Repeat After Me
A Novel
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
A young New Yorker teaches English to a Chinese dissident in this "heartbreaking and uplifting" novel of love, loss, and language (Publishers Weekly).
Aysha is a twenty-two-year-old plagued by guilt and anxiety ever since her parents' divorce. But after suffering severe symptoms, she's now focused on recovering and on teaching her English as a Second Language students. Then a young man named Da Ge joins her ESL class. A dissident with a painful past, he has fled China after the Tianenmen Square massacre, and Aysha finds herself falling irresistibly in love, in spite of the language barrier—and often, the emotional barrier—between them. When he asks her to marry him for the sake of a visa, she cannot say no. It is a relationship that will bring both great joy and great sorrow—and will take Aysha to places she never imagined.
A winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, this is an insightful and emotional novel by the author of Big Girl Small and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing.
"Her writing gleams with beautifully realized descriptions of people, places, and encounters." —Time Out
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DeWoskin, author of the memoir Foreign Babies in Beijing, presents a complex love story of cultural intersection, communication barriers, psychotic breakdowns and the search for life's big, unknowable truths. On Manhattan's Upper West Side, several months after 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, young college dropout Aysha Silvermintz is recovering from an emotional collapse. Teaching an adult class on English as a second language, she meets a young Chinese student named Chen Da Ge, an even more unstable soul she finds herself falling for. Under the pretense of helping him gain citizenship, but hoping for a romantic relationship, Silvermintz agrees to marry Chen, whose feelings and past she still finds a mystery. Silvermintz narrates her story from 13 years later, and the parallel narrative finds Chen dead and Silvermintz living in Beijing with their daughter. Immersing them both in the world of Chen's past, Silvermintz struggles to gain a better understanding of her husband and their time together. A tender story of manic love and loss, this is a heartbreaking and uplifting novel with memorably off-kilter leads.
