This long, narrative poem in English and Chinese follows one woman's journey from China to Canada over four decades. In these pages the two languages sit side by side, mirroring each other, each telling a tale that alternates between confusion and despair and hopes and dreams. Lien Chao depicts the struggle of a generation in its persistent search for freedom and for free artistic expression.

This book is a personal epic, a mixture of lyric and narrative that joins Lien Chao's Chinese past with her Canadian present and future. The intensity of its joy and pain, its two worlds caught in two languages, makes it a fascinating and unique creation.
- David Helwig

Lien Chao's Maples and the Stream is an intensely truthful and engaging poem that crosses back and forth the nebulous border of diasporic encounter and identity. This is a hybrid text that poses the in-between places of a translational attention and offers us concrete touchstones of history, person, and desire. The maple is surely a more palpable tree for Lien Chao's lyrical honesty.
- Fred Wah

Lien Chao's profile page

is the author of the award-winning Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English. She lives in Toronto.

This book is a personal epic, a mixture of lyric and narrative that joins Lien Chao's Chinese past with her Canadian present and future. The intensity of its joy and pain, its two worlds caught in two languages, makes it a fascinating and unique creation.
- DAVID HELWIG

Lien Chao's Maples and the Stream is an intensely truthful and engaging poem that crosses back and forth the nebulous border of diasporic encounter and identity. This is a hybrid text that poses the in-between places of a translational attention and offers us concrete touchstones of history, person, and desire. The maple is surely a more palpable tree for Lien Chao's lyrical honesty.
- FRED WAH