‘Do you think the concubines won the emperor’s attention by being cute?’” No man wants a panda – lazy, round, and silly.
Although my parents are not as strict as Mei’s, my mom and dad treasure traditional values like them, and that has made growing up in America quite hard at times. Her mother is seen as chastising her because of the way she looks and acts throughout their meetings, which hits really close to home. She’s not exactly a size 0 (size 8 – same as me!) and her body size is remarked upon when she’s at Chow Chow by her mother. But at this turn of her life, Mei is experiencing an internal conflict that continues to grow as she meets new people and experiences new things in college. She’s the child that her parents are piling their dreams on after they disowned her brother. She’s on the premed track and meets her parents once a week (if not more) at Chow Chow, a restaurant they frequently eat at. She’s intelligent and checks off all the boxes for Obedient Taiwanese Teen™. American Panda is superbly written, with hilarious dialogue and equally witty inner monologues of Mei, a seventeen-year old who is college-bound to MIT.
Although we only see the experience of a Chinese-American through the lense of one teenage girl, I believe there is something – whether it is stinky tofu, matchmaking, or dreams of being a doctor – that a Chinese-American teen can relate to in Mei’s story. I’m making all my Chinese-American friends (both who read and who don’t) to preorder this book because it is exceptional. Xiàoshùn.’”Īnd with that line, American Panda understood me in a way no book has before.
“‘Sometimes I’m so proud to be Chinese, and other times I resent it so much. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels? 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.īut 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. 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. An incisive, laugh-out-loud contemporary debut about a Taiwanese-American teen whose parents want her to be a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer despite her squeamishness with germs and crush on a Japanese classmate.At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents’ master plan.
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