Warning: Commentary contains more spoilers than usual that we didn’t bother to white-out. If this bothers you, read only at your own risk.

Lydia Smith, in a particularly bright (snerk) moment, decides that The Thing To Do is to go to Shanghai to visit her fiancé, Maxwell. Without an escort. Or a chaperone of any sort. Or telling her snooky-wookums she’s coming so he can meet her at the harbor. And as a bonus, she buys passage on a ship that offered the cheapest rates, and makes sure to mention to the captain several times that she’s all alone, her fiancé isn’t expecting her and nobody’s going to meet her when the ship docks. Not too shabby for a blonde English chick in 1898.

So surprise, surprise, within a couple of hours of arriving in Shanghai, our beautiful Lydia finds herself sold to a brothel, drugged and tied up.

Cheng Ru Shan is the owner of a struggling clothing store and a practitioner of a rather exotic branch of Taoism, one in which you attain Heaven and immortality through sex. Lots and lots of sex. Lots and lots and LOTS of sex. But lately, Ru Shan’s progress has stalled entirely. He has reached the penultimate stage to immortality, but ever since an altercation two years ago that resulted in the death of an Englishman on his property, he has gotten nowhere in his practice. His theory is that his excessive yang is interfering with the process.

To correct this imbalance, his female mentor, Shi Po, suggests that he buy a white slave and milk her for her yin. Shi Po also proposes that teaching a white woman (who is viewed as little more than some sort of livestock) some of the more civilized refinements will elevate her soul and therefore help compensate for the death of the Englishman. Ru Shan reluctantly agrees, especially when he sees Lydia and senses how much watery yin she holds within her.

And so begins Lydia’s imprisonment and sexual initiation. Lydia views Ru Shan’s use of her body as barbaric and completely offensive to her tender sensibilities (initially, anyway), while Ru Shan thinks of her as something sub-human. Gradually, however, they start to learn more about each other, and as a result start viewing each other as actual people.

Ru Shan, in particular, becomes increasingly disturbed by the realization that, unlike popular Chinese perception at the time, Lydia is intelligent and has feelings. Lydia also feels extremely torn: on one hand, she wants a return to normalcy and her former life, but she also recognizes that not all her strong feelings for Ru Shan are antagonistic.

Candy’s Take

First of all, what I liked about this book:

I loved the unusual historical setting. Nineteenth-century England is all well and good, but it does get wearisome after a while. Lee does an excellent job of portraying the setting and how Chinese culture—everything from its fashions to its style of architecture—jars Lydia.

Also, Ru Shan is a convincing Chinese person. For one thing, the author refrains from making him über-Chinaman, the way Mary Jo Putney gave Troth of The China Bride so many virtues that she became a caricature of a Chinese woman. Ru Shan knows certain aspects of Chinese culture and philosophy, but is not by any means an expert in all of them. He’s not some kind of kung fu master, nor does he demonstrate intimate knowledge of feng shui; he’s a merchant who happens to belong to a rather interesting sex cult. He’s also not anachronistically tolerant of other races and religions. In fact, he has a true disgust of white people, which is consistent with the era.

The author also did a good job with Lydia’s reaction to being confined and made a slave. It’s very convincing. Finally, a captive heroine who’s not a simpering ninny, sighing and melting into the forceful embrace of the captor after her first flutterings of pleasure. She’s pissed off about her captivity, and she remains quite consistently pissed off, and most of the time I was thinking “Yeah! Good for her!”

Which leads me to what I didn’t like about this book:

The transition from Lydia’s very natural reaction to being a slave (anger, frustration, a desire for revenge, a fervent wish to escape and never look back) to OMG I LURVE YOU RU SHAN was abrupt, to say the least. The sexual portions of their relationship are presented in great detail, but it’s clear that while Lydia enjoys these attentions physically, mentally she’s in another place entirely.

Ru Shan does eventually realize that Lydia is much, much more than just a source of yin the way a cow is a source of milk, so his treatment of her improves accordingly, but we really don’t see them interacting in a way that would lead to two people actually falling in love with each other. Lust, yes. Love, no. Lydia’s switch from bloodthirsty revenge schemes to cooing love dove is so fast, I actually paged back to make sure I hadn’t missed some critical scenes.

Ru Shan’s ultimate declaration of love isn’t convincing, either. He does marry her (MINOR SPOILER:

partly to compensate for the dishonor he had brought on her, partly because of her everlovin’ yin, and partly because he’s desperate to use her clothing design skills to help pick up business in his store—yeah, REAL romantic reasons for marrying a girl

), but up until the very last minute he quite explicitly admits to himself that he doesn’t—in fact can’t—love her. A few pages later, however, he’s declaring his everlasting devotion to her, and given his reasons for marrying her, and the reasons why he panics when he comes very, very close to losing her for good (hint: losing her love was not uppermost in his mind), this comes way, way too close to the Sudden Realization of Love plot device for my comfort.

It’s not just the switch from hate to love that was abrupt. Overall, the speed at which Lydia and Ru Shan overcome the race and culture barriers when both had narrow, jingoistic upbringings is not believable. Throw in how these two are brought together under unpleasant circumstances that enhance negative perceptions and stereotypes, and I needed a lot more convincing to believe in their love.

