A Book That Pleasantly Surprised Me: Legacy of the Tigers

This is the first Long And Short Reviews post that's actually a book review. The prompt was "a book that pleasantly surprised you." The answer:

Title: Legacy of the Tigers 

Author: Iris Yang

Date: 2020

Publisher: Open Books

ISBN: 978-1948598323

Length: 327 pages

Quote: "Jasmine Bai was still alive."

That's the pleasant surprise. Once readers enjoy, or recover from, that surprise, the rest of the book is not much of a surprise. The first two books have prepared them to expect a long, richly detailed, frank and non-partisan historical novel that portrays fine human beings tested by terrible events. Legacy of the Tigers is a separate story that develops its own characters through their own suspenseful adventures--but that's what readers expected. The question with a delayed third volume of a trilogy is whether the third story can be as good as the first two. In this case I think it is.

In Wings of a Flying Tiger and Will of a Tiger we met the two World War II pilots, Birch Bai and Danny Hardy, whose pledge of friendship sustained them in combat with Japanese pilots, and Birch's cousin, the beautiful art student Jasmine Bai. The three young people showed their fine characters, saving each other's lives, caring for their elders, and teaching less privileged people what they'd learned from their expensive educations, all through the first two books. Danny, we know, died. Birch and Danny heard that Jasmine was killed by enemy soldiers; actually, readers have been told, Jasmine was tortured and raped, and crawled off into the snow to fall down a cliff she remembered being nearby, since a good traditional Chinese woman could reclaim her honor, if raped, only by suicide.  

But now we're told that she didn't die. She was found by an old couple who shared their food with her and brought her back to life. When she recovered her wits and memory Jasmine can't move forward with her plan to commit suicide because she has to repay the couple's kindness. Then she has a baby to do something about. She expects to hate the baby since his father was a Japanese soldier instead of Danny, but hormones take over. Jasmine loves her son and goes to work as an art teacher to support him. 

Then the war with Japan ends, and, as readers were told in Will of a Tiger, China sinks into its own internal war between political factions. As Birch did in that novel, Jasmine sees harm done by both factions. People on both sides lack loyalty to fellow Chinese and seem to blame each other for all the effects of war, social change, and local food shortages that postwar social changes actually mitigate. Mao's "Communists" do more damage because they win and have more time to do damage to their country. Chiang, arguably a nicer man and certainly more sympathetic to American interests, had some bad men in his party too. Like Birch, Jasmine doesn't identify with either side, but faces hate from both because she's not really joined either, In order to live in mainland China she eventually works for and with the Communists, but she's immunized to partisan hatred by her own heartaches.

Locked into a sense of herself as Danny's fiancee, and unwilling to believe that Danny is dead, Jasmine's adventures include living with another man, Li Ming, whom she respects, admires, and "friendzones." At first the asexuality of their relationship is mutual since he's widowed too. Later, when they start to "fall in love," Jasmine flees. She'd rather be poor, a bit of a social outcast, with only an occasional dream to warm her nights, than be acceptably married to a well-off gentleman who is both congenial and attractive; that's how much she's still in love with the idea of being in love with Danny.

In order to live through hard times Jasmine has to make some hard decisions. She can't always remain the young idealist who was too good to live in Will of a Tiger. Her maternal instincts don't let her stop with one child. The war leaves many orphans; Jasmine adopts a few. Postwar circumstances caused many untimely deaths; Jasmine will be able to watch only some of the children she loves grow up. She's often poor, sometimes ill, sometimes in situations where her vulnerability seems to be what saves her. She always keeps her clean conscience, but as she grows old she looks back and sees mistakes she made. Denying her love for Li Ming was one of them, she admits after he's married someone else, they've divorced, and she's been coerced into a legal marriage with Li Ming after all. 

The Flying Tigers were a real part of history, a cooperative military program that put Chinese and American pilots on the same team. Though Jasmine is thoroughly Chinese and has little contact with Americans, other than Danny, as an adult, the fictional Tigers Trilogy affirms that Chinese and American people could become friends. It becomes a goal for Jasmine to find Danny, or his grave, and her author gives her a beautiful celebration of family loyalty toward the end of the book. Though the man she trained her baby to call "Uncle Li" may have been her real beshert all along, the idealistic infatuation she and Danny felt for each other is also a kind of love. Jasmine and Danny never married each other but their families are connected, anyway, in a way that satisfies at least the Chinese traditions deep in Jasmine's heart. 

Quiet, peace-loving, romantic, and motherly though Jasmine is, her story still makes a radical feminist statement: a woman doesn't need Romantic Love to have a good life. The Tigers Trilogy, which has affirmed the core of human morality that united people like Birch and Danny and the "Little Sister" Birch married, could have no better conclusion.