Wedding in Yangshuo: A Memoir of Love, Language, And the Journey of a Lifetime to the Heart of China

By Linda Crew

Wedding in Yangshuo reveals the origins of Linda Crew’s award-winning YA classic, Children of the River, and the subsequent impact the writing of this novel had on her family. While the Southeast Asian refugees who worked on her farm inspired an interest in the dramatic escapes from their war-torn homeland, these same friendships were kindling in her little boy an interest in all things Asian, ultimately leading to a trip to China for the author and her husband to witness his marriage to a Chinese girl from the beautiful city of Yangshuo. For readers of Children of the River who ask if Sundara and Jonathan were married in the end, real life imitates art in this cross-cultural love story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543915334

Linda Crew

""""The approach I take with my writing is to have my work reflect real life, and yet be shaped into the best story possible. I feel that a powerful piece of fiction can often convey an emotional truth more compellingly than a strictly factual version.""""--Linda Crew Linda Crew is a recipient of the IRA Children's Book Award and the Golden Kite Award, and her books have been named ALA Notables as well as ALA Best Books. Linda Crew didn't always have to be a writer. In fact, while attending junior high school in the early sixties, this award-winning author wanted to be a folksinger. By high school, when it bad become apparent to her that she really couldn't sing, she decided to become an actress. Then, at the University of Oregon, her theatrical ambitions evaporated. At her mother's suggestion, Crew switched her major to journalism--and loved it. Crew's training was in journalism--interviewing, researching, and marketing--and she was encouraged to present the facts accurately and without fuss. But her assigmnents always ended up full of dialogue and she ""had this compelling urge to make a story just a little better than the way it happened."" Thus, her talent for writing fiction was born. After college, Linda Crew married her husband Herb and settled on a farm in her home state of Oregon, where the couple still resides today with their three children. Crew leads a full, busy life and admits, ""It's difficult sometimes to carve out the time for writing with so many other demands, but it's important for me to do some living. After all, what could a person possibly write about if she spent all day closeted in front of her computer?"" Book List "" Long Time Passing"" ""Children of the River"" An ALA Best Book for Young Adults An IRA Children's Book Award A Golden Kite Award New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age ""Fire on the Wind"" Maine Student Book Award Master List 1996-1997 Vermont Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award Master List 1996-1997 ""Nekomah Creek"" An ALA Notable Children's Book ""Nekomah Creek Christmas"" Author Fun Facts "" Previous jobs: ""Florist, mail carrier, visitor center receptionist for the Forest Service at Cape Perpetua ""Pets: ""One lively black cat named Goblin ""Favorite . . . ,"""","" . hobbies? I like theater. I enjoy working with dried flowers, also sewing, especially creative things like doll clothes and costumes. I am notorious in my house for going overboard on costumes! . . . foods? chocolate! . . . clothes to wear? jeans or long dresses . . . colors? green, of course! I'm an Oregonian. . . . books? good children's books

Book preview

Author

Once upon a time at Wake Robin Farm in Oregon, I was miraculously pregnant with our first child.

That same summer, on the Li River in Southern China, a pretty woman exactly my age was also expecting. She and her husband were both artists.

Our child, born in August, was a son. Theirs, born in October, a daughter.

Twenty-two years later these children, now grown, would meet in Beijing.

The girl from Yangshuo had been studying English.

Our son, traveling with a university program, was rapidly becoming proficient in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

These two could talk to each other.

They could fall in love.

And did.

This is their story.

And ours.

Everything in this book actually happened, even the lovely, fateful coincidences.

Especially those.

It would be so much fun to have a dress made, I tell the proprietor of the Hong Kong tailor shop I’ve wandered into. I’m checking out the famous Peninsula Hotel’s elegant indoor shopping arcade, and the bolts of beautiful silk in his window have lured me from the hall. I’m not going to be here long enough, though.

How long? When you leave?

Well…… Flying across several time zones, we lost a day. Or jumped ahead. Something. I’m still jet-lagged and completely confused. We have only two more days here and leave the day after that.

No problem. We can do it.

Really? That fast?

We measure now, my tailor starts, we fit before close today.

Oh. I had no idea. My eyes drift over the fabric display.

The proprietor swoops up a fat, floppy book of fabric samples. First you choose fabric.

Um… I look over my shoulder, as if Herb might be standing there with ready advice. I need to go check this with my husband. I’ll be right back.

As soon as our son’s engagement was official, my future daughter-in-law and I had begun a most entertaining email correspondence, discussing plans for both the summer wedding in Yangshuo and the second, legal-in-America marriage we would celebrate once they obtained her fiancée visa and Miles brought her home to Oregon the following winter.

