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Crossing Cultures in Marriage & Life
An interview with memoirist Susan Blumberg-Kason about the ‘Good Chinese Wife’
Susan Blumberg-Kason is a memoirist, biographer, and book critic who’s written candidly about her experience as the American wife of a Chinese man in the 1990s. I wanted to interview Susan because both my grandmother and my mother, too, were white American women who married Chinese men. Both also ran into a number of insurmountable cultural road blocks, so when Susan recounted these hurdles in her memoir Good Chinese Wife, I felt as if I could be reading about my own family.
Our conversation, then, revolves around the romantic allure of China and the challenges, for women especially, of marrying across cultural boundaries, in defiance of convention.
Q: Susan, your first husband was Chinese, which was not quite as uncommon in the 1990s as it was in 1906, when my American grandmother married my Chinese grandfather. But it was still unusual. I think my grandmother had no idea what she was getting herself into, either in facing American bigotry…
