Although this is a novel supposedly about an ordinary American college kid’s year abroad, this year abroad, I think I can safely say, is nothing like any year abroad I have ever heard of. Tiller Bardman begins as a very ordinary 20 year old, in quiet even staid Dunbar, New Jersey. He is doing a summer job washing dishes at a restaurant for extra money, though he is by no means badly off. His mother seems to have left him when he was a child, so he was brought up by his kind, gentle father, whom he calls Clark. He has an ordinary childhood apart from this, and is relatively content to stay in this comfortable rut.
Then by chance, he substitutes for an acquaintance as a caddie, and is taken up by the golfers, including one Pong Lou, a chemist and entrepreneur. Pong takes Tiller under his wing, as a sort of assistant in his new business venture selling Indonesian-style, tailor-made jamu — wellbeing drinks. Tiller begins to lead the high life with Pong, enjoying luxury travel, food, hotels, and meeting many wealthy men and exciting women, and having the time of his life. Pong takes Tiller to Shenzhen and Macau, introduces him to even more rich people, rich food, rich lifestyles. They play hard as well as try to sell Pong’s jamu drink on a very large scale and woo rich investors. They surf, they karaoke, they do yoga, and much much more, networking in all kinds of exotic activities.
In the day time hours we toured a local maritime history museum, and took a Sri Lankan cooking class, and banged the gong at an old Chinese temple, and even visited the world’s largest aquarium, on the neighbouring island of Hengqin, where we actually donned wet suits and scuba dived in the massive tank in full view of aquarium-goers (p260).
A lot of this quite long novel is taken up with Lee’s lovely descriptions of how Tiller is introduced to the high life, and his marvelling at the immense privileges he had never even dreamt of or imagined.
This of course a novel where the American college kid learns about himself. He has Chinese ancestry, and is a mixed race child, a ‘hapa’, but for most of his upbringing in Dunbar, Tiller tries to just fit in as a regular white kid and mostly passes. In the course of the ‘year abroad’ – which is actually much less than a year – Tiller goes through the self-discovery and self-development at accelerated rates: he discovers rapidly that he has a gift with languages, he draws well, he discovers he has an exceptional singing voice, amongst other abilities. He also has a very interesting relationship with Clark, his father. It is distant and detached, but loving and trusting. After half a year of not speaking (when Tiller was away in China unbeknownst to his father, having those adventures), he calls his father:
He assumed I was still work-studying somewhere in Western Europe, and I didn’t dispel the notion […] He didn’t need to know that I was hardly a day’s car trip away. Why wound the man? There’s no good reason, just as he saw no use leaving a bruise on me with some sorrowful comment about my scarceness. He knows I love him, and I know he loves me, but this is how we operate, no matter how unideally ideal it is (p471).
The way Lee captures the delicate relationship between father and son makes me nod vigorously when I read the blurb on the cover talking about his “breathtaking, precise, elliptical” prose.
In China, promoting their new jamu-drink venture, Tiller and Pong and other business associates go to one Drum Kappagoda’s house, where at first Tiller is treated like a ‘princeling’, and seduced by the daughter of the house. Then things take a surreal turn when his boss, Pong, leaves and does not return as promised, and suddenly Tiller finds himself in a torture chamber situation. It is all just a bit difficult to swallow, but it is intended to dovetail into the parallel narrative of the novel, of Tiller’s life with Val and VeeJ; VeeJ is Val’s prepubescent son. For unknown reasons, the Tiller of the 2nd storyline, not much older than the 20 year old of the first storyline, is apparently now in some kind of safehouse or witness protection program, with a woman perhaps a decade older than him, whom he met in the food court of the Hong Kong International airport. Val is his lover, They become a family unit, along with VeeJ, who turns out to be not just an overfed, demanding brat, but a prodigy chef.
I am less sure about how much this story line of Val and VeeJ is actually necessary to the structure of the novel. I am not entirely convinced the parallel storylines work. It is like two separate stories which do not need each other. There are some good twists and reveals in the end about Pong, but each of the storylines would have been good stand alone novels, there was no added benefit to bringing two storylines into one, as they added little to each other’s development. That said, although the plot was therefore not the most effective, Lee’s writing is so strong that it carries it through nevertheless, and the reading experience is so smooth and pleasurable that one is willing to give the author a lot of extra leeway, no pun intended. There are some lovely observations, as the blurbs also noted, about Asian values and/or attitudes juxtapositioned with Western norms, comments on capitalism and the type of society it generates, on ambition, egotism, on risk taking, on endurance and sacrifice. Which are themes common to many other novels by Lee. And Tiller is a prototype of a Lee protagonist, in being introspective, self-reflexive, open to external influences, working hard on his relationships with people, and searingly honest about himself. Val is also typical of Lee’s women characters, usually depicted as strong, vital, interesting, daring to be different, attractive; but they tend to be of the same mould. The theme of mothers being away is prevalent in this and other of Lee’s novels.
This is not my favourite of Lee’s novels, but it was still an excellent piece of writing, and I will still eagerly be reading all the rest of his oeuvre. He is the winner of many writing awards, and whenever I see the list of these awards, it makes me glad that his undoubted talent is justly so well recognised and rewarded.
Recent Comments