Hachette Livre

Hachette Reading Group Guides

Welcome to our Reading Group guide for Wives of the East Wind by Liu Hong. We invite you to consider and discuss the following questions when reading this book:

  1. As the title suggests, Wives of the East Wind is a novel about marriage, but would you describe it as a love story? What struck you about the characters’ attitudes to love and marriage in this novel?
  2. One of Zhiying and Wenya’s first ‘dates’ takes place at a political meeting. To what extent do her characters' political commitments colour their relationships? How does this change over the course of their lives?
  3. Wives of the East Wind spans a period of over thirty years. How does Liu Hong succeed in giving her story such scope, while at the same time ensuring we remain connected to her characters? What does this ‘long view’ perspective add to our understanding of her characters?
  4. What does Liu Hong’s writing about food add to Wives of the East Wind?
  5. Motherhood is one of the most powerful themes of the novel – what struck you most about Liu Hong's depiction of the different mothers in the book?
  6. Was Cheng Feng’s role in the novel the one you expected him to have when you first encountered him? Did his transformation convince you?
  7. By the end of the novel, we are in a much more affluent China than the one we encountered in the opening pages of the book. What are the positive – and the negative – effects of this transformation?
  8. How do you imagine Wenya feels as an old woman, returning to the East Wind factory possibly for the final time? What do you think the factory really meant to her?
  9. Do you imagine that, at the end of the novel, Wenya is happy far from her homeland?

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