Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong

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. (July)