Gertrude

Gertrude is Kimani Cannon’s aunt and Wynona Cannon-Longleaf-Higgins-Gunter’s sister, a devoted matchmaker whose attempt to steer Kim toward romance sets the novel’s pretend engagement in motion. A bona fide romantic and reality television enthusiast, she treats Kim’s unmarried status as a problem worth solving. Her intervention is affectionate rather than hostile, but it makes private choices a family concern and pushes Kim to claim she has already found a partner.

Identity and Family Role

Gertrude is presented through the way she concerns herself with Kim’s prospects. Kim loves both Gertrude and Wynona and recognizes that they mean well, even when their efforts feel intrusive. The novel gives Gertrude little separate biography; instead, her character emerges through her practical involvement in Kim’s romantic life and her conviction that a woman Kim’s age ought to have a man. At a family brunch, she appears to Duan Jeffries to be in her early sixties. Wynona and Gertrude have prepared much of the meal, and Duan acknowledges that the women are good cooks, placing Gertrude within the family’s warm, busy hospitality as well as its matchmaking campaign.

The Matchmaking Scheme

Without Kim’s knowledge, Gertrude submits Kim’s name and biographical information to the producers of the reality show How to Find a Good Man. Her essay wins, and Kim is selected as a contestant for a televised scavenger hunt intended to help her find a partner. The selection turns Gertrude’s romantic optimism into a concrete plan: a film crew arrives at the hospital where Kim works, making the family’s matchmaking effort suddenly public and difficult to decline quietly.

Kim does not want to participate. To escape the show, she tells Wynona and Gertrude that she has become engaged after Gertrude submitted her information. The lie is therefore not evidence that Kim has accepted the show’s premise; it is an improvised way to end the pressure without hurting the two women who arranged it. Gertrude’s scheme gives the false engagement its immediate cause, while Kim’s reluctance to disappoint her aunt and mother explains why she chooses a lie rather than a direct refusal.

Gertrude’s concern also rests on assumptions about Kim’s life. She acknowledges that she sent Kim’s résumé to the program because she worried about whether Kim even liked men. The concern reflects a broader social expectation she voices at brunch: when a woman of Kim’s age has no man, people begin to speculate. Duan recognizes the implication behind her question and challenges the logic of sending Kim onto a dating show on that basis. Gertrude answers plainly, but the scene also shows the affection motivating her: Duan sees how much love she feels for Kim. He answers her doubts by affirming Kim’s desirability, even as his words carry the intensity of someone already drawn to her.

The Pretend Engagement Becomes a Performance

The lie acquires a public life when Kim introduces Duan to Wynona as her fiancé. Gertrude is not present in that first meeting, but her matchmaking scheme remains the reason the engagement story exists. The family soon treats the claim as something to examine. Wynona asks whether Duan is willing to wait for Kim to finish medical school before they marry, and he answers that the decision will be whatever Kim wants. The question underscores the practical expectations attached to the engagement: it must satisfy the family’s curiosity while leaving Kim’s education in her control.

A smaller public encounter reveals how readily the performance can spread beyond its original audience. After Duan puts his grandmother’s engagement ring on Kim’s finger, a waitress assumes they have just become engaged. Duan confirms the assumption, and Kim follows his lead; afterward, she reminds him that the role-playing is for Wynona and Gertrude, not strangers. That exchange shows the boundary of Kim’s original deception beginning to blur. Gertrude’s effort to find Kim a good man has helped create a story that Duan and Kim sometimes enact even when no family member is there to be persuaded.

Questions, Motives, and Narrative Function

At Saturday brunch, Gertrude asks Duan how he and Kim met, exactly as Kim had warned him she would. Her questions make the supposed relationship subject to scrutiny, turning the family meal into an informal examination of whether the fiancé fits the part. Duan notices that Edward Villarosas has been avoiding him while seeking Kim’s attention, but Gertrude’s questioning is distinct: it arises from her interest in Kim’s future and her belief that a woman should not be left without a man.

Gertrude is not portrayed as a calculating architect of the romance. She submits Kim for a television matchmaking show because she believes she is helping, and her direct admission about worrying whether Kim likes men exposes the assumptions behind that help. Yet her actions have consequences beyond the show: they prompt Kim’s false engagement, bring Duan into the family’s view as a fiancé, and create occasions for him to demonstrate care for Kim in public. The contrast between Gertrude’s scripted search for a suitable man and the relationship developing between Kim and Duan gives her a quiet structural importance. She tries to arrange romance from the outside; the resulting performance instead makes visible a connection the two principals must confront for themselves.