Patty Ho is a tormented 15-year-old. Half-white and half-Asian, she stands out like a sore thumb in high school where 90+% of the kids are white. Her social life is severely curbed by an ultra-strict single Taiwanese mom. Her home life is marred by an elder Harvard-bound brother who’s the apple of their mom’s eye. Their father left the family many years ago and their mom won’t even talk about him. So when a fortune-teller channels Patty’s fortune via her belly-button, predicting a white guy on her horizon, her horrified mom ships her off to SuMac (Stanford University math camp), where the creme de la creme of the high-school math crop is as Asian and nerdy as they come.
Suddenly thrust into an Asian-dominated environment and blessedly blending in for the first time in her life, Patty gets a much-needed boost of self-esteem from new friends such as Jasmine, a modern-day Chinese Kung Fu queen who introduces Patty to, among other things, ‘buildering’ (climbing the off-limits Stanford U buildings after dark). And there’s Anne, quiet, studious Anne from Patty’s mom’s pot-luck group who morphs into a bodice-ripper reader who sets the guys’ hearts throbbing with her math skills. Then there’s Stu, an Asian guy who’s so tall and so attractive…and so tall.
But when Patty ignores her mom and brother’s phone calls, her worried mom turns up on the campus and ends up throwing the mother of hissy fits and pulling Patty out of summer camp. Will Patty ever live down the humiliation? Or will she somehow manage to turn things around for herself? With a little bit of help from Auntie Lu, Patty learns some lessons that will prove useful as she negotiates the path leading through the hormone-raging storm that is adolescence.
Written with a great deal of verve and a heaping dose of good-natured humour, Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies) is a wonderfully entertaining book that would appeal to all teenagers, though those of mixed descent would doubtless identify with Patty’s special trials and tribulations. As a child of a mixed marriage myself, and having lived as a visible minority in different places, I can certainly identify with Patty’s sense of not fitting in and not belonging. I have also felt the blessed relief of blending in with a crowd in a multicultural society where no-one really stands out because everyone is different. What I never realised is that math theorems can apply quite so punchily to life. And as for the laugh-out-loud Mama Lecture Series and the tension-filled Pot-Luck Club, you simply have to read about them first-hand to appreciate Justina Chen Headley’s very special blend of humour and realism.
Highly recommended.
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