Blythe's Book 44: The Piano Teacher

I went to Barnes & Noble in search of some new books and ended up with a long list of potential reads, which I promptly took to the public library. I am nothing if not frugal! One of the most intriguing looking books was The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee. This novel tells the story of Claire, a young British bride who follows her husband to Hong Kong in the 1950s, shortly after World War I. There she becomes a piano teacher for an affluent Chinese family, and, through her involvement with the family and her affair with a British man, she quickly becomes embroiled in a scandal with roots back in the war. The setting alternates between 1950s Hong Kong and 1930s-40s Hong Kong, and the (pre)wartime events are covered in every other chapter, where we learn about the past of the piano teacher's lover, Will, and his friends. Perhaps my favorite character is Will's lover, Trudy Liang, a spunky Hong Kong native who introduces him to Asian society before the war.

What I loved about this book, in addition to the well-crafted plot, was the historical information the author provided. Lee was raised in Hong Kong but educated at Harvard, and this shows in the way she creates Asian and Western characters. Her understanding of Hong Kong's culture, as well as the events and sentiments leading up to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, made this a really worthwhile read. I'd never thought about Hong Kong's occupation, or about how interred Americans and Britains in Hong Kong must have felt-- and, therefore, this novel was a real eye-opener. I also liked the main character, Claire; she starts out so naive and unformed, but becomes a much stronger, more individualized person through her experiences in Hong Kong. A favorite quote: "There had been times when Claire felt that she could become a different person. She sensed it in herself, when someone made a comment at dinner, and she thought of the perfect, acerbic reply, or something even racy, and she felt her mouth opening. . . [but]She swallowed her thought, and the person she could have become sank down again, weighted down by the Claire that was already too evident in the world. But then came Will . . . She was out of context with him. She was a new person. Sometimes she felt that she was more in love with that new person she could be, that this affair was an affair with a new Claire, and that Will was just the enabler" (74).