To the East of the East by Ping Lu: Marriage, disappearance, and the stories we tell ourselves

Ping Lu’s To the East of the East, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, is an unusual novel about a woman searching for her missing husband while gradually confronting how little she may have understood the marriage she is trying so desperately to preserve. Its structure moves among Min-Hui’s search in contemporary Beijing, her increasingly complicated relationship with a man who claims to be a human rights activist, the historical novel she is writing, and the letters left behind by her husband. The individual threads don’t always fit together neatly, but their loose connections create a story that asks questions about freedom, attachment, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about the people we love.

Min-Hui discovers that her husband has disappeared from China, although even the circumstances surrounding that disappearance are difficult to pin down. Their marriage has already become a strange kind of long-distance arrangement, with the two of them speaking on the telephone only once every couple of months. She knows remarkably little about his life, and yet when she realizes that she hasn’t heard from him for an unusually long time, she travels from Taiwan to Beijing to look for him. Once there, she settles into a hotel and tries to determine what happened to the man she calls her husband.

The more we learn about Min-Hui’s marriage, the more complicated her search becomes. She has spent years trying to be a good wife, but her idea of what a good wife should be seems to have created more distance between them rather than bringing them closer. There is a painful irony in the way she thinks about her husband. She seems to know the role he occupies in her life better than she knows the actual person who occupies it. Even her concern over his disappearance feels rooted partly in the loss of the husband she believes she should have rather than a clear understanding of the actual man who is now living somewhere in the world without her.

That makes her decision to spend months searching for him in Beijing all the more intriguing. What exactly is she trying to recover? A husband? A marriage? A version of herself who has fulfilled the expectations she placed on herself? The novel never reduces her motivations to a single answer, and I found myself increasingly interested in the gap between Min-Hui’s understanding of her marriage and what the reader can see from the outside.

Her situation becomes even stranger when Shangjun appears. He claims to be an activist fleeing some unnamed threat and manages to persuade Min-Hui to let him hide in her hotel room. From the beginning, there is something slippery about him. He never gives her enough information to make his story entirely convincing, yet he is sufficiently charming and confident to keep getting past her defenses. He continues to return to the hotel, and their companionship gradually develops into something more complicated.

It takes a while before their relationship becomes romantic, and even then, romance doesn’t quite seem like the right word for what happens between them. There is intimacy, certainly, but there is also an odd imbalance in the relationship that made me suspicious of Shangjun long before Min-Hui seemed ready to question him. He takes an interest in her writing and becomes one of the few people with whom she shares her work, but he also spends an extraordinary amount of time making fun of her and undermining her confidence.

I found Shangjun increasingly difficult to like. His constant negging of Min-Hui became exhausting, especially because she seemed willing to tolerate behavior that should have sent her running in the opposite direction. I kept wondering what she saw in him and why she continued to allow him access to her room. Then again, I’m hardly in a position to judge someone for putting up with a person who treats them badly. I spent more than a decade doing exactly that with my ex-husband. One of the novel’s sharper observations is that we can become attached to people because of what they represent to us rather than because of who they actually are, and Min-Hui’s relationships repeatedly circle that uncomfortable truth.

Her willingness to show Shangjun her unfinished novel is another revealing piece of their relationship. She has never shared the manuscript with her husband, yet she allows this man she barely knows to read it. The novel within the novel follows a young Qing emperor confined within the Forbidden City and his fascination with the stories of pirate merchant Zheng Zhilong and the Taiwanese seas. Min-Hui explains that her own circumstances with her missing husband helped inspire the story, suggesting that the historical narrative is somehow allowing her to work through the problems in her own life.

This was where I struggled most with the book. I never fully understood what Min-Hui saw connecting her contemporary situation to the historical story she was writing. The historical sections are presented through excerpts she reads to Shangjun, and although I could recognize the themes of confinement and freedom running through both narratives, I never felt that I completely grasped the relationship between them. The pieces seemed to exist alongside Min-Hui’s story rather than becoming fully integrated into it.

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That structural quality extends throughout the novel. The various story lines are interspersed rather than completely woven together, and I think readers who enjoy fiction that asks them to assemble its meaning from multiple layers may find much to appreciate here. For me, however, the connections sometimes remained frustratingly out of reach. I could see what the novel was doing on a broad thematic level without always understanding how its individual pieces were meant to illuminate one another.

Some of that difficulty also comes from my own limited cultural knowledge. There were elements of the contemporary worlds of Taiwan and Beijing that I suspect would carry considerably more meaning for a reader with greater familiarity with the cultures, histories, and political circumstances surrounding the story. I wouldn’t call this a failure of translation so much as a reminder that translation can carry a reader across linguistic boundaries without necessarily providing all the cultural knowledge needed to interpret every layer of a work. Jeremy Tiang’s translation gives English-language readers access to Lu’s novel, but there are still things I felt I was missing because I simply didn’t have the background to recognize everything the book was invoking.

Even so, I came away from the novel feeling culturally enriched by the experience. To the East of the East gave me a glimpse into contemporary Beijing and Taiwan while also sending me into pieces of history I knew far less about. I may not have understood every historical or cultural reference as fully as I would have liked, but the experience made me aware of how much more there is to explore. In some ways, the gaps in my understanding became part of my reading experience rather than a reason to dismiss the book.

The novel’s larger questions about freedom are easier to recognize. Min-Hui is surrounded by people who are constrained in ways they don’t always acknowledge. Her husband is absent, but his absence still controls her choices. Shangjun claims to be fleeing political persecution, yet he exercises an unsettling amount of control over Min-Hui while supposedly depending on her for safety. The emperor in Min-Hui’s unfinished novel is physically confined within the Forbidden City. Across these different narratives, freedom becomes less straightforward than simply being able to leave one place and go somewhere else.

What I found most compelling, ultimately, was the way Min-Hui’s search for her husband exposes the limitations of what she thought she knew about him. She has constructed a marriage around expectations, obligations, and assumptions, and his disappearance forces her to confront how little of the actual man may have been available to her. Her relationship with Shangjun creates another version of the same problem. She wants to believe she understands him even while the evidence suggests that she doesn’t. The people she is trying to hold on to remain partly unknowable.

To the East of the East is not a novel I feel equipped to explain completely, and I suspect that may be part of the reason it has stayed in my thoughts. There are pieces I understood, pieces I only partially understood, and pieces I suspect I would understand differently after learning more about the historical and cultural contexts behind them. Ping Lu has constructed a novel that resists being reduced to a single interpretation, even if some of that resistance left me wishing for stronger connections between its various narratives.

The novel will be released on October 20, 2026, and was longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature. If you have read To the East of the East and found connections between Min-Hui’s story and the historical sections that I missed, I would genuinely love to hear your interpretation in the comments. I’m especially interested in what other readers made of the novel within the novel and how you understood its relationship to Min-Hui’s marriage and search for her husband.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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