Mail-order bride

Author: Zhang Ling
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: The Mail-Order Bride can be interpreted in multiple ways. From an entertainment perspective, it is a book about romance between men and women. Various kinds—Chinese, foreign. Intellectuals, common folk. The men and women in the book have traveled extensively, yet fate played tricks on them, and they never reached their destination together. The paths, the journeys, the endings—appealing, yet heart-wrenching. From a historical perspective, The Mail-Order Bride tells the story of three generations of women in a family. In the women's stories, history is merely a fleeting backdrop. History serves as a foil to the women; yet the women refuse to serve as a foil to history. Each story of the women is a silent rebellion against history. Sometimes the women win their struggles, and sometimes they lose. The losses and victories, however, are inevitably transformed into new history, regardless of the women's will. From a sociological perspective, The Mail-Order Bride involves a story of migration. The pursuit of opportunity to realize one's own value seems to be the reason for immigration for all races in the world, though this ordinary immigration story is packaged with a bit more complexity. A widower, a mail-order bride, a pastor struggling between desire and morality, a dry cleaner who could have been a detached observer but chose not to. All the things that should have happened did not happen as desired. All the things that should not have happened occurred in a series of misfortunes. Thus, the ending of the story could only be as it was. From a cultural perspective, The Mail-Order Bride is a novel about searching. Searching for a home, searching for belonging, searching for solace. The content of the search may vary from person to person, but the pattern of the search is always the same: it begins with hope and ends in disappointment. In the process of searching, it is inevitable to destroy some of the established and establish something new. Therefore, the process of searching is also a process of destruction, loss, and repentance. The Mail-Order Bride, structurally, consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter has a complete storyline independent of the others, while the chapters together form the systemic plot of the entire book. If the entire novel depicts a story that spans a century and crosses two continents, each chapter is like a small piece of this vast map. The chapters are arranged in a way that interweaves time and space, and only by reading the entire book can one piece together the complete map. The suspense of the story lies in the multiple identities a woman named Jiang Juan might have and the various endings she could enter. Throughout the reading process, the suspense acts like a drug, pulling the reader step by step, unknowingly into the ending the author has pre-set. The Mail-Order Bride can be interpreted in multiple ways. From an entertainment perspective, it is a book about romance between men and women. Various kinds—Chinese, foreign. Intellectuals, common folk. The men and women in the book have traveled extensively, yet fate played tricks on them, and they never reached their destination together. The paths, the journeys, the endings—appealing, yet heart-wrenching. From a historical perspective, The Mail-Order Bride tells the story of three generations of women in a family. In the women's stories, history is merely a fleeting backdrop. History serves as a foil to the women; yet the women refuse to serve as a foil to history. Each story of the women is a silent rebellion against history. Sometimes the women win their struggles, and sometimes they lose. The losses and victories, however, are inevitably transformed into new history, regardless of the women's will. From a sociological perspective, The Mail-Order Bride involves a story of migration. The pursuit of opportunity to realize one's own value seems to be the reason for immigration for all races in the world, though this ordinary immigration story is packaged with a bit more complexity. A widower, a mail-order bride, a pastor struggling between desire and morality, a dry cleaner who could have been a detached observer but chose not to. All the things that should have happened did not happen as desired. All the things that should not have happened occurred in a series of misfortunes. Thus, the ending of the story could only be as it was. From a cultural perspective, The Mail-Order Bride is a novel about searching. Searching for a home, searching for belonging, searching for solace. The content of the search may vary from person to person, but the pattern of the search is always the same: it begins with hope and ends in disappointment.