In an early, much treasured letter, Ziwei wrote this:

I’m so appreciated for I’m welcomed to become a member of the family. I’m so happy about it. I’m getting married. Haha, I’m going to have new life with the guy whom I love. This is the dream all girls are dreaming about. I’m so lucky. My dream comes true. There are a lot of things I need to figure out. There are a lot I need to learn. Miles and I have been talking about the future lately. We are going to face the new life together. It’s very exciting. Well, of course thing are going kind of complicated. We are still looking for the information about the visa business. It doesn’t seem easy. Don’t worry about it. I heard about they won’t give people who really love each other a hard time. Everything is going to be fine.

Naturally I had to work hard at hiding my delight from Miles. He didn’t approve of my enchantment with her fractured English, but come on, I got it. This was her second language. Since I only have one, did he really think I harbored the slightest feeling of condescension? Obviously Ziwei was extremely smart and, in the language department, way ahead of me. How far would I get trying to jot her a note in Chinese characters?

Besides, it’s flat-out charming to me when someone expresses herself in a second language, just enough off with a cliché—We are going to face the new life together—that it sounds fresh and sincere. She had to stop and think about it. She means it.

I printed and saved each of Ziwei’s emails, binding the packet with a red velvet ribbon.

In one of her earliest, she asked if I would like to wear a traditional Chinese qipao at the wedding in Yangshuo. They’d be glad to have it made for me in Beijing.

Would I like it? Oh, my God. A dress being made in China just for me? Yes, yes. A thousand times yes! It was like the costume department had been notified that an unknown American woman had been cast in this role—Mother of the Groom—and they were on it.

Red, for good luck, they suggested. Oh, by all means. I love red. Especially a dull red. Oxblood.

Ziwei emailed pictures, asked me to pick a style.

Easy enough.

She sent pictures of fabric swatches. Please choose.

No problem. Nothing I enjoy more than fabric selection, whether for clothes, curtains or upholstery. I studied the online photos of silk brocades to my heart’s content.

She had found a tailor in Beijing to make her wedding dress. He would be making Miles’s Chinese-style suit and she’d ask him to make my dress, too.

Please send measurements.

Oh. Right. They’d need those, wouldn’t they?

But. . . should I send my current measurements? Or what I fervently hoped my gym mantra—Not gonna be fat in China….Not gonna be fat in China—would reduce them to in six months? Okay, for the record, I wasn’t that overweight, but I knew the score. Ziwei herself is only about 4’ 11" and probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds back then. Her mother was reportedly the same. Compared to these two and all the other slender women of China, I was bound to feel like a little porker.

Still, much as my current numbers embarrassed me, I sent them. I’m a dreamer, but I’m no fool. My record for losing weight by a target date is abysmal, no matter how glorious and public the goal occasion is expected to be—class reunion, book awards ceremony, big family wedding. Bottom line: I get impatient with hunger. When I find myself experiencing it, I tend to eat something.

Fluctuating weight issues aside, holding off on sending my measurements just wouldn’t seem polite. Or fair. They’d need plenty of time to make this dress. I didn’t want to be difficult, sending the crucial information at the last minute.

Ziwei was teaching English in a private elementary school in Beijing during this time, and when her mother came up to visit from Yangshuo, they went together to the tailor, who told them he could not be expected to make a properly fitting qipao for a customer—me—who would not be able to show up for a final fitting. So Ziwei’s mother was thinking of buying the fabric I liked in Beijing and engaging a tailor in Yangshuo to make my dress.

Hmm. Seemed like cutting it pretty close to me. Would we have enough time for this between our arrival in Yangshuo and the actual wedding?

For a couple of months I simply assumed someone somewhere was starting on my dress and, frankly, I hated to ask. Miles had enough on his plate with his classes—he was finishing up grad school at the Monterey Institute for International Studies—and trying to make wedding and immigration plans with Ziwei by email. He hardly needed to add the dress drama to his stress load.

Just two days before we were to leave for China, Miles, already there, emailed us. My dress was to be made in Guilin. They would meet us when we arrived there and I could try it on.

I hardly had time to decide whether this was reassuring or not before another email followed: Argh! They CAN’T make it there so will make it in Yangshuo.

I was starting to wish I’d just been given leave to outfit myself and hope for the best. A dress made in China sounded delightful, and I was trying to be a good sport, but what if my reward for playing nice was that I ended up with nothing to wear?

