By Its Cover: The Piano Teacher

By Its Cover is a series of posts wherein I read a book based solely on my love of the cover. No reading the jacket, no checking reviews!

I was pleasantly surprised by The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y. K. Lee. Lured by the graceful curve of a neck and the beautiful combination of colours, I found myself, unexpectedly, reading a book set in World War II. With a bit of a twist. A twist for me at any rate…while I have read many a book set in this time period, mostly in Britain, sometimes in France or Poland, I have never read one set in Hong Kong where this novel takes place. At second glance the cover does have a slight oriental feel to it, with the pop of orange flowers, but I don’t think I thought about that before reading.

Claire Pendleton is the piano teacher of the title. In May of 1952 she arrives in Hong Kong with her husband of a few months. He is an engineer assigned to oversee the building of the Tai Lam Cheung reservoir. Claire doesn’t particularly love her husband. While acknowledging that he is a good man, she married him to escape a dull life.

To fill her days, Claire becomes a piano teacher for Locket, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy Chinese couple, Victor and Melody Chen. Also in their employ is Will Truesdale, their English chauffeur. It is here that all parts of the story intersect, slowly unravelling to be gracefully knitted back together again by Lee.

Hong Kong suits Claire. While other British expats wilt in the heat, she glows. “Something about the tropical clime had ripened her appearance, brought everything into harmony.” She is opening up and blooming like an exotic flower in the sultry Asian climate. An unintended consequence is that she finds herself doing things that she would never have considered back home…a little pilfering from her employers and an affair with Will.

But this is the story of two love affairs, set a decade apart and and told through flashbacks, we learn of Will’s prior relationship with the beautiful and enigmatic Trudy Liang, daughter of a Chinese father and Portugese mother. He meets her on his arrival in Hong Kong and is immediately swept into her lavish world of cocktail parties, meeting her cousins Victor and Melody Chen. But a few short months later, in December 1941, the Japanese invade Hong Kong and when the British surrender the colony on Christmas day, all British expatriates, along with a handful of Americans and other nationals are interned at the Stanley internment camp.

And so the stage is set for an age old dilemma. How far is a person prepared to go for survival? And what are the consequences years later? While Will struggles to endure the harshness of the camp with many of the other British characters, Trudy has her own struggles on the outside. And then there is Victor Chen, who has his own way of doing things.

And in the midst of the two love affairs set years apart is the mystery of the priceless Chinese artifacts that have disappeared and are being sought after by the Japanese during the war. On this mystery hinges greed and betrayal and the choices that ripple through the years. It is the devastating impact of war that confronts Claire when she lands in 1952 Hong Kong, faced with the brittleness of English society, shot through with pettiness as well as the greed of the wealthy Chinese. For Claire has unwittingly become a catalyst for bringing the past into the present. War, as always, proves ugly.

If you’re a fan of WWII literature like myself, this is a great book to read. Lee has synthesized the lush and nuanced, the brutal and forlorn all at the same time.

The author herself was born and raised in Hong Kong and clearly knows her stuff. I enjoyed this book enough that I checked to see if she had written any others. She has…a book entitled The Expatriates, also about women in Hong Kong. I shall be adding it to my list.