Feature image credit: OneWorld
On the front cover of this book, The Moon Represents My Heart, a question is asked: “How far would you travel to find a love lost in time?”
Honestly, the only reason I picked up this book is because I love the Teresa Teng song of the same name. I am an infrequent reader of stories on time travel or romance. How delighted I was when the start of the book opened with a paragraph from her song! I was immediately intrigued.
In The Moon Represents My Heart, author Pim Wangtechawat is really asking readers questions like: If a love never sours, what do you do? What choices do you make, and how do you get there? What’s more important, family ties, or a love in the past that cannot be replicated in the present?
Using the narrative of a family that can travel in time, she explores these topics most centrally in romantic love, along with the love of family, memories, sentimentality, and loving one’s purpose in life. The Wang family tree appears at the start of the book, highlighting that Lily and Joshua are the parents of twins Tommy and Eva. Each of the four have an ability to travel through time yet each is gifted differently.
The relationship of Tommy and Peggy is the main story and his twin Eva’s relationship is a close second. The parents are fairly absent, yet they are layered in the narrative as a constant in the two siblings’ lives. How they met, their childhoods, and the story of how time travel became their joint occupation and obsession, are slowly unravelled throughout the text, despite their physical disappearance from the family in chapter two of the book.
When the parents go missing, Tommy and Eva call their Ah-ma (maternal grandmother), and she moves in to take their place. The dialogue between her and her grandchildren about their “death” is characteristic of Chinese conversations. Ah-ma wants the pair to start getting on with things rather than dwell on the fact that their parents are “gone,” judges time travelling as stupid and impractical, is stoic, and wants to suppress the pair’s expressions of grief. Consequently, for the twins, time travel is the entity used for healing.
Part one of the book (page 1) opens with “All things are difficult at the start” to explain this thought process. The last part starts with the quote (written in both Chinese and English on page 215) “Wait till the clouds part to see moonlight.” I loved the inclusion of this chaos quote and the clearing for new paths.
Ah-ma’s judgement, the expectations of family, quotes like the previous two, and the directness with which conflicts are dealt are all part of author Wangtechawat’s purpose: to show east Asian conversations and ways of thinking. This extends to the central love theme: what is the purpose of love if compatibility or practicality is not long lasting? And this is the story of Tommy and Peggy. Tommy, who lives in 2005, falls in love with Peggy, after a chance meeting in 1927, in the east of London.
Tommy is stuck in the past and his inability to be part of the present both drains him and ruins him — does he ever heal, or does he remain tied to his love? The agony of making a choice makes up a large part of this narrative. In contrast is Eva, who can only visit family members from the past, and over time comes into her own being in the present. Not having ever felt such a powerful love connection herself, she struggles to understand her brother. This is also despite her own parents having never returned to be with them in the present.
Wangtechawat uses the alternating of chapters to demonstrate the eras, which can sometimes be both the past and the present, and to change characters. There is also the alternating of prose and poetry, the latter usually used for past events creating a dreamy like feeling which feels like the sensation of time travel.
The book would suit most audiences, however there were some parts that kind of let me down, as I didn’t understand some of the abstract stuff that you are meant to work out and it is too unsystematic to backtrack for clarity. Nevertheless, the debut novel is so wonderfully woven that it has just been signed up to be a Netflix series!
Reviewed by Rebecca Wu
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: OneWorld
Released: May 2023
RRP: $32.99
Very dreamlike in style yet incredibly realistic in its depiction of heartbreaking choices.
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