Loveboat, Taipei

Genre

YA Contemporary, romance

Content Warnings

Domestic abuse, revenge porn, mentions of suicide, discussions of racism

Loveboat, Taipei plot summary

After all the sacrifices her parents have made for her, giving up her dream of dancing to instead study medicine seems like a small price to pay for Ever. Or, if not a small price, at least a reasonable one. But that doesn’t stop Ever from heading off to the educational summer program they’ve packed her off to with a heavy heart. Little does she know, the program is nicknamed Loveboat, and nobody is really there to learn anything. Except maybe how to drink snake-blood sake and party all night.

My thoughts

Loveboat, Taipei is a contemporary YA story, the debut novel from author Abigail Hing Wen. There’s a lot to like about it, but some hard-to-overlook issues as well.

You get a strong sense of character from Ever, the protagonist, right from the start. Sometimes I thought she was kind of a drama queen, it’s first person present tense and some of the comparisons and descriptions she used seemed like kind of a lot. But I wouldn’t say it bothered me, it just seemed like part of her character.

We get some other ‘home’ characters before Ever heads off to the eponymous Loveboat for the summer. Her friend Megan, the friend who she dances with, and who’s been trying to encourage Ever to go for what she wants. She seems sweet, and clearly supportive. It’s tough though, because Megan doesn’t really understand the specific pressures that Ever is under. Ever’s parents immigrated to the US, giving up their families and their lives, to give their daughters a chance at a better life. As much as Ever understands why Megan keeps telling her to just be honest with her family about what she wants, it’s not quite that simple for her.

Speaking of family, Ever has a younger sister called Pearl. Clearly the two of them work together to manage their parents, which is fun. Her parents we get less of a sense of, except for knowing how passionately they want Ever to study medicine and become a doctor. We pick up other snippets of information and characteristics throughout the story, but they mostly function as obstacles for Ever. That’s not to say she doesn’t love them, she obviously does, but her interactions with them revolve largely around the future they’ve imagined for her.

Loveboat, Taipei feels like it’s going to be pretty predictable at first

The beginning of the story feels like it’s following pretty well-worn paths. Child of immigrants wants one thing, her parents want another. She has a close friend who doesn’t get it. Her parents are taking action (this summer program) in an attempt to bring her on board with what they want. Additionally, it doesn’t seem like Ever would be at all conflicted about what she wants if it weren’t for her parents’ pressure; within 15 pages we know that Ever is bad at biology, feels faint at the sight of blood and feels at her most alive when dancing. So, I felt pretty confident in where this was going.

Ever heads out to Taiwan, and literally bumps into a cute boy at the airport in the most stereotypical meet-cute you can imagine. She also meets Sophie, who’s an interesting character; by turns supportive and patronising, encouraging and undermining. She’s a lot of fun, and serves as Ever’s tour guide to the world of Loveboat.

There are some very sweet interactions where Ever starts to settle into the idea that she’s surrounded, for the first time, by people who understand her context. The book also goes onto break down some of those similarities and illustrate that not every Asian-American experience is the same, by any means, and I think that’s something this book does really intelligently and really deftly.

I had a good time reading Loveboat, Taipei

Despite my original assumptions, this book kept surprising me. Not in the sense of plot twists coming out of left field, more that the author found interesting and often unusual ways to approach familiar YA situations. I definitely enjoyed the fact that it kept me on my toes.
Ever makes a lot of mistakes throughout the book, but I think they made sense. Also, you couldn’t always tell what was a mistake and what wasn’t until it was too late, which I thought was a plus for the writing! I wrote this week about characters making bad decisions in fiction, because I think it’s a hard thing to pull off sometimes without irritating readers. I thought Loveboat, Taipei pulled it off nicely. For the most part.

A massive strength of the book was also its honest discussions of racism and the various tropes, from irritating to harmful, that Asians get lumped with. The fetishization of Asian women, the Western beauty standards, the many and varied stereotypes. But there’s also an acknowledgement of the ways in which they’re lucky, and the privilege these kids do have. I think all of those conversations are handled in such an interesting and thoughtful way throughout the story.

The story also had some serious weaknesses

The plot is high, HIGH drama. I didn’t entirely hate that, I get that these summer programs feel very heightened. And when you’ve got a bunch of teenagers living together and drinking every night things are likely to get wild. But even so, sometimes it felt like a lot.

I found the romance a little tricky. There’s a sort of love triangle situation, which I was interested and invested in while reading. The love interests fit pretty neatly into their trope boxes (the good guy and the bad boy), but I liked them well enough. In hindsight though, there was a lot of poor behaviour on the part of most of the characters. As well as some dodgy decisions which didn’t feel like they were critiqued or even questioned all that much within the story.

Perhaps as kind of an outgrowth of the highly dramatised storylines, there are some big, big plot points and topics that come seemingly out of nowhere and aren’t handled with the same care and sensitivity as I’d have liked. One character does something completely outrageous, a truly vile betrayal of trust and decency, and I don’t think that was addressed with the severity it should have been. And then there’s an abusive relationship storyline that appears and disappears within about 10 pages, which felt more like a way to resolve an unrelated conflict than something the author was prepared to handle with any seriousness.

I know people make bad choices, and treat each other badly sometimes, and I have no issue with that being represented in fiction. I’ve already said that I thought some of Ever’s mistakes were really well handled within the plot, well contextualised and compelling even when I didn’t necessarily agree with her. But when you can see that an author is more than capable of carefully examining the different layers of a situation, it feels a bit off that the same care isn’t taken in some other scenarios. I think that’s partly why some of the sub-plots that were picked up and then swept away with so little consequence bothered me as much as they did. Particularly when dealing with something as serious as abuse, I do think authors have a certain responsibility to consider the way it’s explored in their work.

In summary…

Without commenting on specifics of the resolution, I thought most of the plot threads resolved in a way that made sense within the story, and I was pleased with the ending. It took some interesting directions, and provided an interesting insight into Asian-American culture. I just wish all of the topics had been handled with the same nuance and sensitivity as the issues around race and culture were. I mostly enjoyed the book while I was reading it, but in hindsight there were definitely some important topics that were brushed over or felt trivialised.