The Occidental Husband
by Fred L. Smith
A 42-year-old geeky newspaperman finds love and lunacy when he meets a Chinese divorcee in a place called South Carolina. He wanted a change. She wanted to show him how to live. They settled on just trying to survive the culture shock. Most of it actually happened.
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The practically, unbelievable, curiously true story of a Western man, an Eastern woman and the fate of mankind (or at least one little boy).
A 42-year-old geeky newspaperman finds love and lunacy when he meets a Chinese divorcee in a place called South Carolina. He wanted a change. She wanted to show him how to live. They settled on just trying to survive the culture shock. Most of it actually happened.
About the Author
Fred Lee Smith was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1954 and is not afraid to admit he has lived in the Lowcountry his entire life. He claims to have attended Charleston Southern University (then the Baptist College) long enough for there to be records of some kind. You can check. Finding himself a dropout with nowhere to turn (except to his parents, whom he lived with and stole gas from), Smith consulted a Quija board, which led him to “The News and Courier” newspaper in 1974. He intended to work there one month. Nearly 40 years later, he’s still there and somehow along the way managed to write more than 1,000 columns, reviews and articles for the paper between 1978 and 1991. Shortly after “The News and Courier” and “The Charleston Evening Post” combined into “The Post and Courier” in the early ’90s, Smith dropped his writing pen (or rather, it was confiscated by editors who knew better) and began concentrating on page design. “In that job, you don’t have to take your work home with you, which was good for me because I had too much TV to watch.” He stumbled his way through several relationships (“at least one with an actual woman,” he says) until he met Mei Li from China online in 1997. That experience, subsequent marriage and numerous stupefying incidents comprise the subject of this merry memoir.
