New Releases: Wedded Bliss (?), Hong Kong, and Why the Contessa

Sure, marriage can be hard, and sometimes boring, but maybe the boring is good? Ask Polly advice columnist Havrilesky writes about the ups and downs of her own fifteen year marriage, illustrating “what a tedious, glorious drag forever can be.” Havrilesky wrote a piece for this book that was in the NYT, and it definitely made me want to pick this up.

Called one of the most anticipated books of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, this is “a rare insider’s view” of Hong Kong from someone who grew up there. Cheung was born just prior to Hong Kong being “handed over” from the UK to China. She tells of her “yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests” and delves into its musical and artistic life, sharing what it means to be a part of this complicated city.

Drayton and her siblings moved to New Jersey in the early 1990s to join her mother. They were coming from Trinidad and Tobago. She soon started asking questions about the racial dynamics of the US — “Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all?” At age twenty, she moved back to Tobago, and absorbs the news from America, particularly concerning Black Americans, with the keen eye of someone outside the maelstrom.

I love this trend of telling the stories of multiple figures and how their work combined. William Lloyd Garrison and certainly Frederick Douglass are more known, but Maria Weston Chapman, aka “the Contessa,” has not stuck as strongly to the pages of history. These three all worked for abolition from the 1830s to 1860s. If you’re wondering about the Contessa nickname, no worries, I did a deep dive on Google. It looks like she was nicknamed that by American author Edmund Quincy, who liked to dole out nicknames. Anyway! This looks interesting.