asianamlitfans | May. 2nd, 2009

A Review of Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Piano Teacher (Penguin, 2009).

There is a breathtakingly cinematic quality to Janice Y.K. Lee’s first novel, The Piano Teacher, a quality that makes you believe that this is the kind of novel that will soon be turned into a movie. With a bevy of Asian American novels and fiction having been turned into movies at this point, including Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Shawn Wong’s American Knees, one believes it is only a matter of time before Lee’s The Piano Teacher becomes an adapted screenplay. Add to the pot characters that you at first find completely self-absorbed, but later discover have much more nuance and depth and you have yourself quite the compelling premise. Lee cleverly pulls the readers in through the creation of a character, Claire Pendleton, ostensibly the protagonist, although I would not call the main focus (that goes to the Eurasian beauty, Trudy Liang, the vortex from which all other individuals revolve around and get sucked into in some form), who travels to Hong Kong in 1953 and settles into her life as a newlywed to a man (Martin, who is working for a utility company) she seems to simply tolerate. Claire’s provincial English world is turned upside when she starts to look for a side job as a piano teacher and her disorientation is one mirrored by the reader because everything is not as they seem. You see, Claire is baffled to discover that the job she is applying for will be for an ethnic Chinese family (made up of a business magnate father, Victor Chen, his wife, Melody, and their daughter Locket, the one taking piano lessons), where her status as an Englishwoman would, at least according to her initial prejudices, connote a higher class location. Instead, Hong Kong is a different world, where her background as a middle-class Englishwoman pales in contrast to the various elite socialites that populate the colony, of Chinese ethnic heritage or not. Claire is eventually drawn into a world in which exterior performance do not match interior intent and the novel eventually moves back in time to 1941, just before the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong. At the center of this novel is Trudy Liang, a beautiful heiress of part Chinese, part Portuguese background who is the envy of every woman in the colony and has caught the eye of every eligible bachelor, including William Truesdale. The name “Truesdale” is certainly a bit heavy-handed, but bespeaks a certain quality that will draw Trudy, despite her incredible popularity, to him and to him only. As the Japanese advance on Hong Kong, their relationship blossoms. And among the various adventures they have, the readers will be introduced to a bevy of socialites, many who know more than are willing to divulge, such as Dominick Chen (Trudy’s cousin), Edwina Storch (a long-time resident and sort of matriarch for the British colonials) and her best friend, Mary Winkle, Reggie and Arbogast (another power elite couple), among others. The novel will then jump cut back to 1953, where Claire meets William Truesdale, now a chaffeur for the very same family where she works as the piano teacher. The narrative is catalyzed by the mystery that surrounds William’s change in status as well as the strange way in which a triangle eventually forms between Trudy and William in 1942 and Claire and William in 1953. What happened to Trudy? And what does the Crown Collection of Hong Kong have to do with all of this? These questions structure a mystery that enfolds the reader and the strength of the book lies partly in this enthralling plot.

While there are portions of the novel, I found a bit sentimentalized, Lee’s gift is in the exploration of characters that are placed into extraordinarily difficult circumstances and then offers such characters an intricate and complex arc. Some of the sequences are difficult to read, simply for their graphic war imagery and content. The most challenging connection though ultimately lies with Claire Pendleton, whose racist viewpoints concerning the colony make it difficult to empathize on a political level and certainly Lee expected this and provides Claire with her own developmental narrative. The choice then to focalize the narrative often through her eyes is a risky one and one that I’m not sure wholly pays off. Indeed, the sense that a British Empire might be destroyed and reconfigured for her in a more politically progressive way is a kind of consciousness that is lacking in say, Adela Quested, in A Passage to India, but even then, the colonial subject’s mobility is one that many readers have been used to or already conditioned to understand, so when Lee makes definite care to include the presence of amahs, the Chinese caretakers who populate Hong Kong, one wonders about their lives and their stories. I kept finding myself falling into these marginalities even as the inexorable pull of Claire’s narrative moved forward. Overall though this critique is a minor one, as I fully understand that it would have made for an entirely different book, but the rubric of identity politics, postcolonial theory, and third world subjectivities, makes us more acutely aware of what is often overlooked, written out, expunged, and excised, in the fictive imagination. We are reminded then of the power of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt to reverse the gaze.