Another point that bothered me is how Lydia heads over to China a mere three months after her father’s death, all hot to trot for Max. This seems odd to me. I know at least a year of mourning was customary in the Regency era, though I have no idea what the customary mourning period is in 1898, but three months seems mighty short even for modern times. That, and the fact that Lydia is a young, beautiful, gently-bred woman who travels completely alone all the way to Shanghai provided me with quite the major “WTF?” moment. Even if Lydia is dumb enough to think this is a great idea, where the hell was her mom? I find it difficult to believe that a Victorian mama is willing to allow her young, beautiful, unmarried daughter ship off to a barbaric land without any sort of chaperone.

The writing style overall is quite good, and like I said, Lee does an excellent job with the setting, but there were some passages that, to me, sounded jarringly modern. This is especially true when Lydia finally reunites with Maxwell, her hapless (and hopeless) fiancé. In particular, he constantly calls her “Lyds,” which not only seems modern and too informal even for an affianced couple, but to my ears sounds like a very American diminutive of “Lydia.”

White Tigress is quite the page-turner and I really enjoyed the setting, but ultimately I wasn’t convinced of Lydia and Ru Shan’s love. I’m still going to pick up Lee’s next book, though. It features a Shaolin monk. RRROWR.

Sarah’s Take

I’m entirely in accord with Candy’s impressions of reading about an entirely new location. Breaking out of dewy green England for the far east during a time of great cultural flux was fascinating, and Lee did a masterful job of portraying how each side influenced the other – from their personal perception of each other’s hygiene, grooming, and habits, to the misconceptions that rumors bred on each side.

Further, Lee spent a good amount of time developing how both the hero and the heroine moved past their own shallow perceptions of each other’s culture, and began a deeper understanding of the motives and values that drove them – particularly when those concepts shared common value and interpretation, such as his notion of a person’s “spirit” and her understanding of a human “soul.”

Now, what was it you called yourself, Candy? An uppity Godless chink? Yeah, I think that was it. Either way, Godless hebe over here needed the heathen Chink when it came to some major moments of Chinese culture and Taoist philosophy with a healthy dose of tantra. I honestly felt that the explanation of the motivation came so late that I already distrusted his motives because without any background to his religious goals, I had no basis on which to judge him except by his actions: obeyed woman mentor, purchased slave, chained her to bed, and proceeded to milk her yin, whatever that was.

By the end of the story, I came away with a fascinating grasp of concepts and an appreciation for how Ru Shan’s goals were different from Lydia’s, and, more importantly, how between their character motivations they could find personal and sexual harmony. Getting to that understanding took me some time.

However, my disappointment with the book came when it ended and I didn’t feel there had been enough vindication on three key points.

For one, Lydia herself goes from being a slave to being something of an addiction for Ru Shan to…sailing off into the sunset. I keep asking myself: was the degree to which she became a victim vindicated by the end of the book? Was her experience as a slave properly acknowledged by her lover who was also the person who purchased her and held her in captivity? That’s a serious imbalance of power that a mere, “I’m sorry” is not going to assuage. Even grovelling might not cut it.

Next, Maxwell: without giving too much away, I wanted him to bleed for his treatment of Lydia, and sadly, he remains intact from a phlebotomist’s perspective. She manages to use her newfound language skills and her ability to understand the values of both his culture and the culture of the country in which he resides to bend him to her will, but even then he still manages the upper hand. Through his machinations, she gains what she professes to hate but secretly wants all along, but still, I wanted Mr. Fiance’s head to roll. In a Bobbit sense.

Perhaps the real problem I had was the balance between fantasy and reality. Reaching a glowing happily ever after when there’s been such imbalance of power, hatred, prejudice, rage and sexual pressure, if not abuse, is quite a task that Lee sets up for herself, and one of the easier ways to urge that HEA along would be for those who stand in the way of the couple, or malign their relationship, to suffer in some way for their poor actions. In a romance, at least for me, I want bad things to happen to bad people, especially after bad things have happened to the good people.

Reality, of course, is that the bad things don’t happen in measure to the bad people who you think deserve them, and perhaps Lee was erring on the side of realism, since she did such a careful and crafty job of clearly portraying the prejudices and hatreds on both sides of the English and Chinese cultural divide. Suspending reality for a just-desserts ending might not have been on the menu.

However, I wanted to see some misery on the part of the shitful characters, and I wanted to see something happen to them other than, “And they lived in Shanghai in their continued misery.” Yes, continuing in their existences as described would be hell enough for me, but like Mr. Fiance, I wanted Bobbit Revenge on these people.

I was thinking, as I read the ending, that the best desserts for the icky villainous characters would be Lydia and Ru Shan’s success. If the family of ickiness can overcome their revulsion of the English wife with the knowledge that she’ll bring in money with her clothing designs, they can damn well swallow the crow of seeing Ru Shan and Lydia so happy together and knowing that their marriage is the cause of the horrid family’s largesse.

However, as Candy and I discussed today, it is often very, very hard to buy into mixed race and mixed religion happiness and I wonder what that says about us as a culture. I mean, Candy and I are both in mixed-culture and mixed-religion marriages, though I converted, yet we both remarked on the hurdle that those mixtures presented, and whether it’s possible to suspend belief knowing as we do the historical prejudice that faces them at every turn. Much like the Cassie Edwards Savage Indian who settles down in to prairie bliss with Margie McPioneer, we have a hard time putting aside what we know must have happened in the future.

Yet doubts and cultural clashes aside, White Tigress is a definite page turner, and is certainly a book I’ll reflect on, particularly for what it reveals about my own preferences and impressions of cultures portrayed in romance.