Published by Simon Pulse on 06 Feb 2018
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At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents' master plan. Now a freshman at MIT, she is on track to fulfill the rest of this predetermined future: become a doctor, marry a preapproved Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer, produce a litter of babies.
With everything her parents have sacrificed to make her cushy life a reality, Mei can't bring herself to tell them the truth--that she (1) hates germs, (2) falls asleep in biology lectures, and (3) has a crush on her classmate Darren Takahashi, who is decidedly not Taiwanese.
But when Mei reconnects with her brother, Xing, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman, Mei starts to wonder if all the secrets are truly worth it. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels?
As a Taiwanese gal myself, I was immediately drawn to this story. Similar to Mei's parents, my parents have always valued my education and future success above all their personal needs... and they want me to marry well too. But my parents have never been one of those stereotypical overbearing, controlling Asian parents, like Mei's parents are, so I wasn't looking to relate to this story in that sense.
My favourite thing about this book was Mei's parents'--particularly her mom's--small quirks, which I also experienced with my mom in my life: texting obscure health hacks that Taiwanese moms get from god knows where (probably WeChat), offering to 刮痧 (guā shā) their kids (scraping away toxins with a cow's hoof comb), pinching their kids' noses to make them bigger (culturally for good fortune, but I always thought my mom did it to me for aesthetic purposes--Taiwanese aesthetic I suppose), gossiping about other people's kids, and most significantly, making sacrifices and shouldering everything so that the only thing their kids ever need to worry about is getting good grades.
This was a fun read for me and actually took me back to high school more than it took me back to college, probably because this is a young adult novel. The dialogues were sometimes a bit blunt and felt like narrations rather than natural conversations--which felt especially uncharacteristic with Mei, as she was such an insecure character (insecure as in being unsure of herself due to being torn about cultures and expectations, not the regular self-conscious teen stuff, though there's a bit of that too)--so that's partly why this book felt very young adult, which isn't a good or bad thing, just a genre.
Other minor grievances I had were that Mei had a tic for saying "how ironic," the "twist" in the side-plot at the end felt a bit juvenile, and the parents weren't the most dynamic characters (though I understand the challenge of balancing cultural representation and individual identities), but overall, this was a fun, easy, fast-paced student-life story that I connected with.
