The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Ling, Zhang. Where Waters Meet. Amazon Crossing, 2023.

Ling's novel is divided into six chapters. The first and final chapters are set in the present day, and the four in the middle consist primarily of main character Phoenix's manuscript detailing the events of her mother's life and her own childhood in China.

The novel begins with Phoenix's mother, alternately known as Rain or Chunyu, dying. Briefly, we learn of how Phoenix met her husband, George, an audiologist living in Toronto. Then, more details are given about Rain's death. She had dementia, and was deteriorating mentally for years. Phoenix learns that her mother worked in a field hospital during the war, which she never knew, and Rain's sister, Mei, calls and tells her to come to Shanghai so she can tell her more about her mother's life.

Phoenix decides to write a manuscript detailing her mother's (and her own) experiences. She writes about her father, Wang Erwa, a veteran of the Korean War who came back home with a brain injury; Chunyu married him after this. After his return, a famine sets in within China, and Phoenix (Chinese name Yuan Feng) goes hunting for sparrows with her father. They find supplies and food dropped by the Nationalist government in the woods and take them even though they are the enemy Erwa had fought against. Erwa puts on a shirt he finds there, unaware that there is a Nationalist slogan on the back. Upon his return to town, he is arrested. He is held for two weeks and his war medal is stripped away. In 1968, a man named Little Tiger comes in the house demanding money from Chunyu for something she allegedly did to him. Erwa scares him away, and dies later that night.

After Erwa's death, Yuan Feng and Chunyu grow close to Meng Long, an English teacher of Yuan Feng's. Meanwhile, the famine is ongoing and the Yuan family is struggling to make ends meet; Chunyu sells her blood to put food on the table.

One day, Meng Long finds Yuan Feng at a pond nearby having stepped on a nail. He brings her home to treat her wound and the family has dinner with him. He brings a radio over illegally that broadcasts the news in English and Chinese, and he tutors Yuan Feng in English. Yuan Feng has a big crush on him, and one night he tells her that he will tell her something at the end of the school year. However, he is banished to an even more remote community because of a spelling error that made it seem like he was amenable to the Nationalistic government. The family decides to flee to Canada with him, but they need to smuggle themselves to Hong Kong by boat first in order to do that. When they are spotted by government forces on the boat, Meng Long dives in to distract them, basically sacrificing himself. Decades later, in Canada, Yuan Feng sees Meng Long again for the first time in a restaurant. She decides not to go up to him.

The action jumps to 1949, with Chunyu reuniting with her sister, Mei, for the first time in five years. Mei, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, moves Chunyu into her home in Shanghai with her husband, Chen, a high-ranking Communist official. She meets Chen, who gives her a job in the garden, which becomes a bustling source of food for the Communist party. Chunyu, meanwhile, falls into a deep depression after her father's death, and learns that he never wanted her to return home because of a man who matches Little Tiger's description who kept coming to collect money from Chunyu. Chunyu briefly nurses a cat and her three kittens until one dies and the rest of them flee. As the Korean War begins, Chunyu has a horrible miscarriage, but she goes to meet Erwa at the hospital, knowing him somehow from years past. They agree to marry.

The action shifts to 1944. Mei and Chunyu's mother has just been killed in a bombing, and the two are captured and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers when they go to tell their father the news. They are held in a brothel to be used as sex slaves for the Japanese soldiers. Little Tiger is a teenager who works in the brothel. Chunyu is taken to be the main sex slave of the Japanese soldiers' leader, Kobayashi. Mei grows more unwell by the day, and Chunyu figures out a way to get Kobayashi to let her out to see her mother's grave. She leaves and does not return, which angers Kobayashi. One stormy night, Little Tiger comes into the room with Kobayashi's water buckets not full, and he shoots several of his fingers off in outrage. The warehouse the Japanese are building explodes shortly thereafter, and Kobayashi shoots Chunyu in the shoulder as she escapes, thinking that Mei may have had something to do with it. Chunyu begins to bleed out, but is rescued by a group of Chinese soldiers that include Wang Erwa, her future husband. Erwa is shot in the process, and the two are treated in a hospital afterwards. It looks like Erwa may need his leg amputated, but Chunyu licks his wounds, recalling an old wives' tale she remembers from her mother saying saliva has healing properties. It works and he keeps his leg. Chunyu stays on to work at the hospital after Erwa is discharged until, years later, Mei summons her to Shanghai.

Back to the present day, George visits Phoenix in Shanghai. Mei later tells Phoenix about how she ran into a classmate fleeing the brothel who brings her into the Communist Party. Mei tells Phoenix that Meng Long was going to marry her mother if he had not died, which shocks Phoenix. She leaves, resolved to scatter her mother's ashes in the water in China.