That evening, just before we were to leave on the trip, I sat in the backyard, a little weepy. A doe and her spotted fawn emerged from the woods and crossed the dappled lawn. The sprinklers chink-chinked in that restful, reassuring way that to us says it’s summer and yes, for the moment anyway, the pump is working. Thanks to the Marys River, all shall be watered.

I didn’t want to get on a plane. I didn’t want to go to China. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to sit right there where everything was already perfect.

I think I’d better pack a Plan B dress, I told Herb.

You can’t do that, he said. You don’t want to insult them and not wear their dress.

"Hey, are you paying any attention at all here? What do you think I’m freaking out about? They haven’t…made….the dress! If they do, of course I’ll wear it. And anyway, who’s going to know this was stuffed in my bag, just in case?"

I settled on a blue silk dress I hadn’t worn in years, but had saved out of sentiment. Classic in style, it was the first nice thing I bought after losing the baby weight from Miles, and I was pleasantly surprised to be able to fit into it now. I’d worn it to the awards dinner at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, and when the unpublished manuscript of Children of the River came up a winner, the first official encouragement I’d had on the book, the afterglow was so powerful I swear it was still clinging to the dress all these years later. A good choice, I decided now, as a backup dress for the wedding of my son, whom I’d been trying to imagine as a teenager smitten with a beautiful Asian girl as I wrote the book.

Since Ziwei’s mother is a member of the Zhuang ethnic minority, Ziwei could pass for Cambodian, and although Miles is no longer blond as he was as a little boy, I still think he and Ziwei made good representations of my novel’s sweethearts, Jonathan and Sundara.

Can you imagine how hard I’ve had to work at hiding from my no-fun-allowed son how deeply satisfying this is to me?

In the room at the Peninsula, Herb’s lounging on the loveseat with a New Yorker magazine. He reads them cover to cover, whereas I only check out the cartoons and count on him to point out the satirical pieces he knows I won’t want to miss.

What’s up? he says.

Um… remember Miles saying in that last email how it probably wouldn’t hurt if I shopped for a dress in Hong Kong?

Yeah, and if you did, you shouldn’t go for Chinese style, right?

I know, I know. To my son, it seems, I’m just a walking, talking, ever-present threat of major embarrassment. No confidence I could ever get things right. But what’s the point of having a custom-made dress if you’re not getting the style they’re famous for?

Wait. Custom-made? We’re not gonna have time for that.

But see, that’s the amazing part. The guy says they can do it super fast. If it’s okay with you, I’m running right back down there so they can take my measurements and get going on it.

He remains unconvinced. I thought the blue dress was your back-up.

"Well, even if I don’t need it for the wedding, what about doing it just for fun? I mean, this is what they do here. What’s a more perfect souvenir?"

Uh, something that takes up less space in the suitcase?

Well, we’ll have more room going home once we aren’t hauling the painting, right?

Carefully packed in bubble wrap, the framed watercolor, a gift for Ziwei’s parents, is taking up a sizeable chunk of space.

And we’ll be getting rid of Miles’s magazines. Short on English language reading material, he’s requested we bring him copies of The Economist.

Oh, all right, Herb finally says. But don’t get red, okay? We can’t have it looking like you aren’t trusting them about the dress they’re making.

Right, I agree, although to be honest, the last bits of anything resembling trust on that subject were blown away by Miles’s last email. The wedding is a week from today. If that dress hasn’t been made yet, to me the odds of it happening seem slim indeed.

So I hustle back down to the tailor’s shop. This is going to be fun!

The proprietor takes my measurements. Not so fun. We debate my waist. As in, exactly where is it? I try to make him measure where my mother and I did back when we sewed my junior high wardrobe together. She always said I had a long waist.

No, no! the tailor argues, and sternly informs me my waist is higher up. Everyone knows the waist is the narrowest part.

Wow. He’s probably right. So I have to fly clear to Hong Kong to find out my mother and I have been wrong all these years? Maybe we always measured where we wanted my waist to be, where we thought it should be, and where it was, we were convinced, except for a couple of inches of flesh stubbornly positioning themselves over it so as to make the measurement falsely inflated.

The proprietor hands me the fabric sample book. Please choose. He takes up his phone to summon his tailor.

Reverently, I accept the book. I’ll enjoy this part. I start flipping through, but almost immediately find myself in a bit of quandary. How to choose? Since red is out, that helps narrow it down, but only a little. The remaining jewel tones seem the most traditional for a qipao and I know this. Furthermore, it will bother me to appear not to know this, even as I’m aware these aren’t the colors particularly flattering to my own skin tone and hair. These look good on women with black hair. Chinese women culturally entitled to wear them. These are the shades that completely overpower brown-haired me.

