The China Bride

how my mother acted as a translator for her parents. She had a musician's ear for the subtleties of the Chinese language, in which slight changes of inflection can completely change the meaning of a word.

On special occasions I was allowed to wear some of my mother's Chinese jewelry and the magnificent embroidered garments that my grandmother had bought from 'the silk man.' (I had a particular fondness for a certain splendid rooster hat.) None of this made me even remotely an expert on China, but it did leave a lasting interest in this most ancient and fascinating of cultures.

Though The China Bride takes place more in Britain than in China, I had to do major research to do justice to the Asian parts of the story. Since this is a romance, I looked for the ideas and details that would best illuminate my characters and the setting without bogging the story down in too many explanations.

The Temple of Hoshan is my invention, but based on descriptions of real temples. Troth and Kyle's journey through South China is also somewhat fictionalized.

In Scotland, my Castle Doom is based on Castle Campbell near Dollar, which is often called Castle Gloom. This highly romantic structure overlooks the Burn of Care and the Burn of Sorrow.

Starting in Roman times, the Silk Road became the conduit for goods between Asia and Europe. Even then, governments complained that too much of their treasure was being spent abroad to buy luxury goods. Once trade resumed between East and West in the seventeenth century, balance of trade was an issue again for Europeans eager to buy tea and other goods from a self-sufficient Chinese empire that wasn't much interested in what Europe had to offer. Hence the Cantonese trading system, designed by China to minimize the possible infection of foreign ideas.

Europeans who believed that trade was a natural right hated the restrictions the system put on their movements. They also needed goods to trade, which is where opium came in. In pursuit of profits, European traders poured illegal opium into China, creating millions of addicts. The Opium War began in 1839, several years after The China Bride. Britain used its military strength to bully trading concessions out of the Chinese government, and it took a century to throw the Europeans out so China could regain its sovereignty. This was not the West's finest hour.

I avoided trying to reproduce the pidgin trade language of South China, since it sounds so ugly to the modern ear. However, for lack of better terms and because they are historically accurate, I occasionally used Asiatic and Oriental, even though the words have acquired some negative connotations.

I hope you enjoyed seeing Kyle and Troth Mei-Lian build their own personal bridge between East and West.

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