About the Author
Violet Tang is a Chinese-Canadian writer whose life was forever changed at age eleven, when she witnessed the horrific aftermath of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake.
After seeing a teenage survivor on television, she was so deeply moved that she began what would become her life’s work: documenting their lives and sharing their stories.
While other children played after school, Violet scoured blogs and forums, searching for earthquake survivors. One by one, she found them and won their trust. She grew up alongside them, not only as a listener and chronicler of their trauma, but as a friend. For nearly eighteen years, they shared their stories, diaries, grief, laughter, inside jokes, secret wounds, fears, and dreams.
Some survivors showed the world curated versions of themselves; brave, funny, cool, smiling. But Violet saw their unspoken memories, their survivor’s guilt, their fierce love, their unbreakable loyalty, and their quiet resilience. She traveled to the towns where they had once lived. She listened. She documented. She wrote their quiet, hidden truths.
All of their experiences, personalities, and memories are the soul of her work—not imagined characters, but real lives rendered with literary precision, deep understanding of human nature and psyche, compassion, and emotional truth.
That’s why her characters feel so incredibly real and human: they are.
She has spent nearly eighteen years listening, writing, and honoring their truths—crafting a literary chronicle of a generation shaped by tragedy, but not defined by it.
Her novel Where the River Meets the Moon: The Ballad of Youth was first published in Zhongshan Magazine’s Long Novel Edition in 2024, one of China’s most respected literary journals. It marks the beginning of a multi-volume saga tracing the lives of earthquake survivors from childhood into adulthood.
Violet holds a master’s degree in art history from Queen’s University, where she researched Chinese Canadian women’s identity through fashion and oral history. She has worked in cultural memory and curatorial practice across Canada and China, and currently serves as a manager at Cotton D Contemporary Art Centre in Nanjing.
She is also the co-founder of Earth Online, a trauma therapy center supporting survivors of violence and disaster. Her work lives at the intersection of art, empathy, healing, and storytelling.
Writing has always been in her blood. Her mother, a poetic and literary contemporary Chinese romance author, guided her pen from a young age, nurturing the voice that would one day give rise to her monumental saga.
Violet is currently continuing the saga and working to build a real-life space of remembrance and healing: the Grad Club, in honor of a promise made by one friend to another who didn’t survive.
Outside of writing, Violet loves wolves, exploring new places, volunteering, playing the violin, discussing psychology and therapy, and admiring beautiful paintings.
Blog Posts
Book Blurb
Where the River Meets the Moon:
Stardust
They were just kids. Then the earth shattered.
In one devastating moment, the students of East High went from taking exams and falling in love… to being buried alive beneath concrete, steel, ash, and blood.
Some would survive, some would lose limbs, and some would lose the ones they loved most.
What follows is the story of those who survived—and everything it cost them.
Ma Yu, once a proud top student, now haunted by guilt and shame.
Xue Xiao, who lost his arm saving her, becomes a national symbol he never asked to be.
Shasha, the queen bee whose sharp tongue and scheming antics masked a deeper loneliness.
Qing Yan, fragile and quiet, who finds unexpected strength and peace in helping others.
And the Wolfpack—China’s top youth basketball team—shattered by loss, but daring to play again on plastic legs, aching memories, and incredible resilience.
This is a story of quiet, everyday heroes. A story of teenagers learning to live again, love again, and walk forward—together—after the ground gave way beneath their feet and their world fell apart.
About the Series
Explore Saga of East High Kids
Book I
Where the River Meets the Moon: The Meili Story
This middle-grade novel follows Xue Xiao—later known as the “Coke Boy”—through his primary school years, alongside his childhood companion, Ma Yu, and their close-knit group of friends. Set between 2000 and 2003, the story revolves around a mysterious tragedy on a snow mountain in 1990, where seventeen mountaineers from a Chinese–Japanese expedition perished and were never recovered.
Book II
Where the River Meets the Moon: The Ballad of Youth
Set during junior high school, this lower Young Adult novel centers on East Junior High’s basketball team, the Wolfpack, as they struggle to regroup after their former captain, Fu Cheng, transfers to a rival school. The team’s pursuit of a provincial championship becomes a story of rivalry, loyalty, and resilience.
Book III
Where the River Meets the Moon: Stardust
This Young Adult novel follows Xue Xiao and his peers through high school, with the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake as its central rupture. The first half portrays their lives before the disaster—full of friendship, first love, conflict, and the sweetness and bitterness of growing up. The second half examines the aftermath of the earthquake, focusing on disability, autonomy, survivorship, and the formation of selfhood in the wake of irreversible loss.