What We Were Promised

by Lucy Tan

Overview

Set in modern Shanghai, a debut by a Chinese-American writer about a prodigal son whose unexpected return forces his newly wealthy family to confront painful secrets and unfulfilled promises.

After years of chasing the American dream, the Zhen family has moved back to China. Settling into a luxurious serviced apartment in Shanghai, Wei, Lina, and their daughter, Karen, join an elite community of Chinese-born, Western-educated professionals who have returned to a radically transformed city.

One morning, in the eighth tower of Lanson Suites, Lina discovers that a treasured ivory bracelet has gone missing. This incident sets off a wave of unease that ripples throughout the Zhen household. Wei, a marketing strategist, bows under the guilt of not having engaged in nobler work. Meanwhile, Lina, lonely in her new life of leisure, assumes the modern moniker taitai -a housewife who does no housework at all.

She is haunted by the circumstances surrounding her arranged marriage to Wei and her lingering feelings for his brother, Qiang. Sunny, the family's housekeeper, is a keen but silent observer of these tensions. An unmarried woman trying to carve a place for herself in society, she understands the power of well-kept secrets. When Qiang reappears in Shanghai after decades on the run with a local gang, the family must finally come to terms with the past and its indelible mark on their futures.

From a silk-producing village in rural China, up the corporate ladder in suburban America, and back again to the post-Maoist nouveaux riches of modern Shanghai, What We Were Promised explores the question of what we owe to our country, our families, and ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316437196
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	08/06/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lucy Tan grew up in New Jersey and has spent much of her adult life in New York and Shanghai. She received her B.A. from New York University and her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the 2016 August Derleth Prize. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Asia Literary Review and Ploughshares, where she was winner of the 2015 Emerging Writer's Contest. What We Were Promised is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

"A beautifully rendered debut with vivid characters who will stay with readers long after the last satisfying page."—Judith Claire Mitchell, author of A Reunion of Ghosts

"The magnificence and splendor of modern Shanghai come to life in Lucy Tan's debut novel."—Palm Beach Post

"If you love explorations of the American dream transplanted in Shanghai, generational sagas, and the lives of the newly rich and confused, read What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan."—Lillian Li, author of Number One ChineseRestaurant

"What We Were Promised explores the question of what we owe to our country, our families, and ourselves." (—Five Spot Green Living

"a beautifully written, evocative and provocative narrative."—All-About Romance

"Status, family dynamic, and gender roles plague the characters and they must ponder, what 'they owe to themselves, each other, and their country."—Women.com

"It has plenty of literary heft and timely social commentary, but it's also a thoroughly enthralling and deeply moving novel"—Isthmus

"addicting books to read if you loved Crazy Rich Asians"—Hello Giggles

"an elegant debut novel"—Newark Star Ledger

From the Publisher

05/28/2018
Tan’s solid debut centers on Shanghai housewife Lina Zhen and her observant former housekeeper, Sunny. Lina still holds a torch for Qiang, the wild brother of her husband, Wei, though Qiang has been gone for 20 years. After living in the U.S., the Zhen family relocates to Shanghai, now a part of the upper class, for Wei’s lucrative, high-profile marketing job, which allows Lina to forgo working and live a life of leisure. She’s often at home while Wei works late and on weekends, tending to her 12-year-old daughter, Karen, when she isn’t being educated abroad. When Qiang sees Wei on television and contacts the family, Lina looks forward to finally being able to ask him why he reneged on their plans to run away together before her wedding. In anticipation of spending time with Qiang, Lina hires Sunny, their housekeeper of five years before they moved to the U.S., to look after Karen for the summer. Sunny picks up on the situation in the household and wonders how Wei can remain so clueless. Sunny also sends part of her paycheck back to her family in Hefei, who wonder why she prefers to work rather than settle down and have a baby. Sunny and Wei’s stories are arresting, but Qiang and Lina come off as entitled in spite of the author’s efforts to make them sympathetic. Despite this, the novel presents an intriguing portrait of class, duty, and family. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2018-04-17
Like the Emerald City in Oz, contemporary Shanghai provides the backdrop for an examination of the clash between old and new lifestyles and values in Tan's debut novel.Upon moving back to mainland China after more than 20 years in America, the Zhens finds themselves ill at ease in their new opulent and coddled setting. Husband Wei becomes unhappy with his work for a multinational advertising firm, while the previously industrious Lina settles into the unfamiliar role of taitai, a housewife with no housewifely duties and an infinite amount of time to devote to shopping and gossipy meals. Karen, their adolescent daughter, spends most of the year at an American boarding school in order to enjoy the purported advantages of "American privilege." Wei and Lina are strangers to Shanghai themselves, having shared modest beginnings in Suzhou, a silk-farming town. The silent witness to the Zhens' quietly uncomfortable household is Sunny, an observant housekeeper from rural Hefei. When the balance of the Zhens' carefully calibrated domesticity is disrupted by the reappearance of Wei's long-out-of-touch brother, Qiang, the assumptions that underpin the family's fragile equilibrium are tested. In the Zhen household, Tan brings us a microcosm of the conflicts among China's larger populations: residents versus expatriates, wealthy versus poor, urban and commercial versus rural and agrarian. Humming quietly beneath the surface of the day-to-day microdrama in the Zhens' home is the motif of the disappearance of Lina's talismanic ivory bracelet, the story of which reflects the rivalries between more than one set of characters in this portrait of people learning how to live after a period of immense repression.Tan examines the tension behind the facade of the moneyed lifestyle in a still-evolving post-Mao Shanghai, where everyone seems to be an expat in their own country.

Kirkus Reviews