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halthemonarch 's review for:
Second Sister
by Chan Ho-Kei
Initially, I had written like a two page review about the things I didn’t like about this book, but I think now I can summarize it. The Second Sister is about a woman in Hong Kong who lives (or did live for a large chunk of her life) in extreme poverty with her family who, through accidental death and disease pass away. Her sister was all she had left until she killed herself. Overcome with grief, she seeks a private investigator for answers about who cyberbullied her sister online during her final weeks. She’s directed to N, short for Nemisis, a hacker who can do anything with a bad attitude.
Nga-Yee, the protagonist, is unlikable in how embarrassingly naive she is. She’s a librarian so she needs technological jargon spoonfed to her-- fine, I get that. But to be worried more than once about whether strangers you’ll never see again think you and a stranger are dating just because you ordered lunch for him? To swallow your anger whenever the detective you hired outright insults your intelligence but have to be talked down from letting a 15 year old girl kill herself? And N is advertised as the best, indeed in the first few pages he’s introduced he says he won’t take her case because it’s too easy, and yet it takes him two months to find a teenager in Siu-Man (Nga-Yee’s sister)’s school was to blame.
I didn’t like how N was worshipped as a hero by randoms Nga-Yee encounters, like Belle in her opening song in beauty and the beast, except instead of singing about France, everyone is dickriding this absolute blockhead of a man. He lies, he calls names, he kicks Nga-Yee’s shins under tables,and he (her HIRED private investigator, remember)gets pissed at her for ruining his plan after decidedly not enlightening you to said plan, hides her sister’s hidden suicide note, and is overall worse than Gregory House when it comes to dubious professionals. I invite us all to think about how the Houses and the Sherlocks and the Monks and Spocks, and every other analytical bastard out there are always given a pass for how they treat others because of what they can contribute. N really put a bad taste in my mouth. His actions and how he treated this person in extreme grief-- to demand literally all Nge-Yee’s money (literally-literally, not even figuratively-literally) as a test to “how much what he’s about to do means to her”, and then to demand more for a “kill the teenager who was kind of the straw that broke the camels back, the camel’s back being your sister’s suicide”follow up plan. I thought he would go back on this since a) she’s poor and b) I mean if he was the angel people keep insisting he is, wouldn’t he do one nice thing the entire novel? He even dressed Nga-Yee and put makeup on her at the end of the book, and Nga-Yee is startled as though it's never occurred to her that she's a woman before. A lof of N and his interactions with Nga-Yee made me roll my eyes and think "written by a man behavior. No woman would ever-" I hated him, every time he spoke I gritted my teeth.
All of the characters had a relationship to poverty and the government not caring about them that I cannot deny. Nga-Yee and Siu-Man’s mother died of cancer because they couldn’t afford the expensive treatments to keep her alive, and before that their father had been killed in a factory accident. Siu-Man believed if she weren’t born her parents would have been less burdened and maybe things would have been different for her family. After an incident of harrassment on public transportation, she gains the public eye and not in a good way. The girl who posts the inflammatory post had once called her a snitch-- only it was her then boyfriend at the time which is a whole thing, I won’t go into, but basically the bully’s family is a dad and brother who strive for wealth, and a mother who left when she was very young, described as a beauty and attracted to money. If life wasn’t so hard, these people could have put their lust for money aside-- I believe the desire for money is a desire for safety. With enough money, nothing bad could befall you or the people you cared about, and you’d have the true freedom to do what you wanted in this world-- but what’s wrong with this world is that it’s built that way in the first place. Nga-Yee forgets to treat her sister like a person with the pursuit of money and the tangible goal of a savings account for her baby sister in her sights. This novel brings all this to mind, and also the question of whos really to blame when it comes to internet bullying. Nga-Yee was definitely going through something during the leg of the novel where she pretty much ordered N to help her kill a fifteen year old girl for facillitating a crusade against her fragile and already suicidal little sister. I wish at some point the novel really drove home that the pursuit of money will always be bitter and unsatisfying, but the pursuit of human connection is evergreen. I wish the women in this book were more than just worried about the men in their lives, and I wish those men weren’t so knight-in-shining-armor to those women in sparse instances while being judgemental and dismissive the rest of the time, and then upheld as heroic. I wish that Nya-Yee didn’t have to be spoonfed every plot beat, and in the end I wish she maintained that N is a bastard man with n inexplicably good reputation. N does the bare minimum-- takes payment in exchange for the most dubious and disrespectful of services, and he’s a hero?
Halfway in, I started to realize the rest of the novel will likely be Nga-Yee needing her hand held through every new revelation in the case, and then a quick, and unsatisfactory ending wherein she doesnt reckon with her grief at all. And isn’t that the sad truth of the world? That even if your whole family dies, no one in this world is obligated to care about you, be nice to you, or not take advantage of you for their own means or due to their own arbitrary reasons. That you could need someone to help you, desperately, for the sake of your own soul and sanity, and that person can shit on you all day and you might just bow your head and bear it because your need is so great. That the real issue here is extreme poverty and societal neglect, and yet we swirl around characters that could be charming or rational or full of heart in another universe, while we barrel towards an ending that did not get her her sister back! I hated the epilogue because in a way, Siu-Man was right about holding her sister back and Nga-Yee’s life has all the potential now that everyone she loves has died. What kind of message is that? I learned while reading that real life and real people are unforgiving, unbending assholes who only feel badly after being caught in a lie or a crime simply because they’ve been caught. This is advertised as a detective novel, and it does what it says it will on the tin, however, I read books to escape the dumpsterfire that is the unfeeling society we have to live in, not to be so forcefully reminded the truth of it. The longer this review gets, the more I realize this wasn’t the novel for me. I’d say I enjoyed this book less than Knight and Moon, (which I guess, I didn’t enjoy all that much because it wasn’t realistic enough, ironically) is a detective novel much more removed from reality and definitely less weighed in terms of subject matter, but features at least a likable cast. I will not read book 2 if there is one. Nancy Wu, as always, was a delight.
Nga-Yee, the protagonist, is unlikable in how embarrassingly naive she is. She’s a librarian so she needs technological jargon spoonfed to her-- fine, I get that. But to be worried more than once about whether strangers you’ll never see again think you and a stranger are dating just because you ordered lunch for him? To swallow your anger whenever the detective you hired outright insults your intelligence but have to be talked down from letting a 15 year old girl kill herself? And N is advertised as the best, indeed in the first few pages he’s introduced he says he won’t take her case because it’s too easy, and yet it takes him two months to find a teenager in Siu-Man (Nga-Yee’s sister)’s school was to blame.
I didn’t like how N was worshipped as a hero by randoms Nga-Yee encounters, like Belle in her opening song in beauty and the beast, except instead of singing about France, everyone is dickriding this absolute blockhead of a man. He lies, he calls names, he kicks Nga-Yee’s shins under tables,and he (her HIRED private investigator, remember)gets pissed at her for ruining his plan after decidedly not enlightening you to said plan, hides her sister’s hidden suicide note, and is overall worse than Gregory House when it comes to dubious professionals. I invite us all to think about how the Houses and the Sherlocks and the Monks and Spocks, and every other analytical bastard out there are always given a pass for how they treat others because of what they can contribute. N really put a bad taste in my mouth. His actions and how he treated this person in extreme grief-- to demand literally all Nge-Yee’s money (literally-literally, not even figuratively-literally) as a test to “how much what he’s about to do means to her”, and then to demand more for a “kill the teenager who was kind of the straw that broke the camels back, the camel’s back being your sister’s suicide”follow up plan. I thought he would go back on this since a) she’s poor and b) I mean if he was the angel people keep insisting he is, wouldn’t he do one nice thing the entire novel? He even dressed Nga-Yee and put makeup on her at the end of the book, and Nga-Yee is startled as though it's never occurred to her that she's a woman before. A lof of N and his interactions with Nga-Yee made me roll my eyes and think "written by a man behavior. No woman would ever-" I hated him, every time he spoke I gritted my teeth.
All of the characters had a relationship to poverty and the government not caring about them that I cannot deny. Nga-Yee and Siu-Man’s mother died of cancer because they couldn’t afford the expensive treatments to keep her alive, and before that their father had been killed in a factory accident. Siu-Man believed if she weren’t born her parents would have been less burdened and maybe things would have been different for her family. After an incident of harrassment on public transportation, she gains the public eye and not in a good way. The girl who posts the inflammatory post had once called her a snitch-- only it was her then boyfriend at the time which is a whole thing, I won’t go into, but basically the bully’s family is a dad and brother who strive for wealth, and a mother who left when she was very young, described as a beauty and attracted to money. If life wasn’t so hard, these people could have put their lust for money aside-- I believe the desire for money is a desire for safety. With enough money, nothing bad could befall you or the people you cared about, and you’d have the true freedom to do what you wanted in this world-- but what’s wrong with this world is that it’s built that way in the first place. Nga-Yee forgets to treat her sister like a person with the pursuit of money and the tangible goal of a savings account for her baby sister in her sights. This novel brings all this to mind, and also the question of whos really to blame when it comes to internet bullying. Nga-Yee was definitely going through something during the leg of the novel where she pretty much ordered N to help her kill a fifteen year old girl for facillitating a crusade against her fragile and already suicidal little sister. I wish at some point the novel really drove home that the pursuit of money will always be bitter and unsatisfying, but the pursuit of human connection is evergreen. I wish the women in this book were more than just worried about the men in their lives, and I wish those men weren’t so knight-in-shining-armor to those women in sparse instances while being judgemental and dismissive the rest of the time, and then upheld as heroic. I wish that Nya-Yee didn’t have to be spoonfed every plot beat, and in the end I wish she maintained that N is a bastard man with n inexplicably good reputation. N does the bare minimum-- takes payment in exchange for the most dubious and disrespectful of services, and he’s a hero?
Halfway in, I started to realize the rest of the novel will likely be Nga-Yee needing her hand held through every new revelation in the case, and then a quick, and unsatisfactory ending wherein she doesnt reckon with her grief at all. And isn’t that the sad truth of the world? That even if your whole family dies, no one in this world is obligated to care about you, be nice to you, or not take advantage of you for their own means or due to their own arbitrary reasons. That you could need someone to help you, desperately, for the sake of your own soul and sanity, and that person can shit on you all day and you might just bow your head and bear it because your need is so great. That the real issue here is extreme poverty and societal neglect, and yet we swirl around characters that could be charming or rational or full of heart in another universe, while we barrel towards an ending that did not get her her sister back! I hated the epilogue because in a way, Siu-Man was right about holding her sister back and Nga-Yee’s life has all the potential now that everyone she loves has died. What kind of message is that? I learned while reading that real life and real people are unforgiving, unbending assholes who only feel badly after being caught in a lie or a crime simply because they’ve been caught. This is advertised as a detective novel, and it does what it says it will on the tin, however, I read books to escape the dumpsterfire that is the unfeeling society we have to live in, not to be so forcefully reminded the truth of it. The longer this review gets, the more I realize this wasn’t the novel for me. I’d say I enjoyed this book less than Knight and Moon, (which I guess, I didn’t enjoy all that much because it wasn’t realistic enough, ironically) is a detective novel much more removed from reality and definitely less weighed in terms of subject matter, but features at least a likable cast. I will not read book 2 if there is one. Nancy Wu, as always, was a delight.