Wedding in Yangshuo ― A Memoir of Love, Language, and the Journey of a Lifetime to the Heart of China

Once upon a time at Wake Robin Farm in Oregon, I was miraculously pregnant with our first child. That same summer, on the Li River in Southern China, a pretty woman exactly my age was also expecting. She and her husband were both artists. Our child, born in August, was a son. Theirs, born in October, a daughter. Twenty-two years later these children, now grown, would meet in Beijing. The girl from Yangshuo had been studying English. Our son, traveling with a university program, was rapidly becoming proficient in both Mandarin and Cantonese. These two could talk to each other. They could fall in love. And did. This is their story. And ours. Everything in this book actually happened, even the lovely, fateful coincidences. Especially those. Wedding in Yangshuo reveals the origins of Linda Crew’s award-winning YA classic, Children of the River, and the impact the writing of this novel had on her family. While the Southeast Asian refugees who worked on her farm inspired an interest in the dramatic escapes from their war-torn homeland, these same friendships were kindling in her little boy an interest in all things Asian, ultimately leading to a trip to China for the author and her husband to witness his marriage to a Chinese girl from the beautiful city of Yangshuo. For readers of Children of the River who ask if Sundara and Jonathan were married in the end, real life imitates art in this cross-cultural love story.

Linda Crew is the author of the award-winning YA classic, Children of the River, as well as other titles including Accidental Addict, A Heart For Any Fate, Brides of Eden, Nekomah Creek, and Fire on the Wind. She still lives with her husband at Wake Robin Farm in Corvallis, Oregon, where they were married under the oak trees in 1974.