In Wu’s novel, memories and revelations mark a woman’s trip to her native China.
Chinese-born Mei is a driven scientist who works for a pharmaceutical startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts; she’s unhappily married to an Italian American man, with whom she raises snarky, 12-year-old twins. Mei can’t say no when one of her aunts asks her to help facilitate the marriage of the family’s only male heir, Mei’s cousin Binbin, “whom we protected like an endangered panda”: “We all understood his destiny: before exhaling his last breath, [Binbin] must produce a male progeny against all odds.” To seal the deal with his betrothed, Binbin must take ownership of his late grandparents’ apartment; the hitch is that Grandpa’s death certificate is nowhere to be found, so all other potential beneficiaries must relinquish their claims to the apartment by signing waivers before a local notary. This setup takes Mei back to her hometown of Nanjing, where, through adult eyes, she reevaluates family anecdotes, her own childhood and coming of age, her beloved Grandpa and Grandma, and her “take-charge mother.” She also comes to understand how the lives of her parents, grandparents, and extended family members were shaped by Japan’s invasion of China and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937; the purges, property seizures, and reeducation camps of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong; and Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Mei’s struggle to belatedly reconcile her past life in China with her assimilation in the United States also spurs her desire to archive her grandfather’s wealth of lore, including the story that gives this novel its name. Wu’s debut novel effectively presents one woman’s compelling personal story and how it’s been shaped by history. Its characters are memorable, and Mei’s introspective narration gives the work a distinctive voice. The presentation of a revelation affecting Mei’s marriage borders on the melodramatic. However, this is offset by the striking sensory quality of Wu’s narrative throughout, as when an “odor of over-ripe fruit” sparks Mei’s “olfactory memory—a strange, illogical library,” and she describes the dialect in her father’s hometown of Suzhou as “so soft—as if every harsh sound had been muffled by cotton candy.”
An observant and emotionally authentic novel of homecoming.