A Taiwanese-American coming-of-age story, set in a blended family? It could have potential.
Despite the title, the protagonist is not, in fact, a Tiger Mom, but is Lexa, the result of a romance between her Caucasian-American mother and a Taiwanese man during her mother’s vacation in Japan. (Among the oddities in this book: the mom thinks her Taiwanese lover is Japanese, despite her having lived in Japan for a year. His name, accent and appearance didn’t give her a clue?)
Since this is not actually the Tiger Mom’s tale, the title of the novel seems designed to surf off the popularity of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In this book, the Tiger Mom is Lexa’s stepmother, who is basically Cruella de Vil.
The single-note personality of the Tiger Mom foreshadows the main problem with the book: its hopelessly one-dimensional characters. Lexa is quite perfect: she is warm, tolerant, kind, hardworking, fit to an extreme, and the social glue for her family. (Coincidentally? her career seems much like the author’s). As a child, she travels back and forth to Taiwan, loving every new food item and experience, never missing her friends or life back in America. She works as a fitness trainer, and also acts as an unpaid therapist for all her clients’ problems — romance, fat, you name it.
Her half-sister Maddie is just as single-note. Despite being a thirty-something mother of two, she invariably sounds like a spoiled teenager.
“Whatever,” Maddie muttered. “You can’t make me.”
The TIger Mom — Pin-Yen, Lexa’s Taiwanese stepmother — is perhaps the most cliched of the characters: she mutters, scowls, glowers, is pathetically triumphant over small victories, and shows no hint of humanity until the end of the novel, where she suddenly finds virtue. The words used to describe Pin-Yen are unimaginative: ‘cold stares’, ‘pursed her lips’, ‘her mouth hardened’.
Pin-Yen locked eyes with [Lexa], staring as if she could see deep into her soul. And if what she saw was only an innocent twelve-year-old girl, Pin-Yen brushed the thought aside. This girl was a threat to her own daughter. She wasn’t going to let her worm her way into the hearts and finances of the Chang family.
The one interesting character was Hsu-Ling, Lexa’s Taiwanese half-sister via her father. She was born without one leg and has a prosthetic limb, but it doesn’t limit her enthusiastic energy at all. It was nice to see a disabled character with personality beyond her disability.
When the novel starts, Lexa’s mom has just announced that she has fallen in love with a woman. Lexa, of course, accepts this calmly, but it causes much angst for her sister Maddie. The woman in question turns out to be part-Asian, but plays very little part in the novel, leading the reader to wonder why this plot point was included in the first place. It almost seemed like diversity boxes were being ticked off: LGBT, disabled….and then Lexa’s stepfather starts dating a Jamaican/Puerto-Rican woman. I’m all for diversity, but I prefer it to fall more naturally into the plot.
The characters are flat, but the plot is pretty thin too: it depends on a deus ex machina involving a complicated will. There are dark hints of a traumatic event that befell Lexa on her last trip to Taiwan, when she was 14. This is dragged out over many chapters, each mention of this event more foreboding. When the event is finally described, it comes as an anticlimax. Would everyone really have believed the Tiger Mom’s dubious lies, given her obvious hatred of Lexa?
Running parallel to the main story of Lexa’s Taiwanese family is Lexa’s search for romance. She meets Jake, whose physical and emotional perfection appropriately match her own. And whats more, he turns out to be part-Asian too! But their romance is doomed: Lexa’s childhood trauma has made her wary of having children, while Jake — divorced, one (charming, of course) child — wants more children. Will they come to a meeting of the minds by the end of the novel? Let’s guess.
A few Asian-American issues are raised in a perfunctory manner. ‘Yellow fever’ — the phenomenon of Caucasian men who only want to date Asian women, expecting them to be ‘submissive’.(The capable Lexa flings a drink over such a man and performs kung-fu on him). ‘Asian glow’ — Asians whose skin flush in response to alcohol. These issues are dragged abruptly into the novel, disrupting the main story at random points.
An eminently forgettable novel.
My interest had also been caught by the title of this book and I had mentally made a note to check it out, so I am thrilled you reviewed it. But heavens, it sounded like a painful read. Thank you for translating what is clearly a pretty awful piece of writing into such a hilarious review. It boggles the mind that in this day and age with so many examples of superb Asian-American writing/literature, people would still want to 1) turn out stuff like this, and 2) publishers would market it. Honestly, inflicting bad writing on the public ought to be a criminal offense! 🙂
I too was taken by the title, expecting something interesting and novel, but unfortunately I was very disappointed. If it does come your way, I’d love to know if you agree — perhaps I am being too harsh on a new author.