Customer Reviews

Mae Franking's My Chinese Marriage: An Annotated Edition

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Brief, though a well written and engaging account of love overcoming the difficulties confronting an interracial courtship and marriage in the early years of the 20th century. Moving. All the more so for me as I am a descendant of the couple.

The love story is about half the book, while the remainder is a collection of letters (primarily) between the couple and also from Mae to her family describing life in China. This collection of newspaper clippings, letters, and poems which forms the Appendix is delightful.

The estrangement from family and society on both sides of the Pacific brought by their marriage made their relationship all the closer, which makes the end all the more poignant.

In a letter from Mae: "It is often claimed that Mother-love is the most powerful, the most wonderful in the universe. But I believe firmly that the love of a true wife is more powerful, more wonderful than the other...the love of a wife has all the protective qualities of the love of a Mother with many more - deeper, truer, more intimately tender than Mother-love can ever know. Children grow up and form new ties, while parents grow aged and pass into the world beyond. But husband and wife walk together, side by side, hand in hand, -- as you and I shall walk, dearest, -- as you and I must walk because we love each other."

The concluding sentence of the reminiscence: "So, by visible evidences, my history is finished. But it has begun new for me, not as I wished, not as I hoped, but on a level that I can endure. For I have my children and my memories and my home in China, which waits with the gentle healing of sight and sound and place ... and I have learned that in love, and only in love, we can wring spiritual victory out of this defeat of the body."

Finally, from a poem by Mae:
"We build our Eden - my love and I -
On an isle in the China Sea,
Where the rough gray rocks are hidden by
A tangle of vine and tree;
Where like rosy laterns aglow at even
The ripe pomegranates sway,
And the tips of our tiled roofs point towards Heaven
In the quaint Chinese way."

century. I enjoyed reading about their relationship. I found the way Mae Franking tried to become a good Chinese wife very interesting. I found the original edition of this book in my college library. In the original, there are no pictures and it was written by M.F. This new annotated edition gives pictures and dates, so it really helps the reader to picture the story. The book was fascinating, and sad because they both died quite early in life.

its a good story. it best describe the intermarriage between east and the west