WHAT WE WERE PROMISED

From a small silk-producing village in rural China, up the corporate ladder in suburban America, and back again to the post-Maoist nouveau riche of modern Shanghai, WHAT WE WERE PROMISED explores the question of what we owe to ourselves, to each other, and to the generations past who imagined our futures.

After years abroad, chasing the American dream, the Zhen family has returned to China. Settling into their luxurious serviced apartment in Shanghai’s Lanson Suites Towers, Wei, Lina and their twelve-year-old daughter, Karen, join an elite community of Chinese-born, Western-educated professionals who have chosen to return to settle down in their radically transformed homeland.

Despite the trappings of success, both Wei and Lina battle deep feelings of unease. Wei, a marketing strategist for US companies, secretly worries that he is complicit in crushing his late father’s dreams of a robust, egalitarian Chinese domestic economy. Meanwhile, Lina, lonely and aimless in her new life of leisure as atai tai, becomes increasingly haunted by personal ghosts—namely the mysterious circumstances of her arranged marriage to Wei and her lingering feelings for his estranged brother, Qiang, with whom she shared a unresolved childhood romance.

Careful of disrupting the family’s process of readjustment, Lina and Wei take pains to hide their anxieties from one another, however, their housekeeper, Sunny, a hardworking girl from the countryside with a tragic past and dreams of her own, bears witness to their struggles. When Qiang suddenly reappears in Shanghai after decades on the run with a local gang, the family must finally reconcile their past and present.

Lucy Tan earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was awarded the 2016 August Derleth Prize. Her stories have been published inAsia Literary Review,Sixfold Journal,Paterson Literary Review, andPloughshares, where she was winner of the 2015 Emerging Writer's Contest. When the timing and role are right, she is also an actress (this fall she will perform in the Forward Theater Company’s production of 4000 Miles in Madison, WI). Lucy splits her time between Shanghai and New York City.