Fāngyán De Shēngyīn

Shu Ya grew up in Shanghai and can't understand a word her Wenzhou grandmother says. A linguistics PhD student, she goes back to the village on the Nanxi River to record its dialect before the last speakers are gone: a boatman's river words, a wedding song only three women remember, a typhoon night, a talking dictionary -- and the day she answers her grandmother in her grandmother's own language.