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Summary
Summary
In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, a gripping tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Will is sent to an internment camp, where he and other foreigners struggle daily for survival. Meanwhile, Trudy remains outside, forced to form dangerous alliances with the Japanese --- in particular, the malevolent head of the gendarmerie, whose desperate attempts to locate a priceless collection of Chinese art lead to a chain of terrible betrayals. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. A provincial English newlywed, Claire is seduced by the heady social life of the expatriate community. At one of its elegant cocktail parties, she meets Will, to whom she is instantly attracted, but as their affair intensifies, Claire discovers that Will's enigmatic persona hides a devastating past. As she begins to understand the true nature of the world she has entered, and long-buried secrets start to emerge, Claire learns that sometimes the price of survival is love.
Author Notes
Janice Y. K. was an editor at Elle before becoming an author. Her books include The Piano Teacher and The Expatriates.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Orlagh Cassidy narrates this tale of Hong Kong's ultra-wealthy Chinese and the British and American expats who share their high life until Japanese occupation in the early 1940s. After the war Claire, the American naif who joins society through her role as a piano teacher, leaves her husband, is abandoned by her lover and settles into a quiet suburb far from the social whirl. Cassidy handles various accents expertly and has a keen sense of irony, but she is unsuited for more emotionally charged settings-the love scenes hardly seem romantic, and the horror, intrigue and collusion of the occupation period should have been recounted with more drama and less aloofness. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 8). (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A historical and romantic narrative, alternating between the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II and a time roughly ten years later that follows the tragic consequences of that occupation. The central figure is Will Truesdale, who across this ten-year period is involved with two vastly different women. In 1952 he meets Claire Pendleton, the piano teacher of the title, who's come to Hong Kong with her dull and unimaginative husband, a civil engineer overseeing the building of a reservoir. Claire finds a position teaching Locket Chen, the ten-year-old daughter of Melody and Victor Chen, the latter a successful and Anglophilic businessman with a dark past. Will is the Chens' chauffeur, an anomalous position for a Westerner, but Victor well knows that having Will in this position elevates Victor's status in the Chinese community. Lee presents her narrative antiphonally, so the story frequently flashes back to Will's other lover, the beautiful Eurasian Trudy Liang, daughter of a Chinese father and a Portuguese beauty. Trudy is impulsive, pragmatic and strongshe's willing to do anything to guarantee that her relationship with Will survives the dire and dangerous time when the Japanese take over the government of Hong Kong. She submits herself to the will of the powerful Otsubo, who serves practically as a warlord. He's trying to recover a mysterious cache of priceless Chinese artifacts and is willing to engage in any activityincluding torture and murderto get what he wants. Only three people know the whereabouts of the trove, and this knowledge gives them power while at the same time putting them in danger. Despite Will's warning to Claire (" 'I don't like to loveYou should be forewarned. I don't believe in it' "), the piano teacher is sucked into the maelstrom of his passionand learns more than she expected to about the human implications of the dark events of the war. A lush examination of East-West relations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It is 1952 and the British government has just transferred newly married Martin Pendleton to Hong Kong with his young, naive bride, Claire. Looking to keep herself busy while her husband is working, Claire takes a job as a piano teacher to Locket Chen, the daughter of an upperclass Chinese family. Bored by her husband and surprised by her own desire for something exciting, Claire is lured by the colony's exotic ways and lavish lifestyle. She begins an affair with the mysterious Will Truesdale, the Chen's chauffer, whose tragic past is marked by war, betrayal, and a deep, passionate relationship with a beautiful, Eurasian socialite, Trudy Liang. When Will's past collides with Claire's present, Claire can only watch, stunned, as her delicately orchestrated life falls apart. Lee's debut novel shifts back and forth between Claire's story in 1952 and Will's past in 1942's war-torn Hong Kong. Lee has created the sort of interesting, complex characters, especially in Trudy, that drive a rich and intimate look at what happens to people under extraordinary circumstances.--Kubisz, Carolyn Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A novel about the affairs of a Hong Kong couple's hired help. "THAT'S us, the British colonials, battling against our circumstances, always," the formidable Edwina Storch says to Claire Pendleton over tea one sweltering afternoon. Most of the colony's British residents are cultivating a lifestyle of potted palms and potted duck. But not 28-year-old Claire. While her compatriots wilt and sweat, she glows. Hong Kong suits her. "Something about the tropical clime had ripened her appearance, brought everything into harmony." Janice Y. K. Lee's first novel, "The Piano Teacher," opens with the newlywed Claire traveling to Hong Kong in 1951 with her husband, Martin, an engineer. Of their marriage Lee writes, "She was not so attracted to him, but who was she to be picky, she thought, hearing the voice of her mother." Soon Claire is hired as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese couple, Victor and Melody Chen. Also in their employ, as a chauffeur, is an enigmatic Englishman, Will Truesdale. In sleek, spare prose, Lee plays with the growing erotic tension between Claire and Will. Here he is approaching her, cutting "the space between them in half, and half again, coming at her with those hooded, sardonic eyes." "Be good to me," Claire cautions him. Will's response is noncommittal. Claire is sexually charged and curious, the affair with Will her rite of passage. She's also insightful enough to realize that the headier intoxication is with herself, the newly emerging Claire - a woman who indulges in petty thievery and has a lover; a woman more comfortable among the throngs of Chinese at the city's wet markets than at the teas and cocktail parties on the Peak, where some of the colony's wealthiest members reside. Lee has made the bold (and successful) decision to write a novel in which none of her characters are particularly endearing. Will can be cruel and self-absorbed; Claire is often prejudiced. And the upper echelons of Hong Kong society, through which they both pass, are rife with pettiness and jealousy. Many of these people have been deeply scarred by the Japanese occupation - just how deeply Claire will eventually discover as she learns more about Will Truesdale's past. Will's entree into Hong Kong took place in the summer of 1941 through his relationship with a quixotic Eurasian named Trudy Liang. Driven by deep insecurities, Trudy was part Holly Golightly, part Mata Hari - charming, insulting, scheming and above all captivating. In one of the novel's retrospective scenes, at a party on the beach, conversation ceases as "they all watch her, rapt, as she plunges into the sea and comes up sleek and dripping - her slim body a vertical rebuke to the flatness of the horizon between the sky and sea." In December 1941, six months after Will met Trudy, the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. In small but riveting vignettes, Lee evokes the turmoil and fear that seized residents during the occupation, a time when Will and Trudy and the Chens made choices that have rippled through the war years and into Claire's future. "The Piano Teacher" is laced with intrigue concerning a hoard of Chinese artifacts called the Crown Collection that went missing during the war (like the artworks owned by the real-life Hong Kong businessman Paul Chater). But while the inevitable "who did what and when and why" that dominates the last third of the novel is satisfying because it answers all those questions, readers will be more enthralled by Lee's depiction of Will's relationships with his two lovers - "Claire, with her blond and familiar femininity, English rose to Trudy's exotic scorpion" - and the unsparing way Lee unravels them. Lisa Fugard is the author a novel, "Skinner's Drift."
Library Journal Review
Moving back and forth in time between the Japanese invasion of World War II and its aftermath ten years later, this debut novel by Lee, whose familiarity with her Hong Kong homeland is apparent in her vivid descriptions of the setting, is a sparsely written study of how people react under extraordinary circumstances. Actress/narrator Orlagh Cassidy's (Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict) fluid and charming performance helps listeners better engage with the tale's generally unsympathetic characters. Of interest to larger public libraries. [Audio clip available through www.blackstoneaudio.com; the Viking hc received a starred review, LJ 10/1/08.-Ed.]-Denise A. Garofalo, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
