The Love Wife

Gish Jen’s novel The Love Wife (2004) mixes humor and dramatic pathos to portray a family pulled apart by both internal and external forces. Drawing on her life as a second-generation American, Gish tends to write “bittersweet stories about the Chinese immigrant experience in America,” and this novel is no different. Centered on a family of mixed backgrounds, it revolves around the theme of kinship. How are family bonds created, and what do those who consider themselves related actually share with one another? Shifting between many different narrators, each of whom speaks in sections that range from several sentences to many pages, the novel builds its story by jumping from perspective to perspective and flashing backward and forward in time.

The Wong family is composed of three generations. The matriarch, Mama Wong, is a tough and shrewd businesswoman whose pragmatism has fueled an incredible rise. As we learn in the novel, Mama Wong, born in Mainland China, escaped to Taiwan by swimming across the Taiwan Strait buoyed by two basketballs. After coming to America, she became a successful entrepreneur.

Her son is Carnegie Wong – named for the famous nineteenth-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Unlike his ruthless namesake, Carnegie is mild and softhearted. Growing up, he has had a contentious relationship with his mother; as a result, he is mostly out of touch with his Chinese roots. When Carnegie was in graduate school, he impulsively adopted an Asian foundling baby named Lizzy. Through the process of the adoption, Carnegie met Janie Bailey, a white woman whom his mother nicknamed “Blondie” as a pejorative insult – and the name stuck. When Carnegie and Blondie decided to get married, Mama Wong offered each of them a million dollars not to go through with it because she really wanted Carnegie to marry a Chinese woman.



Carnegie and Blondie call themselves the “half half” family. Their children include the now fifteen-year-old Lizzy; nine-year-old Wendy, whom they adopted from China; and thirteen-month-old Bailey, who is their biological child.

The arrival of Bailey, who was born blond and lacked Asian features, highlights some of the tensions various members of the family experience. For Lizzy, he is a reminder that there is no way to determine what her actual ethnicity is – visually, she is clearly Asian, but because she was abandoned as a baby, no one knows her provenance. Both Lizzy and Wendy are jealous of Blondie’s attachment to Bailey – their matching physiognomies seem to be a reproach to the girls, who don’t look like their adopted mom. For Mama Wong, Bailey’s white features are indicative of everything that is wrong with her daughter-in-law. Despite the fact that Blondie has done her best to adapt Carnegie’s Chinese roots – from learning to speak and write Chinese to celebrating traditional holidays – Mama Wong has never recovered from Carnegie’s decision to marry her.

As the novel opens, Mama Wong has been slowly losing cognitive function because of Alzheimer's. After she dies, her will reveals that along with her estate comes Lan Lin, ostensibly a distant cousin from Mainland China who survived the Cultural Revolution and who will come to live with the family to work as a nanny.



Lan’s arrival brings all the simmering tensions to the fore. What is her true purpose? Carnegie and Blondie are suspicious of Mama Wong’s motives. Is Lan supposed to be the “love wife” – the late-in-life woman who fulfills the role of wife to the fullest?

It doesn’t help that Lan does seem to be doing everything to displace Blondie from the family. She cooks Chinese meals and speaks to the Wong daughters about the place where Wendy and, possibly, Lizzy come from. Both girls are immediately enamored of Lan, feeling closer to her than to their own mother. They discuss with her the race-inflected issues they face in school – issues they never felt able to adequately address with Blondie. Carnegie starts to wonder whether he should have married an Asian woman instead of a WASP. He begins to connect to his roots, rectifying the fact that he “never learned one Chinese word,” and begins to be romantically interested in Lan.

Lan isn’t sure about her motives. Even her first-person narration doesn’t make it clear whether she is out to wedge herself into the Wong family or whether her more down to earth style just happens to be a better match for their personalities than the slightly fake Blondie. Either way, Blondie quickly gives up the battle and moves out of the family house, leaving Lan behind in her place.



However, the climax of the novel comes with the dramatic reveal of who exactly Lan is. One of Mama Wong’s bequests was a very valuable book about the last seventeen generations of Mama Wong’s family, which takes many months to arrive from China. When Wendy finally receives it, the family learns that Lan isn’t a cousin at all – she is Mama Wong’s biological daughter, who was forced to stay behind in China after Mama Wong escaped. What’s more, it turns out that Carnegie isn’t biologically related to Mama Wong, but is adopted.

The shock of this news overwhelms Carnegie so much that he has a heart attack. The novel ends in the hospital where he is scheduled to undergo heart surgery. Under anesthesia, Carnegie has a vision of his mother, in which she tells him that Blondie is an unnatural wife and that he has wrecked his life by making the choices he has made. After the surgery, the entire family, including Lan and Blondie, embraces each other, a gesture that is ambiguous in its meaning for the future. The novel ends on the line, “This world can disappear like any other.”