A dichotomy is immediately established between the two women who dominate the narrative of "The Piano Teacher" by Janice Y. K. Lee. Trudy is the exotic, flip, Portuguese-Chinese young woman who seduces whom she likes and behaves as she pleases. Claire is her demure, naive, and restrained British counterpart. They both fall in love with Will Truesdale, an appealing but not particularly unique Englishman.
Unlike the constraints of a typical love triangle, Trudy and Claire do not contend with one another in real time. Claire appears in Will's life a decade after his passionate relationship with Trudy. They are separated not only by character and nationality but also by time and its repercussions. The narrative stays in Hong Kong, though it alternates between the early 1940s as World War II draws closer and 1953. There is a strong expat, colonial presence in Hong Kong that sets up complicated dynamics, both within the community of foreigners and in relation to the Chinese residents.
It is somewhat difficult to stay interested in Claire in and of herself. She is a little too quintessentially out of her element, in Hong Kong because the man she married is there: a man she is using as an escape, not as a companion. The characteristics Lee gives her to enhance her individuality are too far-fetched for her docile disposition. For instance, the scenes in which Claire steals from her employers aren't convincing. Her love affair with Will makes her more interesting to the reader, but even this romance fails to reveal any depths.
Trudy, on the other hand, is almost too much. She embodies joie de vivre. She performs constantly. She is the life of the party, the belle of the ball. She is the sort of character who is never unwatched. There is almost too much distance between Trudy and Claire. Ultimately, it is not entirely clear how important their differences are.
"The Piano Teacher" is a love story but it is also very much a story about war. The book by no means aspires to the heights of Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" or Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke" but it does succeed in portraying the extent of the damage contained by a war. Allegiances are too easily broken and the shady dealings behind closed doors in order to survive have repercussions that last far beyond the certification of a peace treaty. Lee takes us into the internment camps in Hong Kong. The discomfort is evident and startling. It does, however, pale in comparison with what is being perpetrated simultaneously in Europe.
Ultimately, the novel explores very little. The character developments are too roughly handled to be innovative. The links binding the protagonists together become indistinct and frayed at such a clip that it is difficult to fathom why they are interested in each other and why we should be interested in them.
It was only at rare moments that I felt myself penetrating the polite, varnished surface of expat Hong Kong. Lee herself seems to have a grasp of the complexities, but she never provides the reader with a way in.