Review: The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

/

For all of our US readers, happy Veteran’s day.

I recently read this book, The Bride Test, by Helen Hoang, and if you want nice (but a bit sexually explicit) romance featuring Vietnamese in the US (both from Vietnam and Viet Kieu), this is a great one. Also, one of the two characters is autistic, which adds an interesting wrinkle to the story.

A quick summary: A mother goes to Vietnam to look for a wife for her son, Khai. She rejects all the women that “audition” for her, and chooses the hotel cleaning woman, My (later to take on the name Esme). Esme goes to America and starts to live with and fall in love with Khai, who is autistic. Misunderstanding ensue, Khai has problems knowing and expressing his love, but in the end…

Things I liked:

  • Neither Khai nor Esme are mean or cruel, but their misunderstandings are cruel to the other. Communication is hard, even for people in the same culture, without autism adding an extra layer of complication. But both are trying to do their best.

  • There is some hot sex in this one! And Asians are treated as sex symbols, which is something often lacking in Western books. Stereotypes of Asians as nerds or non-sexual are ubiquitous in the West, especially for Asian men.

  • Like all good romances, you really want to these crazy kids to get together in the end. But neither are willing to compromise, even Esme, despite her disadvantages: poverty, immigrant status.

There are a lot of things that are not realistic about the book (no one cares about money in the least, and how these people got visas beggars belief). But realism doesn’t really bother me. At times, it was a bit rote, but the elements about Vietnamese in America and autism plus some unexpected twists added up and made me want to finish.

[Plus, I read it in Large Print (amazing for those of us getting up in age), and so I really felt a sense of accomplishment as I sped through pages!]

My final point is this: There are close to 4.5m Viet Kieu (or overseas Vietnamese), or about 5% of the population of Vietnam. In certain countries or cities, they can be a sizable portion (New Orleans and Houston, come to mind). It would be a mistake to think that their stories aren’t worth reading and that only the Vietnamese in Vietnam are worth listening to. Immigrants occupy a liminal space that can tell us about both their home culture and their adopted culture. So I was excited and continue to be excited about reading Vietnamese immigrant fiction.

That’s why I am happy to recommend The Bride Test, especially for anyone interested in romance.