BLOG tour for Good Chinese Wife

I was thrilled when I was asked to be part of the blog tour for this book as I am a big fan of memoirs.

Thank you to Sourcebooks for sending me a copy of this book.


TITLE:             Good Chinese Wife

AUTHOR:        Susan Blumberg-Kason

GENRE:           Memoir

RATING:          

Ah, the things we do for love.  This is what kept popping into my mind as I read this book.  

Thanks to the fact that we can now move about freely and meet a variety of people, gone are the days (for the most part) of marrying the boy next door.  As we travel about the globe, people meet and experience things that were unheard of in the past and nowhere is this more obvious than in this book.

Susan is a shy girl living in the USA who has always been fascinated by China - she gets the opportunity to make her dream come true by heading to Hong King to study.  There, she meets her soul mate - Cai who is Chinese.

From the first sentences of this memoir, you can immediately feel the clash of personalities brought on by so vastly different cultures.  In the beginning, Susan pushes away her fears and her thoughts, making herself believe that everything is just fine.  This made me want to scream at her,, although I guess as a bystander without a horse in the race, it was way easier for me to see what was happening than for Susan to admit it to herself.

Told in a very frank and honest way (Susan does not always portray herself in the best light either), this book is a road map for all things that can go wrong when two people who are wayyyyy too different in every way get married.

Cai is unlikeable and frankly, annoying from his first appearance in the story and Susan spends much of the early book making me want to strangle her, but that is the strength of this novel - that it can actually elicit so many different emotions in the reader.

Through the story, we also learn some interesting things about Hong Kong and how truly different their cultures seem to be.

Written in a clear voice that doesn't go too overboard on details (although at times, I found myself wishing there was a tad less of it in some spots), the overall story and writing are first rate.

I truly enjoyed reading this memoir.