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.
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