Yang’s Chinese-immigrant-coming-to-America novel is in some ways similar to others of its genre, in that our protagonist, Ivy Lin, finds herself different from her American peers and longs to fit in. In these ways, Ivy’s tale is like many second generation migrants to the west, where their parents, engaged in the hard scrabble for mere survival in a new host country, do not quite understand what the second generation need to be provided in order to blend into mainstream American society at school.
But American women had different needs: disposable pads, tampons, bras, razors, tweezers. It was unthinkable for Ivy to ask for these things
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Ivy is not quite a second generation migrant, however, because she was born in China, and brought up by her grandmother, Meifeng, when her parents went to America. At 5 years old, her parents send for her, and later, for her grandmother too. The grandmother (Meifeng) is a loving grandmother, but slightly unorthodoxed; she teaches Ivy to steal and shoplift, seeming to regard this as not morally wrong.
She felt it her duty to instill in her granddaughter the two qualities necessary for survival: self-reliance and opportunism
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Also similar to many migrants’ stories, for all intents and purposes, since she was brought up in the USA, Ivy wants to identify as American but is aware of her Chinese appearance. However, she works hard to shed her Chineseness when outside her family home, attempting to be pleasing and therefore acceptable to peers, and later, attractive to rich, white men of good family. (Ivy does not seem to be interested in Chinese men.)
Ivy’s mother, Nan, apparently had her heart broken when her well born, handsome teenaged sweetheart was taken away by Communists, to die in a labour camp. Struggling, single-parent Meifeng forces Nan to eventually accept Shen Lin (Ivy’s father eventually) in marriage, particularly as he was immigrating to the USA and could take Nan with him. Meifeng tells Ivy this story when Ivy is 14 and about to be sent back to visit China and stay with her relatives for a few weeks, to distance her from unsuitable peers at school. Listening to her mother’s tragic romance, Ivy draws certain conclusions:
she might love and lose but she would never settle for a Shen Lin with the knobbly forehead and bulbous nose. Not for her an existence governed by Meifeng’s tenets. Love would exist for its own sake, and not for the sake of getting your sister and mother a United States green card
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Now while it is very probable a girl of 14 who has American citizenship can so easily dismiss her mother’s and grandmother’s choices, interestingly, the 27-year old version of Ivy seems to know no better. (interestingly, when Nan later tells Ivy her love story, it is quite a different version from Meifeng’s.)
Ivy had had a teenaged crush on one Gideon, a handsome white American boy from a rich family. When in her late 20s Ivy happens to meet Gideon’s sister by chance, and manages to get invited into their circle and thus reacquaint herself with Gideon, she is determined to marry him, even if he moves in circles which she does not understand, and which clearly hold her in contempt.
Ivy found it impossible to feel anything but fumbling ineptness when socializing among these old-moneyed Mayflower families, who held tradition as life’s highest tenant. Tom Cross could laugh at his own pretensions, but Ivy couldn’t laugh. She didn’t know the difference between tradition and pretension.
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Ivy puts up with her own discomfort, partly because she is beguiled by the wealth, which she has always aspired to but could never claim on her own, and partly because she does not yet understand her own worth, and so is willing to devalue herself just to be found pleasing and accptable:
she barely understood how to navigate such a circle in which her Chinese-ness wasn’t something to hide under the tablecloth like an unseemly dog, but flaunted in a qipao with a slit up the thigh
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She clings onto life as Gideon’s girlfriend even though it is clear even to her that things are not working out smoothly,
But as long as she was amenable and admiring, there were many new experiences available to her
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such as skiing, horseriding, and The Yacht Club, the Racquet Club, The Algonquin Club, the UClub, etc. Ivy is basically a young woman on the make. She is ambitious without actually having much ability or achievement. She lacks discipline and self control – as is evidenced in the novel by her reckless impulse purchases on credit when she knows she cannot afford certain things, and her inability to stop smoking even though she tries many times to quit. She did not work hard and so did not get good grades at school, and eventually gave up the notion of doing Law because it was too much hard work, and settled for being a first grade school teacher. She regards marriage as a career, instead.
Ivy didn’t like children but that didn’t matter. Being a teacher wasn’t actually about teaching. Most jobs have nothing to do with the day-to-day work and everything to do with what they represent. Teachers made good trophy wives to wealth men. Why struggle to climb the corporate ladder yourself then you can retire after marriage to volunteer at puppy shelters and color-code your sweater drawers?
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However, what Ivy had not realized was that other women who wanted to marry a rich man and live a leisured life thereafter,
already had a pool of future husbands to choose from. Family friends, childhood playmates, church members, best friends of older brothers, their dads’ golf partners’ nephews. For the Christines and Sylvias and Arabellas of the world […] but she [Ivy] had always been different. She had no family to back her
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So Ivy ends up in a state of anxiety over the precarity of her toe hold into Gideon’s world, the world of the effortlessly affluent, which she hungers to be legitimately a part of. And yet, oddly enough, Ivy’s soul mate is clearly a Romanian chap from her childhood, whom she is deeply attracted to and entirely comfortable with, who understands her and sees her exactly for what she is and yet loves her unconditionally. Even though Roux has made a huge success of his life and ended up extremely wealth, Ivy still rejects him time and again because of his humble origins and lack of family.
The novel becomes more and more interesting as it unravels, as we follow the plotline to see how Ivy contrives to land her prize, and of course, whether she will land it in the end. The writing also becomes stronger when it moves away from rehearsing the immigrant angst, and focuses on Ivy as a protagonist in her own right, not just pre-determined by her migrant background. Read just as a novel with an element of suspense built in, and some social commentary about the Mayflower-type of Americans, it is quite a good read, and for a debut novel, promising of even better yet to come. But read as an immigrant novel about a Chinese-American, it is less satisfactory, and indeed, does not actually benefit from the rather mechanical insertion of the cliches of the hard-working and lowly origin migrants making good and generational gap in cultural values. Yes, this background perhaps was needed to illustrate why Ivy wanted so much to belong to mainstream and privileged America, wanting to shed her Chineseness which she associates with negative traits; but this can be done either better, or else with less emphasis on the migrant cliches, which actually weaken rather than strengthen the novel.
Moreover, there were interesting angles which were raised an unexplored, such as Ivy’s admiration of the supposedly ugly but confident Liana, wife of Gideon’s boss, who is Chinese but clearly utilises her Chineseness as an asset, rather than the liability Ivy always assumed it to be. Or Ivy’s brother, Austin, who is depicted as struggling with depression but whose story and character remains nothing but a prop, peripheral, but could have led to a promising angle of discussion too.
It is not unusual for a debut novel to have all kinds of loose ends which don’t tie up or which lead nowhere, and to have uneven parts of the novel, some stronger, some weaker. Nothing a strong editor cannot help with. Overall, I look forward to Yang’s second novel, because I have mostly enjoyed her first.
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