heatheradiamond's reviews
296 reviews

This memoir reads like fiction--a prince, a palace, a fairytale romance, and a few wicked relations. Gee's cross-cultural romance starts in colonial Hong Kong and takes her to post-colonial India, where her soon-to-be-husband happens to be heir to a once grand palace. As an independent American trying to adapt to an unfamiliar and much more traditional cultural environment, Gee learns about herself and the value of family. In Hong Kong, Gee (who is Chinese American) circulates in the glitzy ex-pat world of designer clothes, taxis, and high-class restaurants and clubs while working as an entertainment editor for the foremost newspaper in the colony. Her insulated privilege is annoying at first, but keep reading. Her self-deprecating humor and candidly honest reflections on her family of origin turn her into a relatable character, and when she falls in love with her Indian co-worker, she begins to make very different choices about her lifestyle and values. Gee's descriptions of her time in India are full of rich sensory description and woven through with insights about her fiance's family history set against a changing India.

As someone both who lives in and writes about intercultural marriage, I love this book. While many memoirs about this topic focus on the obvious external challenges and conflicts of adjusting to a foreign spouse and environment, Slater goes beyond the Cinderella story and delves into the internal issues of loving someone from another culture. An introverted feminist who is estranged from her own family, she falls in love with a Japanese salaryman and eventually moves to Kyoto to make a life there with him. There are predictable challenges because she and her husband-to-be come from very different sets of values and social customs, but as she grows to understand the culture and cares for her aging father-in-law, she learns the beauty of interdependence and Japanese customs. This is a quiet book of unfolding revelations about self and family that beautifully reflects the very real process of acculturation and the deeper appreciation that is possible after the "happy ever after."

Part memoir and part fiction, this book is breathtaking--innovative in its braided form and mix of facts and imagined narrative, disturbing in its revelations about how young women were ostracized and disciplined for their perceived "immorality." As we follow the narrator's efforts to unearth her mother's adoption history, we are dawn into the hidden history of incarceration for girls deemed socially aberrant. The fictional thread that imagines the life of the missing grandmother is a spellbinding and poignant reminder of both personal and social loss when women's voices are silenced.