What does it mean to speak? What consequences does silence have? How do we construct the world, both the world of our personal mythology and the outside world, onto which we cast the projections of our dreams? Who are we, in the end, what defines us -- trauma, action, desire, or the story we tell about all three?

Zinedin Aldiyarov’s text confronts the difficult implications of these questions through the transformation of his protagonist and his own attempt to make sense of the inevitably multifaceted, painful answers. 

In telling this story of a midlife awakening, the story of a quite literal but also deeply metaphoric discovery of a new world, the author deftly avoids the pitfalls of easy epiphanies. While his story is set in 17th century China, its motifs and concerns far transcend its historical costume. As all good fiction, this is a story that is on one hand firmly about Zheng, the disaffected merchant haunted by his past; but on the other it is a narrative of universal yearning. For truly, the search for something greater than the world we know, the lure of the mythical El Dorado, the call of unknown shores upon which one could remake oneself and break free from the confines of established society and one’s own traumas, is not only deeply human, but timeless.