Scenes from a broken marriage in Weike Wang's current New Yorker story

Weike Wang's story in the current New Yorker, The Trip, has us off guard at the outset and it takes a while for readers, or at least for this reader, to figure out exactly who's who in this scenes-from-a-marriage tale. Eventually we, or I, recognize that the husband in this young, so far childless couple is American, presumably (this is never stated definitiely) a white male, and the wife is what the story refers to as an ABC: American-Born Chinese. And as the story opens they are on a guided tour of China, hitting all the main tourist spots w/ various reactions to the crowds and inconveniences. The wife is the casus bella, bringing her husband on this long and expensive journey in order to introduce him to Chinese culture (her relationship to Chinese culture is an open and ambiguous matter, as she is by her own account more typically American) and to her many family members in China. Both, for what it's worth, are children of divorce; we know little about her parents but we see that the husband's mother is intrusive and annoying - calling them multiple times during the course of the narrative (the husband ignores many of the incoming calls and messages). There's a shift about midway through the story, as the wife becomes more "Chinese," eventually speaking to her husband only in Chinese (which he has to translate through Google Translator, notoriously unreliable and even comical, though WW makes no use of that possibility) until she declares she's going to stay in China, perfect her Chinese (a topic of some joshing throughout the story) and perhaps work as a tour guide. Husband flies home; that's it. All told, the story seems to require more willing suspension of disbelief than I'm able to give - it's such odd and extreme behavior, not really fully grounded in the characterization or the back story - but I suppose anything's possible, and maybe WW will further examine the remains of this broken or at least damaged marriage in further writing: This could well be the first chapter of a novel or the first in a series of stories, in which maybe we'll learn why the wife takes such drastic and unexpected action and how the husband endures, or doesn't.