What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan: Book Review

Brooks with Mark Twain at Village Books and Paper Dreams in Bellingham on June 26, 2026

The Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, Washington, has been good to me.  When I attended the 2019 conference, I pitched an early draft of Landscape in Lavender to agents and took classes on how to get published.  This led to publication of an excerpt of Chapter Two in Interconnectedness, the 2022 Whatcom Reads anthology. 

Later, when I attended the 2024 conference, I met Brooke Warner, the publisher of She Writes Press and Spark Press.  In addition to recording a live session of her podcast, “Writerly Things,” with author Grant Faulkner during a plenary session, Brooke taught two excellent classes, one on writing memoir and one on how to create an author’s platform.  Standing in line behind Brooke at the lunchtime taco truck, I introduced myself and asked her how to apply to be published by Spark Press.  Brooke encouraged me to submit Chapter One of my manuscript through her website, which led less than a year later to signing my publishing contract with Spark.

Most recently, I advertised my June 26, 2026 book launch event at Bellingham’s independent bookstore, Village Books and Paper Dreams, in the conference program.   At the conference that same day I took a class from author Lucy Tan called “The Writer as a Multi-Tasker.”  After a short conversation with Tan at the same taco truck where I met Brooke Warner two years earlier, I purchased her first novel, What We Were Promised, from Village Books.  Following is my book review:

An ivory necklace provides the fulcrum upon which the plot of What We Were Promised hinges, linking three generations of a Chinese family.  When the necklace goes missing, it has an almost visceral impact on all the dramatis personae, from its owner, Lina, to the mysterious admirer who gifted it to her decades earlier, to the two hotel maids accused of stealing it.  Recently returned to Shanghai after a sojourn of over twenty years in America, where Lina’s husband Wei studied engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and joined a prominent marketing firm, Lina is viewed by her maids as a “taitai” or lady of leisure.  Despite being Chinese born and raised, Lina and Wei are considered Chinese American by virtually all the people in their wake.  Lina appears to have everything—a brilliant and affluent husband, an Americanized daughter, and permanent residence in one of Shanghai’s most glittering high-rise hotels, with its restaurants, gym and pool—but her discontentment reaches beyond her state of idleness.  She still pines for Quiang, the young boy she fell in love with as a teenager, a boy who happens to be Wei’s brother.

That’s the surface tension of this story as it first appears to the reader, but what I found more entrancing is the novel’s vertiginous backdrop, which is nothing less panoramic than the complete transformation of China in only three generations.  Lina and Wei were not born rich:  Wei’s father was a small farmer and Lina’s was a young professor of chemistry plucked from his university by the Red Guard to serve in a labor camp where his elitism was abrasively rubbed away, proletarian callouses sprouting on his aristocratic hands.  Lina’s mother was forced to burn all her Western books and records after her own merchant father’s linen business was yanked away from him for being a capitalist enterprise.  With a background like this, it’s astonishing to picture Lina morphing into a fashionably dressed urban taitai by the age of forty, mother to a ten-year-old daughter wearing sunglasses and Dolce & Gabbana swimwear.  Lina’s ambitious maid, Sunny, looks upon her as a card-carrying member of Shanghai’s international elite, and therefore a person meant to be despised.  Sunny never suspects Lina of her modest origins during the Cultural Revolution.

 Who is Lina, anyway?  Is she fundamentally Chinese or has she become an American living in China?  Can she be regarded  as thoroughly modern and bourgeois or is part of her still aligned with her proletarian origins?  That seems to be the essential question posed by this novel.  The answer, or at least the key to the question, links the new Lina to the old Lina, even as it links the futurism of twenty-first century China to the traditionalism of nineteenth-century China.  That device is the institution of arranged marriage.  Lina was betrothed to Wei at the tender age of seven, assured by her parents that he was the most eligible boy in his nearby village in Suzhou.  It’s a betrothal she never really questions, one she assumes will assure her a stable and happy life, even as she falls in love with Wei’s younger brother, Quiang.  Yes, Lina is a modern woman in an arranged marriage, and yes, Wei checks all the boxes of eligibility:  He’s exceedingly bright and well educated; he’s an excellent provider, a respectful lover, and an attentive father. 

What’s missing is the rebellious spark of true love, the kind of fireworks that prompted Romeo to elope with Juliet.  What if Lina were to leave Wei for Quiang, a man so taciturn and unreliable that the last time anyone saw him he was a nocturnal animal making money by winning card games for a gambling gang?  That question kept me on the edge of my seat as I turned the pages of What We Were Promised.  But truthfully, it points to a bigger question:  is China’s astonishing twenty-first century advancement a solid and enduring product of legitimate, hard-working strivers like Wei and Sunny, or is it at best a wobbly status quo, rotten at its base, held together only by the gambling, bribes and secret handshake deals of underworld figures like Qiang and his gang brothers?