AT the start of Janice Y. K. Lee’s bestseller The Piano Teacher (2008), we find ourselves in Hong Kong in 1952. Claire Pendleton, a young, naive, newly-married Englishwoman fresh off the boat, is having trouble adjusting. She knows next to nothing about Hong Kong, other than what her mother has told her – which turns out to be mostly newspaper-derived prejudice about the Chinese. And then there is her new husband. Martin is a generation older than her and a busy, rather boring man who leaves her with a lot of time on her hands.