“A Face for Listening”: Witnessing Hong Kong’s Occupation in The Piano Teacher

Abstract

Janice Y. K. Lee’s 2009 New York Times bestselling novel The Piano Teacher is set alternately between the 1940s and 1950s and describes the years of the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong during World War II and its aftermath a decade later. The novel includes scenes of the Hong Kong internment camps in which Western (Allied) subjects were incarcerated under Japanese control. Against this backdrop, the novel’s core romance traces the relationship between Trudy Liang, a half-Chinese, half-Portuguese socialite, and Will Truesdale, a British expatriate newly arrived in Hong Kong, as it unfolds in the 1940s and is put to the test during the war. In the 1950s postwar scenes, we see the trauma carried by the war’s survivors, a trauma accompanied by a silence and inability to testify about their wartime experiences. Into this setting arrives Claire Pendleton, the novel’s titular character, whose role within the plot allows her to aid those survivors to bear witness to wartime stories. This essay investigates how Claire functions as a catalyst that elicits wartime testimony, or according to Dori Laub, as a “witness to the testimonies of others” (61). It is just her “face for listening” that enables Claire’s most significant narrative function, as an auditor who elicits war testimonials from the survivors of World War II.