Book Review: Will of a Tiger

Title: Will of a Tiger

Author: Iris Yang

Date: 2019

Publisher: Open Books

ISBN: 978-1948598132

Length: 295 pages

Quote: “He’d heard two horrible stories on the same night— one friend had been beaten to death by the Communists, and the other had lost everything and almost starved to death under the Nationalist government.[Iris Yang. Will of a Tiger (Kindle Locations 2880-2881). Open Books.]”

Trigger warnings: Although this is a classic Moral Tale about how a good person survives bad things, it’s full of horrible stories. As with Wings of a Flying Tiger, a simple English vocabulary does not indicate a book suitable for children. Will of a Tiger contains graphic sex and violence and period-appropriate hate.

Iris Yang says she didn’t plan to write a sequel after writing Wings of a Flying Tiger, a novel about China in the early 1940s, but then she became interested in what happened to the pilots known as the Flying Tigers after 1945. It wasn’t pretty. The Chinese people achieved some unity during the urgent need to fight Japan, then used up their remaining resources and energy fighting each other. There were no pensions for the veterans who’d done their bit toward winning one war. There was another war, without supplies, and often without the spirit of brotherhood that had alleviated their suffering during their first war.

In Wings we met the tragic heroine Bai Moli, White Jasmine, who was too good for this world. Fleeing the Rape of Nanking, this art student found a wounded American pilot who’d been left for dead and rallied the people in an obscure (fictional) mountain village to rescue him. Because they already knew and admired Jasmine’s cousin Bai Hua, White Birch, who was also a fighter pilot, the village adopted Danny Hardy. When Birch came back to the village, he and Danny took a formal vow of brotherhood.

Will is the pilots' story. Birch and Danny have visited each other’s countries, learned each other’s languages, and piloted fighter planes as a team, before they’re shot down and taken prisoner by the Japanese enemy. Danny has begun reading a Chinese novel about brotherhood by which Birch was impressed. After some months in a prison camp, the nastiest Japanese soldier tells fourteen prisoners to choose which seven of them are going to die in the morning; if seven don’t volunteer he’ll kill all fourteen. Birch and Danny argue about which of them should die for the other. Danny’s wound may have been aggravated beyond all hope of real healing, but he still has a family. Birch is healthier, but has lost most of his close relatives. A relatively kind Japanese soldier has been giving Danny painkillers. Later Birch wakes up with a headache, a hung-over feeling, and a sinking feeling that if Danny had escaped somebody would have noticed him.

Then Birch is shot, knocked down into a trench, and left for dead. He loses a leg and spends months in a coma. His passionate, very modern, U.S.-educated “girlfriend” has rich parents who tell her that couples always separate after a disaster. His father, General Bai, is still alive to tend Birch, and so is his late mother’s half-grown housemaid, who is, in old China, legally a slave—“bought” from other people, not paid wages.

Desperate parents could sell their children as slaves; “luck” determined whether such children were abused, prostituted, starved, or brought up like adoptive children of rich families. Being kind and well educated, Birch’s parents have even taught the slave Xiao Mei, “Little Sister,” literacy along with cooking and nursing, and in due time General Bai planned to arrange a respectable marriage for her, as if she'd really been Birch's little sister.

Though custom dictates that after some years of faithful service a slave was considered to have earned her freedom, Xiao Mei asks nothing more in life than to go on working for Birch’s family, because she’s always adored Birch. She nurses him night and day, until his eyes start to open, with traditional Chinese medicines—including “yang enhancers.” Her status is so much lower than his that she can’t hope to become his wife, but she’s always hoped to be sexually exploited by Birch, who is too nice to exploit anybody and wants to be an ideal husband...if he can be a husband, at all, now. 

One of the most pleasant parts of this novel is watching Xiao Mei, whose crush on Birch was a joke between him and Danny, mature into a fine “modern” woman anyone would want to claim as a sister, or wife, or daughter.

However, the will of a tiger seeks goals beyond romance, or even fatherhood. Before they were tortured in the prison camp, Birch was teaching Danny to read a Chinese novel about the virtue of brotherhood. Birch and his father believe in brotherhood. The civil war disgusts them; they advocate for the new idea that government, as well as fellow soldiers, should support veterans. This idea is unpopular as many Chinese people prefer to vent their leftover hostility toward the Japanese on their political opponents. Some hate General Bai for being a Nationalist; Birch is arrested and tortured for giving money to the aged parents of another Flying Tiger who was a Communist.

U.S. readers have read about the self-destructive "ideological purges" and partisan hysteria among Mao’s Communist Party; we’ve read less about similar excesses among the survivors of Chiang’s Nationalist Party. Yang’s point is that when people lose the ideal of brotherhood, it hardly matters whether they’re Chinese Nationalists, Chinese Communists, Japanese enemy troops, or common thieves. In this book we see people in all four categories behaving badly. Birch’s purpose in life, as a disabled veteran, is to live out his beliefs about brotherhood, consistently giving people a good example whether he’s admired or beaten up for it. That’s what loyalty to his father (and to Jasmine’s memory) requires, so that’s what he does.

In the nineteenth century moral tales were an overworked genre. (The best nineteenth century moral tales in English survived as “children’s classics,” like Deerslayer or Little Women.) In the twentieth century many U.S. editors turned against the whole genre. It became fashionable to believe that nobody really does choose to act according to an ideal of human virtue, or, if someone did, the virtue wouldn’t be rewarded. Nobody is perfect! (Even Birch smokes, as most men of his generation did, and grows old at an early age.) Nevertheless in real life most of us do meet a few people who live according to their ideals, and we find that sometimes diligence does lead to prosperity, courage to victory, and kindness to love. Will of a Tiger is a fine example of a moral tale with adult content. If you admire President Kennedy or Senator Dole, you’ll love Birch and wish history had made it possible for his story to end even more happily than it does.

Though I’ve read very little about the civil war between the followers of Mao and Chiang, I guessed the answers to most of the questions the characters raised. Nevertheless I, who usually take two or three pages of a novel to put myself to sleep at night, did sit up till two o’clock in the morning finding out how the story ends. On a computer screen, yet. I’d like to spare others that experience. Buy the book—your eyes will be glad you did.