Last Tang Standing

by Lauren Ho

June 9, 2020 · G.P. Putnam's Sons

Buy →

D+

Genre: Chick Lit, Contemporary Romance, Romance, Women's Fiction

More Info →

View Book Info Page

CW: Off the page suicide attempt of a minor character. Classism, including jokes about hobos.

The blurb for Last Tang Standing recommends it for “fans of Crazy Rich Asians and Bridget Jones’s Diary.” I liked those books, and I can see the superficial similarities—this is a humorous diary set in wealthy Singapore—but this book doesn’t bring much of an original perspective to the story of a 30-something finding themselves. Last Tang Standing tries so hard to be funny but it’s mostly just mean, especially to Andrea Tang, the heroine. She’s unhappy for nearly the whole book, and the love story isn’t resolved until the last few pages.

Andrea is a Chinese Malaysian lawyer living in Singapore. This allows her a teensy bit of physical distance from her mother in Kuala Lumpur, but not from the sprawling extended family who enjoy making her life miserable. Andrea is one of the few unmarried women in her generation and she’s envious of her wealthier and more settled relatives. Andrea’s nuclear family stands out from her wealthy extended family because her father is dead, and her mother’s upper middle-class income meant they sometimes relied on their relatives for big purchases. Her only ally is Linda, her shamefully single cousin and favorite drinking partner.

Andrea hates her job at a large corporate firm, but enjoys the lifestyle it supports. She describes herself as the “working poor,” while owning a flat filled with designer accessories in one of the most expensive cities on earth. Self-awareness is not her strength.

Andrea spends most of her time working to make partner, but she also longs to be married, if only to shut her family up. After a recent breakup, she allows cousin Linda and her mother to help her find dates. But she ultimately manages to find two love interests on her own: Suresh and Eric. Suresh Aditparan is a British transplant to her office, and Andrea’s chief rival for a partnership. If the competition wasn’t enough to make him off limits, he’s also engaged. Too bad she can’t stop staring at his muscle-y shoulders. Meanwhile, Andrea meets Eric Deng, an multinational hotelier who dazzles her with big romantic gestures, like finding a first edition of her favorite book. He ticks all her perfect husband boxes, but is he perfect for her?

Last Tang Standing was at its best when Andrea was sparring with her mom, or reluctantly chatting with Suresh at work. Suresh is newly transferred from their London office, gorgeous, and secretly writes a successful comic strip. He disarms Andrea’s one-upmanship attempts, notices how lonely she is, and brings her to Settlers of Catan games with his friends. Their rivalry melts into a friendship despite Andrea’s attempts to keep him at arms length. Like her, Suresh is idealistic and not in love with corporate law. Some of their funniest scenes take place in the small office they both share. This is how she describes him:

I don’t like sharing the office with Suresh, even though he smells like cinnamon. He has a habit of saying annoyingly posh things like “loo,” and he’s tall and conventionally, boringly attractive (golden‑brown skin that will turn ashy if not moisturized, maple‑colored eyes framed with such thick eyelashes he’ll definitely have droopy eyelids one day, a rakish mop of silky black hair that will most likely never make it past his forties, and, if I’m held at gunpoint, a rugby player physique, but only like a so‑so rugby player whose favorite food is tacos).

He finds Andrea charming even when she falls asleep on her keyboard, or forgets to wear deodorant. But Andrea doesn’t see Suresh as a viable romantic option because a) he’s engaged, even if his fiancée is dragging her feet about moving to Singapore; and b) she doesn’t completely trust him, and misses the ample evidence that he doesn’t care about making partner. I was impatient with Andrea’s refusals to acknowledge their pants feelings even after many almost-kisses. Meanwhile, Suresh keeps pushing Andrea to talk about their attraction, but he doesn’t end his engagement. How is Andrea supposed to believe that he really likes her? Cowardice is not a quality I appreciate in a hero.

But let’s talk about something I do appreciate: desperately-seeking-grandchildren Mama Tang, my favorite character in the book. Her scenes were the only time I laughed out loud, especially when she shows up for an unexpected visit. Andrea complains in her diary:

Doesn’t she have anything better to do with her free time than fixate on her daughter’s lack of prospects? you ask. Wouldn’t she rather spend her golden years discovering exciting new prescription drugs or the cerebral delights of reality TV? No, Diary, she would not.

Andrea’s mom is impervious to her daughter’s pleas to let her focus on her career. Their mother-daughter dynamic helped me sympathize with Andrea, because exasperation with parents is my love language. The more unreasonable Mom became, the more entertained I was:

“You don’t know how to compromise!” said the woman who once told me to drop a boyfriend in college because he was “only a biology undergrad.”

After a promising beginning focused on family strife, Last Tang Standing turns its attention to Andrea’s love life, and that’s where it fails to deliver.

