I have spent nearly all my adult life living in foreign countries. That includes working, dating, marrying, and now—parenting abroad. Aside from the potential challenges of language and geography, what it means for a woman to be in a foreign land is to understand and navigate the joys and threats of womanhood particular to another culture. A woman abroad comes to see herself and her romantic partners through a different set of expectations, standards, and biases. She sees herself anew.
My debut novel, Shanghailanders, features a Japanese-French woman who moves to Shanghai with her husband. In the span of nearly 25 years that the book covers, Eko suffers from anxiety at her foreignness, has a short-lived affair with a local, and wrestles with the ways she and her husband and children change or do not change. I was interested in exploring how a person forms over time, and how outside forces—including place—come to shape a life.
The following books are all narratives about women pursuing love in foreign countries (and, in one case, foreign universes). All these novels follow characters experiencing literal and emotional displacement. They are met with the challenge of redefining their relationships, and themselves, on new grounds.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
To the young French girl living in 1929 Indochine, her entanglement with an older Chinese lover is a breach of multiple boundaries in her life—of race, class, and age. A lush, sensual, nostalgic novel, The Lover portrays a romance that breaks the narrator’s family and home, and that shapes her future as an artist. She is sent back to her “original” country of France, while the lover is married off to a more appropriate Chinese woman. But we come to know, from the beautiful structure of the book, that she has been chasing her lover, writing him onto the page, for the entirety of her life.
Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated by Mike Fu
Taiwanese Sanmao and her Spanish husband José are newlyweds living in the Spanish Sahara, where José works, and Sanmao writes about her charming, dangerous, and sometimes naïve adventures abroad. Her account of their time in the desert includes accounts of the endless paperwork needed to get married, a near-death experience with quicksand in the desert, a study of the local Sahrawis’ bathing habits, and how to keep a husband happy and well-fed. If one reads more about both Sanmao’s and her husband’s tragic early demise, this early life portrait of love in the Sahara takes on a bittersweet, elegiac tone.
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
The unnamed narrator of Kitamura’s intricate and deftly layered novel moves to The Hague to take up work as an interpreter at an international criminal court. Soon thereafter, she begins an affair with a man who has recently separated from his wife. Throughout the novel, she exists, tenuously, in the liminal spaces of romantic ambiguity, cultural and ethnic ambiguity, between languages as an interpreter at the Hague, and in the budding early days of a new friendship. The narrator herself is quiet, unclear. Where is she coming from; and where is she going next? She must grapple with agency within the vast grey areas of morality and existence. The pressures produce, by the end, a possible note of clarity and hope.
Y/N by Esther Yi
In Y/N, a young Korean-American living in Berlin falls in love with a K-Pop singer called Moon. She feeds her obsession rigorously and, in the latter half of the novel, travels from Berlin to Seoul in order to meet Moon in person. Y/N is a story about love for another, but it is also a story about self-definition, about closing the gap between an idea and reality. Who is the beloved, and where does he most vibrantly exist? Who is the narrator, a woman who is tethered so loosely to countries and identities that they move fluidly, surreally, into abstractions? In this novel, every sentence uses language to surprise and delight and distort. Language reconfigures and prods the imagination, as do the characters, as do the book’s conceptions of love, of anything that might tether a reader to what is real.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An “Americanah” is a Nigerian who returns to Nigeria after spending time in the U.S. and adopting Americanisms. Ifemelu, the heroine of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s contemporary romantic masterpiece, is one such returnee, who feels neither completely at home while studying abroad in America nor after moving back to Lagos. At every turn, Ifemelu is confronted with her outsider status, in life and in love. But her great romance is with Obinze, her college sweetheart from before leaving Lagos, and who has also lived life on two continents.
The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee
The Expatriates rotates perspectives between several women expats living in Hong Kong who are forced to redefine what love means in their changing lives. One is grieving from the disappearance of her youngest child; one is closing the last chapter on an unhappy marriage; one is suffering from guilt and shame from a set of disastrous actions. Hong Kong, with its particular brand of wealth and privilege and cosmopolitanism, provides both the structure and the seductions for the dramatic events of the novel. Ultimately, the book lands on an exploration of what motherhood means across cultures, and what it teaches us about how to handle life’s slings and arrows: with grace and forgiveness.
In Universes by Emet North
We first meet Raffi as a young woman who is searching for her place in life: should she continue her lab work cataloging stars in the quest for dark matter? Should she continue dating her college boyfriend, fall into something comfortable with her kind roommate Graham, or explore an alluring friendship with Britt, an artist who reminds her of someone from her past? Raffi, traversing universes, is always searching for that someone we might call her first love. Pronouns shift gracefully over the course of the novel from “she” to “they”—the plural encompassing both the experience of Raffi’s ever-evolving gender identity, as well as the many versions of themselves across the multiverse. The book works in the Whitmanesque sense of multitudes; it works in the Moore-ish Anagram sense; it works because the writing is elegant and wise and dripping with heart-rending beauty about the feelings of being in and out of time, place, body, and love.
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