wendy lee's happy family

I've been meaning to write about Wendy Lee's debut novel Happy Family for some time now. It's been sitting on my shelf for a few months (it was published back in June by Black Cat), but I only recently had the chance to read it... and it's good. The book tells the deceptively simple story of Hua, a Chinese immigrant who gets hired as nanny for Lily, a two-year-old adopted from China by a caucasian West Village couple. Here's the official book-jacket synopsis:

When Hua Wu arrives in New York City, her life seems destined to resemble that of countless immigrants before her. She spends her hectic days working in a restaurant, and her lonesome nights in a crowded tenement, yearning for those she left behind in Fuzhou, China.

But one day everything changes for Hua, when she meets Jane Templeton and her daughter Lily, a two-year-old adopted from China. Worried that Lily will know little about the country of her birth, or her native language, Jane eventually decides to hire Hua to be her nanny.

From the moment she steps into Jane's West Village brownstone, Hua finds herself in a world far removed from the cramped streets of Chinatown or her grandmother's home in Fuzhou. Soon she is deeply attached to Lily and her adoptive parents. But when cracks show in the beautiful facade, what will Hua do to protect the little girl who reminds her so much of her own past? An elegant and poignant debut novel, Happy Family is an entrancing exploration of love and loss, the familiar and the foreign, and the ties that bind strangers together.

It's a good read with some well-drawn characters and a quiet, engaging narrative that manages to touch upon some really timely and relevant underlying issues without being overwrought or preachy. It's a little predictable—I think I figured out where it was going pretty early on, but the book asks such interesting questions, it hardly matters.

Wendy informs me that she'll be doing a couple of readings of Happy Family in California this week, today at UC Irvine and Saturday at Eastwind Books in Berkeley. Here are the details:

Thursday, October 9, 2008
12 noon
Cross-Cultural Center
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
(949) 824-7215

Saturday, October 11th, 2008
3:30 p.m.
Eastwind Books
2066 University Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 548-2350

For more information about Wendy Lee and Happy Family, go to her website here. There's an excerpt from the book, a handy reading group guide, and a brief Q & A with Wendy about some of the intentions and insights that went into writing the novel. Check it out.