Reviews

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Only show reviews with written explanations

archytas's review against another edition

emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

The pacing of this novel is languid, but the prose cracks like a whip. It is a “postcolonial novel” but one which challenges the concept and also somehow centers Sylvia Plath. It is, in short, a study in contrasts and boy is it good.
Which is not to say it is completely enjoyable. Yu’s protagonist drifts through much of the book, unsure of what she wants and increasingly distressed by her own inertia, which is often frustrating to read. Yu captures here almost perfectly many experiences with residencies, where the enforced isolation results less in focus and more in introspection. This is, of course, partly the point. It also enables Yu to take Girl (Yu hints at, but never provides, a ‘real’ name here, in an exercise that seems designed for us to engage with her entirely through her own sense of self and not ours) through mental musings which unpeel the racialised expectations of contemporary literary, artistic and academic cultures. While being funny. The whip smart dialogue is one of the greatest pleasures of the book, but it also offers sharp insight:

“Much later on Ma told me that when I was young, I thought I was white. I didn’t want to be white or anything like that. I just thought that was what I was because I knew I was real. I knew I was real and not made up because sometimes I tested it. Sometimes I bit my lip till blood came out and when the saltine pain came, I knew that I was non-fiction.”

“Her bright light, her warmth and openness were not really her at all, but the carefully constructed house on a hill she lived in. And being porous to the pain of those outside this house would destroy the beautiful architecture of her life because it would be an admission.”

“I was overburdened by the overdetermining of my identity.”

And the surprisingly poignant “These mass emails were becoming more and more personal in tone, now all of them started with my name and told me how much they cared for me, which was why I should buy their new product or read their recently published article. It was a lonely time to be alive.”

Yu also uses this to critique the form of the novel she is writing. I’m not always a fan of this, it can be deployed cheaply as if arch knowing can avoid pitfalls, but here it also provides context for what Yu is prioritising. For example:

“That was the problem with always identifying with the protagonist of a coming-of-age novel, no one else but you ever got to come of age. You got to be an actual person and everyone else was just a symbol of a particular type of person or pathway.”

Yu, in this most definate coming-of-age novel, tries not to make her other characters too archetypal, even as she burns to show us the relentlessness of the way others, especially white people, think of the world as different to the way it is. Two leading academics, for example, make cracks about how lucky they are to be successful in postcolonial studies despite being White, all while Girl looks around at a clearly majority White field. As a public school graduate, I recognised the frustration of the “my parents had to sacrifice hard for private school” narrative which often feels tone deaf to the reality of families where public school uniforms were barely affordable. Yu captures the sense of a world in which diversity is hot in a way that means posed racial harmony, but not in a way which shifts power at all, or even allocates space for those diverse voices. She manages this without making the novel harsh. There is no cringe here (well, only a tiny bit). Instead, Yu centers around the family of Girl, whose thoughts keep getting distracted by trying to understand their lives, their perspectives, and in this way, to take space for what matters, not what is demanded.