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Michelle See-Tho’s Jade and Emerald is a bildungsroman with a twist. The debut novel features a heady combination of the teenage pangs of Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days, the class commentary of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the opulence of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians. The story follows Lei Ling, a thirteen-year-old Chinese-Malaysian girl with an overbearing single mother who is financially frugal, has high academic expectations of her daughter and is fond of corporal punishment.
The novel begins with Lei Ling navigating Year 7. Though there are hints of the 90s sprinkled throughout the story (Game Boy Colors and Tamagotchis are objects of desire), it’s not until the latter stages of the novel that we have confirmation that it is set in 1999. In hindsight, the temporal setting makes sense: there is a lower tolerance nowadays for overt racism in the form of ‘yell[ing] out strange words and pull[ing] their eyelids back’, though comments like ‘too many Chinese here nowadays […] they’re takin’ over’ still have prescience today.
Jade and Emerald is a bildungsroman with a twist.
The conflict Lei Ling feels between her mother’s values and her own desire for independence comes to a head when she is introduced to the more glamorous side of life through Gigi, the aunt of the only other Chinese girl at her school. She sees potential in Lei Ling, who is bullied at school. Gigi promises to teach the girl ‘real skills. Culture, fashion, finance, etiquette […] how to carry yourself, how to be confident and successful in society’. On their first outing, Gigi buys Lei Ling a Chanel bag while correcting her grammar and teaching her to enunciate properly. The hedonistic privileges of this fairy godmother-like character sharply contrast with the constrictive environment Lei Ling finds at home.
I was about halfway through Jade and Emerald when I felt a wave of resentment flood through me towards its premise. As a Chinese-Malaysian woman, I felt like I’d lived Lei Ling’s life, but my escapes were through fiction and periods of teenage shoplifting, not expensive gifts. But I knew I was being petty. After all, this book has what I had wanted when I was a teenager, and still want today: three-dimensional, varied representations of young women who look like me and have names like mine. I have always felt strongly about the need for mediocrity in representation or, at the very least, a way to combat the model minority myth that pervades much of life as a person of Asian descent. Lei Ling breaks this mould perfectly—she plays the violin, but not well. Her mother, like many immigrant parents, pushes her to study hard and even shells out money for after-school tuition, but Lei Ling’s grades aren’t anything to call home about.
It’s easy to paint Jing Fei, Lei Ling’s mother, as the villain—especially when seen through the eyes of a teen. See-Tho does provide balance here: Jing Fei is shown to be hard-working and wanting the best for her daughter. However, she is not attuned to the best way to communicate this—instead of gentle encouragement, Jing Fei responds with anger and tough love, dismissing Lei Ling’s opinions with a simple ‘you are too young, you don’t understand’. When she berates her daughter for her ungratefulness, warning her: ‘Don’t go chasing dreams because this rich lady tell you to’, this foreshadows Jing Fei’s own secrets that she is rightfully hesitant to share with her daughter.
This book has what I had wanted when I was a teenager, and still want today.
I wanted to know more about Jing Fei and her life before motherhood, but this is another real-world conundrum at play. My curiosity clashes with the knowledge that many Chinese mothers—especially those who grew up in Jing Fei’s time—are reluctant to share anything of their private lives to the possible detriment of their own children. The epilogue is narrated from the perspective of an older Lei Ling, but we’re not given any indication as to how much older she is. It would have been interesting to follow more of Lei Ling’s development alongside the maturation of her relationship with her mother, especially through the often tumultuous teenage years.
However, the familiarity of Lei Ling’s internal dialogue kept drawing me back. The honesty in her narration makes her immediately relatable to anyone who’s ever been a teenager, even if many of the problems she faces are specific to the experiences of a young Chinese daughter in the diaspora. It also wouldn’t be a story about a Chinese-Malaysian family without the mention of food—there are lush descriptions of ‘fatty’ Peking duck and pork belly ‘slow-cooked […] for hours until the dark sauce had seeped into the meat, and it was fragrant with soy and star-shaped spices’. Like Lei Ling, my mouth also ‘watered at the thought of the saucy noodles and pork mince’ that is kolo mee, a Sarawakian noodle dish that doesn’t often make its way onto menus in Australia. In a way, these foods are emblematic of the book as a whole; Michelle See-Tho’s Jade and Emerald is the kind of novel that would have been a great comfort to my teenage self.
Jade and Emerald is our Debut Spotlight book for August.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
