What We Were Promised

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for great books (and the time to read them!), not least Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised. This novel is the story of a Chinese couple who has made good on the dream of American educations and American jobs and, finally, a triumphant return as expats to a China they discover they hardly know.

Wei, or Boss Zhen, is a highly successful marketing executive with a reality tv show that allows his estranged brother, Qiang, to contact him for the first time since he walked out of Wei's wedding 20-some years before. In the U.S., Lina was an energetic and popular Chinese teacher. In Shanghai she has devolved into the quintessential taitai; the book opens with her accusation of theft against a longtime maid that, coupled with Qiang's phone call seems to have sent the family, including 12-year-old, home-from-boarding-school-for-summers-only, Karen, into a tailspin. At the center of the action, and able to witness all of the jealousies, insecurities, and half-truths is maid Sunny.

Tan quietly tells their story from the alternating viewpoints of Wei, Lina, and Sunny, each of whom is trying to come to terms with past and present, obligations to family versus self, and the nature of incurring and canceling debts, especially the kinds that can't be counted in dollars and cents.

I absolutely loved this book. I was reminded frequently of Pachinko, particularly in regards to the nature of family dynamics and what is owed to the individual dream and the collective good.

Five stars.