Good Chinese Wife
A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
A stunning memoir of an intercultural marriage gone wrong
When Susan, a shy Midwesterner in love with Chinese culture, started graduate school in Hong Kong, she quickly fell for Cai, the Chinese man of her dreams. As they exchanged vows, Susan thought she'd stumbled into an exotic fairy tale, until she realized Cai—and his culture—where not what she thought.
In her riveting memoir, Susan recounts her struggle to be the perfect traditional "Chinese" wife to her increasingly controlling and abusive husband. With keen insight and heart-wrenching candor, she confronts the hopes and hazards of intercultural marriage, including dismissing her own values and needs to save her relationship and protect her newborn son, Jake. But when Cai threatens to take Jake back to China for good, Susan must find the courage to stand up for herself, her son, and her future.
Moving between rural China and the bustling cities of Hong Kong and San Francisco, Good Chinese Wife is an eye-opening look at marriage and family in contemporary China and America and an inspiring testament to the resilience of a mother's love—across any border.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A well-intentioned though hasty marriage to a less-than-forthright mainland Chinese man turns sour in this prickly memoir by freelance Chicago journalist Blumberg-Kason. Bowled over by an attractive ethnomusicologist she met in the early 1990s while studying as a graduate student at the University of Hong Kong, the author, then 24 (a "Midwestern wallflower" from a Jewish family in Evanston, Ill.), found the attentions of Cai, a 30-something scholar from Wuhan, China, irresistible. He was handsome, unusually tall, and had a young child from a former marriage. Soon Blumberg was tutoring Caion his English papers most evenings and agreeing to marriage. The Chinese don't really date, he told her. "Do you have any bad habits?" was his courting question. While Blumberg-Kason's faults included a lack of self-knowledge and self-confidence, Cai's turned out to be a fondness for porn and an (insinuated but never quite proved) homosexual affair that gave her an unexplained STD. Moving from Wuhan to San Francisco, the couple stumbled over cultural biases on both sides: in China she balked at primitive shower and toilet facilities, while in California he found America had no culture, "no meaning." This is a belabored story, overstuffed with detail, but it inspires little sympathy for either spouse.
