Posted on July 31, 2014 by mauracunningham
No blogging here recently because I am in full-on DISSERTATION MODE as I careen down the home stretch. Ten days to go before I have to deliver the finished product to my committee—I’ll make it
(I hope!), but working full-bore on the final chapter and editing the ones I’ve already written hasn’t left me with the bandwith to do much of anything else these last few weeks.
However, I have carved out a little bit of time here and there this summer to write some other pieces, and two of them went online this morning. At the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog, my article about a new memoir by Chicago-based author Susan Blumberg-Kason is now up. Her book, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong, tells the story of her whirlwind romance and difficult marriage to a Chinese man she met while a graduate student in Hong Kong back in the mid-1990s:
“I thought I knew what I was getting into,” is what author Susan Blumberg-Kason told me about her marriage at the age of 24 to a Chinese doctoral student she met while living in Hong Kong. And she had every reason to feel confident: Competent in Mandarin and with multiple trips to China under her belt, she had about as good a grasp of the country as any Westerner could back in 1995, when few had the opportunity to travel widely there.
Over the next five years, however, she came to realize the vast difference between visiting China and trying to become part of a Chinese family.
Second, my monthly contribution to the LA Review of Books China Blog, which is an essay about four short books concerning China in World War I that I read last weekend: