The Ten Thousand Mile Thread: A Chinese-American Love Story - Paperback

by Linda Harvill Strother (Author)

Newly wed Wu Meichen wants two things in life: the love of her aloof, scholarly husband and a son who'll get her super-critical mother-in-law off her back. But what's a Chinese girl to do when her husband refuses to consummate his marriage, and all her attempts to seduce him fail? Just when she thinks her husband, Chao Chung, might give in, the United States government throws southern China into chaos by passing The Chinese Exclusion Act. Chung rushes to America to get a job before the deadline when all immigration of Chinese will be cut off in 1882. Like thousands of other Chinese wives whose husbands work in America, Meichen is now a "Gold Mountain Widow." She knows Chung will be gone a long time. After all, the uncle he works for has been gone for twenty-two years!A Chinese proverb says that a couple meant to be together are connected by an invisible thread even though they are a thousand miles apart. After five years with no sign that Chung will return, Meichen takes a ship to America, determined to follow the thread that connects her to the man she loves. Corrupt officials, angry relatives, San Francisco Tong gangs, and even violent white miners block her way as she travels across the United States to Georgia where her husband resides, working in his uncle's grocery store. Even if she reaches Chung, his family threatens to end their marriage. Has her impetuous flight jeopardized the very thing she wants most! Can she and her husband revive their marriage after a five year separation? Can the fragile thread stretch 10,000 miles without breaking? THE TEN THOUSAND MILE THREAD is a novel full of romance and adventure based on actual historical events that occurred in China, San Francisco, the American wild west, and the city of Augusta, Georgia, home of fifty Chinese merchants and one Chinese woman at the turn of the nineteenth century.