How to End a Love Story

Kuang’s choice to center How to End a Love Story around a Chinese American woman reflects increasing diversity in the romance genre. Jeannie Lin’s 2009 novel Butterfly Swords was a historical romance set in Tang Dynasty China, and it was an early marker of diversity within the genre of historical romance. For decades, these types of novels were set in either the United States or Europe.

In the 2010s and early 2020s, Asian American and Asian Canadian authors wrote several popular contemporary romances. For instance, Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient (2018) and its two sequels, The Bride Test (2019) and The Heart Principle (2021), have been especially successful. Family tensions and the challenges of navigating two cultures are key elements of Hoang’s novels. Some of her protagonists are also neurodivergent, like Stella Lane, the protagonist of The Kiss Quotient, who has autism. Hoang’s protagonists often confront difficult emotions due to feeling misunderstood throughout their lives, even within their cultural communities. Her work thus showcases that romance can include emotionally difficult topics.

Jackie Lau, who is a Chinese Canadian writer, writes romantic comedies that similarly explore themes of identity and family. For example, her book Donut Fall in Love (2021) features a character mourning the recent loss of his mother. Vietnamese American writer Thien-Kim Lam’s Happy Endings (2021) features a Vietnamese American woman who has a Black boyfriend and is facing her own family’s judgement for her decision to launch a sex toy business rather than pursue a more conventional career path.

In How to End a Love Story, Kuang includes elements of comedy to balance the novel’s more serious themes of cultural differences and tragic loss. She also employs familiar romance tropes—such as forced proximity and forbidden love—as an assertion that core genre elements are not exclusive to white culture. Similarly, Alisha Rai’s Hate to Want You (2017)—which features a biracial Japanese American and Hawaiian protagonist—has a forbidden love element that follows a family tragedy. In How to End a Love Story, Helen believes that she does not deserve true romance like Grant does—this is a commentary on how, until recently, most happy endings in romance were reserved for white characters. Helen struggles to convince herself of her own worth and value as a romantic partner, reflecting the emotional impact of literary and cultural landscapes that marginalize Asian American women or treat them as secondary characters rather than protagonists.

Kuang is also particularly aware that Asian American experiences may appear more often in literary fiction than in genre fiction. Early in the novel, Helen notes that she “wrote a lot of short stories about the quiet tragedies of immigrant-kid assimilation” before turning to her chosen genre of young adult fiction with romance elements (234). One notable example of the kind of fiction Helen describes is Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, which focuses on the relationships between Chinese mothers and their Chinese American daughters, focusing on their struggles to connect with one another. However, Kuang does not shy away from these themes in How to End a Love Story, either, since she focuses on the Zhang family’s grief. She also crafts a happy ending for Helen, who learns that her life is more than her losses. Grant accepts Helen’s parents as they are, showing that romantic satisfaction does not depend on assimilation, but rather on self-acceptance.