Andrea’s tired of disastrous dates when she meets Eric “dad bod” Deng at a fancy party. She mistakes him for the staff because of his rumpled clothing, and willingness to listen to her make fun of rich people. Surprise, he’s a billionaire! They mutually pursue one another around their busy schedules, with things getting more serious once she meets his six-year old daughter. He’s thoughtful and the sex is great, but Andrea isn’t sure she likes how easily he throws his money around, even if it makes her life easier. The depiction of Andrea and Eric’s romance felt flat, but I couldn’t tell if that was just because Andrea didn’t know how to be happy, or if we were supposed to be rooting for Suresh.

Now let’s talk about my main problem with the book, which is that Andrea is MISERABLE for almost all of it. Like, hundreds of pages of misery interspersed with closed door sex, or binge drinking. Andrea’s diary entries are bitter and frenetic, and she avoids examining her feelings too deeply. It was depressing to read. She thinks her coworkers are workaholics or incompetent, her clients are unappreciative, her relatives are vindictive, she’s constantly hungover, her dates are awful, and she’s an idiot for expressing interest in them. Honestly, I agreed with her: Andrea’s life sucks. The only thing that makes her feel marginally better is when men compliment her work, which made me sad. I usually enjoy snark and gallows humor, but Andrea’s constant negativity was exhausting. She critiques everything except for her sister and food. Thank god, because what kind of monster complains about the food in Singapore?

Part of the humor of the story is that the reader is aware of the romantic undercurrents between Andrea and Suresh, while she remains oblivious. But she was so sad that her cluelessness just seemed like part of her misery schtick. She has an emotional growth arc, where she learns to appreciate her friends even though they have too much plastic surgery, date assholes, and like to have public FaceTime sex. This “growth” didn’t make her any more pleasant to read. I felt like the book couldn’t decide whether to lean into a brittle and husband-obsessed Sophie Kinsella-esque story, or to be a critique of that style of women’s fiction. Andrea alternates between desperately searching for a man, any man, and being dismissive of following social convention. She’s also self-loathing, and engages in the kind of casual fat shaming that would be right at home in Bridget Jones’s Diary. It was annoying then, and hasn’t aged well:

Worked through lunch. No respite from the flurry of emails, each titled “URGENT” with a varying number of exclamation marks appended, each for a different closing scheduled in the next two weeks. Cannot afford to dash out and grab sandwich but must eat as stomach is now emitting weird hobbit growls that elicit chuckles from Suresh, who has ordered a healthful vegetarian meal before lunch hour. Can’t believe that I had to eat a candy bar from the office vending machine again. How is anyone supposed to stay slim in this job once you are past your twenties? Everything just congeals in fat rolls stored in the thighs and around the waist, in internal fat purses that your cells now carry. Briefly fantasize about suing law firm for not providing healthful food and snack options, like Google or similar tech companies with their bean bags and sprawling cafeterias where one can order sea bass or other line‑caught and gently massaged fish, with a side of organic [insert name of trendy root vegetable] crisps.

I have a very low tolerance for diet talk and fat shaming and there was too much of it for my taste. Of course, my taste would be zero.

Ultimately, Andrea’s story narrows to whether she should try for Suresh or stick with Eric, and whether being a partner at her firm would make her happy either way. I don’t usually enjoy love triangles, because I rarely root for the right person. I appreciated that Eric and Suresh both felt like viable options, but Andrea seemed to feel so strongly for both that I couldn’t see this ending well. None of this gets resolved until nearly the last page of the book, and I use the word resolved very loosely. I was ready to yell after such an unsatisfying ending.

If cheating is a dealbreaker for you, please be advised that Suresh is engaged for most of the book, and a secondary character has an affair with a married man. This didn’t bother me initially but as it persisted until nearly the end of the book, I started to fantasize about shooting beautiful Suresh out of a cannon without a helmet.

Last Tang Standing had some funny moments that I enjoyed reading aloud to my partner, but the heroine never figures her shit out, the fat shaming is gross, and the love triangle dragged on without enough emotional payoff to meet my romance-loving needs. If you miss Bridget Jones’s Diary, and wish it was set in a world with only people of color (God, yes) this book is similar enough in tone that you might want to give it a try. I appreciated having a woman of color depicted as a high-powered lawyer, and the neurotic lawyer archetype might be attractive to some readers. But the book just wasn’t funny enough to make me want to spend several hours in Andrea’s negative mindset. Despite the very wealthy characters, this didn’t provide an enjoyable fantasy of financial security and luxury unless you care about designer bags more than I do. Instead, Andrea and her circle felt dysfunctional and depressing. I usually adore difficult heroines, but Andrea is frustrating because she can’t decide whether to take care of herself or wait in a state of not-taking-care-of-herself for someone else to show up and manage her life for her. Her story failed to provide either escapism, or give me realistically well-rounded characters worth rooting for.