The Natural Laws of Good Luck: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage

by Ellen Graf

Book Overview

Ellen is forty-six, divorced, and having no luck with personal ads when her Chinese girlfriend comes up with a plan: she has a brother in China, Zhong-hua, who's lonely too. Maybe they'd like each... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590308336
• ISBN13: 9781590308332
• Release Date: March 2011
• Publisher: Shambhala
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Inspiring, Healing, Beautiful, and Fun

The Art of Getting Well: Maximizing Health and Well-being When You Have a Chronic Illness Ellen Graf has an amazing story to tell, and she tells it with grace. In her 40s, she married a man from China, a match arranged by her new sister-in-law, who told her "alone no good." When her husband Lu Zhong-hua comes to upstate New York, he has to fit into a new country, while Graf needs to fit into a new family. The story of creating this new family and making a living as artists, laborers, and teachers takes entertaining and frightening turns. One challenge for Graf is connecting with her spoiled step-daughter. Another is coping with silence - she discovers that the Chinese concept of marriage doesn't include small talk, routine pleasantries, or even "hello" and "goodbye". Money is a constant worry. Will Zhong-hua, an experienced business manager, painter, and Tai Chi teacher in China, be able to work even a convenience store job in the U.S.? Crises keep happening - a terrible illness, their house burning down. Somehow they make things work. Graf learns that, as her husband says, most people are good, and things will work out if you give them time. It's a message of hope. The author writes about the natural world in her small town / rural area. We read lovely descriptions of birds, snakes, trees, and people, and how living with nature helps people heal. She also has a great sense of humor, which she clearly needed to get through the acculturation phase of her marriage. We get to know the couple's relatives, neighbors, and associates. Several characters are so well drawn that you feel you are looking right at them. Ellen and Zhong-hua are like some of the great couples of literature, and they're real people. They're not idealized or romanticized; you can see their weaknesses and quirks as well as their wonderful humanity and strength. This "memoir of an unlikely marriage" is an equally remarkable accomplishment.

Insightful and uplifting view of marriage

I really liked this book. It took me a few minutes to get used to the author's voice, which was a little unconventional, but by the time I got to the meat of the book -- the bicultural differences between her and her husband -- I was enjoying myself. The author is excellent at capturing Zhong-hua's sometimes hilarious, sometimes insightful fractured English and his philosophical worldview, which he developed after years of suffering under Chairman Mao. I thought a number of his aphorisms and thoughts were wonderful ways to deal with stress. Also, I think most people would find this book relatable - who hasn't sometimes been stunned by the differences between husband and wife in a marriage?

funny and wise

Funny, tender, wise, unprejudiced and unsentimental: a brilliant combination of the most hilarious slapstick and the deepest wisdom. By turning herself and her Chinese husband, and all the cultural misunderstandings between them, into a comedy of errors, Ellen Graf questions the prejudices, assumptions and conventions that we all rely on. I squealed with laughter throughout the book.

An Amazing Story -- Beautifully Told

I loved this book, tangents and all. What Ellen wanted was someone to share her life: someone with whom to watch the circling hawk, the setting sun -- someone to help her with her ramshackle farmhouse. She imagined a man with "a sweet and burly personality, and he came over after work in his tight, dirty blue jeans. He was wily and strong and always smiling. He would swing me up over his head, I would bubble with laughter, and then we would fix stuff." This is the story of the man she got -- a stoic survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, a man who spoke almost no English, who in the beginning broke far more things than he fixed, but the man with whom she fell in love and began slowly to piece together a life. Romantic, practical, and maddeningly impractical by turns -- the story of Ellen and Zhong-hua is, in the end, a love story and a lesson in acceptance. I loved the poetic descriptions, the wry humor, the philosophical insights, and the down-the-rabbit-hole quality of the entire adventure that is the marriage of these two amazing people.