Then I flip to find a dusty peach swatch featuring floral medallions touched with delicate pastels set diagonally against a subtle lattice pattern.

Yes. My color.

But will it look completely ill-advised to use this in the fabrication of a Chinese-style dress that’s screaming to be jade green?

Please hurry to choose now, the proprietor says, looking at his watch with significance.

Well, excuse me, Mr. Spoilsport. You’re asking me to spend four hundred American dollars here. Shouldn’t I at least get to be sure of my choice? I had a Folkwear pattern at home for this type of dress. If I’d known it would come to this, I’m thinking, I could have made it myself.

Because I’m actually a decent seamstress. I made my own wedding dress. I already have the lovely piece of red silk I will turn into something suitable for the kids’ wedding at home. I have never come anywhere close to paying this much for a dress, a price that seems worth it only because this will be a treasured souvenir from the journey of a lifetime.

So I want to enjoy this process, not feel bullied.

This my tailor, the proprietor says, gesturing toward a tiny old man entering. He nods and smiles at me in a genial way. Necessary he get started to be ready for your first fitting at six o’clock.

He sews it right here? I look around for a sewing machine, even a door to a work room. I’m just not getting their system.

No, no! He get the fabric at our warehouse, take to his workshop. The proprietor waves to some place away from the elegance of this show room.

I think of the shabby, stacked-up buildings we saw walking along Nathan Road this morning. He will not be sewing my dress in nearly as nice a space as this.

You decide then! He must hurry.

I look at the smiling little tailor and find myself instantly disarmed. This one will be fine, I say, indicating the dusty peach.

After all, if I spent the entire afternoon amusing myself with fabric samples, in the end I’d probably wind up settling on this same swatch, and much as I enjoy such deliberations, I’m also a believer in the power of snap judgment, the initial, instinctive assessment, love at first sight.

Why do I have to go? Herb says when I ask him to accompany me to my fitting a few hours later. By now he’s found a soccer channel on the big TV.

I want to make sure you’re going to like it, I say. And I’m a little scared of this guy. He’s kind of bossy.

Herb frowns. He’s not going to try to sign me up for shirts and stuff, is he?

No, honey, I promise. I won’t let him.

I thought you were afraid of him.

Ah, but I can be brave for you.

Bespoke.

We’ve been debating this word we’re seeing in so many Hong Kong advertisements. It’s British and has to do with custom-made clothes. Apparently men do this here—have things tailored. Miles commissioned a suit during one of his sojourns in Hong Kong. I’d been impressed to see his name—Mr. Miles Crew—beautifully embroidered on an inner label.

The whole idea appalls Herb, though, and no doubt high on his list of fight-or-flight triggers would be the sight of a guy coming at him with a tape measure.

At the store, the tailor awaits me with the basted-together dress.

The proprietor gives Herb a respectful nod. This transaction will not benefit and could even be derailed, I’m sure he understands, by the introduction of a disgruntled husband to the mix.

The tailor, a whirl of energy, is all business, anxious only to see how my figure matches with his dress. He hands it to me and nods toward the curtained fitting room.

Go, go.

Do I not move quickly enough? Because the two Chinese men now feel it necessary to join forces in actually shooing me into the cubicle.

As the curtain drops, I see Herb already looking more relaxed. The proprietor will apparently spare him any sort of bespoke pitch. Maybe I’ve saved my husband by being, myself, challenge enough for one afternoon.

My assigned space is about the size of an airplane lavatory and awkward. I struggle into the dress, trying to be careful not to tear apart the loosely sewn sections. Which is the armhole and which is the neck? Finally I have to give up and get their advice.

I pull aside the curtain and step out. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I—

Two Chinese faces register horror.

What. I look down.

Uh-oh. My bra shows. A bit of bare breast.

Both men rush me, glancing in alarm over their shoulders at the shop windows. Have other people passing caught a glimpse of their customer’s pathetic faux pas? Like two clucking hens they herd this dizzy little chick back into the cubicle.

"Gee, wasn’t that fun," I say to Herb when we’re finally dismissed from the shop.

Hey, you wanted an experience.

I groan. Did I really show that much?

He laughs. Obviously too much for those guys.

Hey! I pretend-punch his shoulder. Then I start laughing too.

I take my prescribed-especially-for-the-trip Ambien that night and crash into the big fluffy bed feeling tentatively hopeful. Don’t look now, but it seems I’ve managed to fly across the Pacific Ocean and land safely in this huge city without being struck down by the migraine that, for me, almost always accompanies events of such magnitude.

But at the crack of dawn I wake with my right cheek pinned to the pillow by a red-hot railroad spike. Shit. I can never fool my