Book Review
"The Love Wife": One family, many voices

By Wingate Packard
Special to The Seattle Times

AUTHOR PHOTO BY J.D. SLOAN Gish Jen

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Before the Communist Revolution in China, a man could have a love wife, a concubine, if the marriage that suited his family did not suit him. A half-century later, Carnegie Wong suspects that his deceased mother, an immigrant from that era, laid plans along those lines for him. So begins "The Love Wife," Gish Jen's painfully funny third novel, a giant American story with roots and branches in unexpected places.

Carnegie and Blondie Wong head up a suburban Boston family. (Blondie was known as Janie until her mother-in-law derisively gave her the nickname, and she accepted this, liking the idea of herself as "open.")

The Wongs have three children: Lizzy, 15, Wendy, 9, and Bailey, 2. Carnegie adopted Lizzy, an Asian foundling left at a church in the Midwest during his graduate-school years. He met Janie while holding the infant for the first time, and they married. Several years later they adopted Wendy from China.

To their surprise, Blondie becomes pregnant at 43 with their biological child, who has blond hair and blue eyes at birth. This mixed race, nontraditional family is already juggling issues of adolescence, adoption, ethnic appearance, bereavement, perimenopause, marriage doldrums and dual careers — when in comes Lan, a relative from China.

"The Love Wife" by Gish Jen Knopf, 379 pp., $24.95

Lan comes to live with the family. Carnegie's mother, Mama Wong, who died two years earlier, left a will specifying that the "family book," which traces the Wong family ancestry, will go to Wendy, but only on condition that a distant female relative first comes to live with them for several years to help raise the children. At the very least, Mama Wong wants to ensure that her adopted granddaughters know what it means to be Chinese; at the most dramatic, it appears to Blondie that this is Mama Wong's way, after hilariously failing to prevent their marriage, to get Carnegie together with a Chinese woman.

Lan, installed in the apartment above the garage, is a rich character. She thinks the Wongs consider her their servant and interprets their generosity as insincerity. Lizzy and Wendy love to do their homework in her apartment and hear about her tragic life, which was derailed by the Cultural Revolution after she was orphaned young and "sent down" to live in the countryside. Now 46 and a single, migrant laborer, Lan refers to herself as part of "the wasted generation." She is proud that she needs so little, compared with these soft Americans who have so much.

Carnegie dismisses Blondie's fears, but cracks in their marriage give Lan an odd leverage. Blondie, who speaks some Mandarin, tries to be flexible and welcoming, and Carnegie embraces his newfound Chinese identity. Still, Lan's interference with the girls bugs Blondie; and Lan herself interests Carnegie.

To understand Carnegie is to know more about his mother. Afflicted with Alzheimer's, she spent the last nine years of her life in a posh nursing home near Carnegie's family, to Carnegie's everlasting regret. Her resilience and immigrant drive to make it in America, after escaping from China in the 1950s by swimming to Hong Kong with two basketballs under her arms, make her a hard act to follow. She was "a pioneer woman, alive to the real miracle of America; namely, mortgages." He has reacted for so long to his mother's steely pronouncements and inclination to profit, he doesn't know any other way of being.

Blondie senses the chaos that will descend on Carnegie after his mother dies; she understands herself to be a work in progress, and it is her constant examination of her habits of mind that force the family to evolve, with Lan along for the ride.

Coming Up Gish Jen The author of "The Love Wife" will read at 7:30 p.m Oct. 14 at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

Jen's well-crafted, capacious novel reads like a play, as if the characters are sitting on the edge of the stage in front of the curtain, explaining background issues, interrupting each other, responding to something one just said. They squabble or ignore each other, then confide in the reader. Jen dispenses with fictional artifices, like "the next day," for sequencing dramatic episodes. Rather like real life, we learn everything through individual voices, Jen giving no one character more perspective than another.

Jen's playful and comic versatility with all these voices and their identity issues, her dramatic achievement in perfectly setting up epic family secrets that are revealed at the end, and her resistance to portraying characters as only sympathetic or unappealing, keeps this sprawling, vibrant story simmering, long after you turn the last page.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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