When girls in the Philippines turn eighteen, it’s customary to have a debut, or coming out party at which eighteen male friends or family serve as “roses” and eighteen females as “candles”, thereby making up the debut’s entourage. Mae Coyiuto’s own debut—of a literary variety—is centered around the coming of age party of a Chinese Filipina named Chloe Liang. Chloe and the Kaishao Boys is more layered than the typical, often formulaic young adult novel and combines Chloe’s Chinese Filipino culture with more universal teen issues like pleasing parents and finding independence.
Chloe’s parents are divorced and she lives with her father in Manila, while her Filipina American mother is back in the US. Both of her parents come from Chinese families that have been in the Philippines for generations.
When my great-grandfather moved to the Philippines from China, he survived by selling buttons and zippers. My grandfather then turned it into a business, and the practice got passed down to my dad and his siblings. It’s now evolved into Liang Zip and Lock company.
Chloe’s generation has it much easier and her passion is animation, which she will study at the University of Southern California just after her debut. When the story begins, Chloe has just gotten off the waitlist at USC and her father is having second thoughts about her moving away from him and the family business.

But the immediate issue for Chloe is her debut. She wants something lowkey without the traditional eighteen candles and roses. Her father and aunt Queenie have other ideas and try to entice suitable young men to her to become her roses. This is where the kaishao in the title is introduced.
Kaishao is Hokkien for “to introduce.” It’s when friends or family, mostly relatives like Auntie Queenie, introduce single people to potential partners. You don’t have to stick with the pairings like arranged marriages (thank god), but it still feels very Mulan matchmaker-esque to me.
Her three kaishao boys include Jappy, the brother of her best friend, Patricia or Cia, as she’s known, along with Miles, a basketball phenom, and Raph, a Chinese teen who is Cia’s boyfriend. The reason Raph so easily volunteers to be a kaishao boy is that his traditional parents forbid him from dating anyone who isn’t Chinese. His parents don’t know he and Cia are dating. Chloe calls them a Great Wall family and explains the difference between that and Great Fence families.
The Great Wall parents: These parents prohibit their children from dating people of other ethnicities. They build an invisible but powerful force field in front of their children that only makes way for Filipinos of Chinese descent.
The Great Fence parents: These parents have a preference for other Chinese Filipinos, but they’ll give in if you push hard enough. You’ll get quicker access through the force field if you have Chinese heritage, but others could be allowed entry.
Chloe starts to have feelings for both Miles and Jappy, and feels confused not just because she likes two boys but also because she’s supposed to leave for California soon. Somewhat unusually YA rom-coms, in which relationship misunderstandings take centre stage, Chloe’s big dilemma is whether she should follow through with her dream of studying animation at USC. For so long it was just a dream, and almost as soon as she gets off the waitlist the kaishao boys and her debut suddenly seem more pressing. And then there’s her father. He raised her after her mother returned to the US because she couldn’t adapt to life in Manila. Would it really be worthwhile to uproot and leave her father all alone? These questions run throughout the story and by the time Chloe’s debut is held, she still isn’t sure what she will do.
The party provides a short distraction from her worries. The lemon-themed party goes well with Chloe’s favorite Beyoncé album and the kaishao boys and other guests do dance routines that has everyone in stitches.
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