were chasms in this world that deflected any earnest attempt at faith." Later, as Vincent makes his way across the wide reaches of mainland China by train and bus, he encounters even worse examples of these "voids," and the journey takes on a kind of Dante-esque "to-Hell-and-back" quality of horror he could never have imagined in his previously comfortable faith-based upbringing. In the city of Lanzhou he witnesses a group of bus-drivers casually stoning a woman in a parking lot near the train station. Her crime? She had snuck into one of their buses to sleep at night. She was "... dirty. She makes a smell in the back of the bus. A very bad smell." Overcoming his fear of the drivers and his own aversion to the woman's filth and odor, Vincent rescues her and takes her to a clinic, where he makes a horrific discovery among her few meager possessions -"... he squatted down beside the woman's rolled blanket. He unwound the first layer, then the next. Inside were two dead, naked infants - girls, twins, each with round bellies and thin, puckered arms. They both appeared undersized, perhaps premature. They had a stiff-limbed hold on each other, a life-seeking embrace. Their eyelids were barely parted. Their stilled gaze was the most horrendous thing he'd ever seen." Sadly, this kind of awful revelation was barely the beginning of Vincent's education in the cruelties that men are capapble of. He learns more nearly every day about those "chasms" where the love of Christ - or Buddha - seem so painfully absent. Betrayal, greed, intrigue and indifference become commonplace experiences as his journey continues and his original mission to collect a bride for Gwa collapses and fails.In an interesting side note, on the return trip to Hong Kong, Vincent meets a customs agent on a bus, who, much to the scorn of Alec (with whom Vincent has made part of the trip), comments, "Some say that in twenty years, in thirty years, China will be leader of the modern world." Considering the year was 1990, one feels a chilling current of prophecy in reading this. The pacing, the plotting, and especially the characters of Heaven Lake are nearly letter-perfect throughout this beautiful novel, which made me eager to return to it each time I was interrupted by other responsibilities. As I drew near the final pages, I realized that, long as this book is, I didn't want the story to end. And perhaps the neatest hat trick Dalton performs here is the way he manages to end Vincent's story on a note of profound hope, which is no small feat, considering the dark revelations about human nature presented periodically throughout the narrative. While Heaven Lake may not be a book you can read in a few hours, it is most certainly one which you will remember for a long time.

[catien_3 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Vincent Saunders is in Taiwan as a volunteer Christian minister, and that is about as far as I got. The book just didn't grab me. Probably my fault and not the book's and will try to read it again at a later time.

[kirconnell · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Vincent Saunders thought that he had his life figured out. He began as a Christian worker in Taiwan with good expectations, but a lapse in judgment changed his life completely. He decides to accept the offer of a local businessman to travel to mainland China and return with a lovely young woman that Gwa wanted as a wife. This expedition across the vastness of China alters not only his future, but also provides Vincent insights into himself and others.I found this to be a beautifully written book about a world that few Westerners will ever have the chance to see. It flows lazily like a river as Vincent relates his observations and experiences. Unfortunately, despite this or because of this, I found Heaven Lake a difficult book to resume once I put it down. Something about it failed to compel me and I found myself picking up other books to read instead.

[5crows · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book should be required reading for any Mormon missionary preparing to go out into the world. The gradual realization that the world is a lot of gray instead of black and white is my favorite aspect of this book. That and the fact that good people can do bad things, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad people.

[mbergman_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A young (mid-20s) midwestern (Illinois, near St. Louis), naive man goes to Taiwan to volunteer for a Christian mission effort. His loneliness gets him in trouble, and he gradually leanrs that life is more complicated than he had realized. Eventually, he undertakes a gruelling journey of cultural & self-discovery across the vast length & breadth of the Chinese Mainland. It's a slow-moving story that's mostly a downer with limited yield.