Excerpt from Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Gone.

Fuck it. Today was the day. Six years without the curb of routine had made me a woman of jagged risings, allowed the indulgence of watching the world change through the prism of my bedsit window. I knew the thrum of my neighbors' engines, the precise flourishes on the tags of graffiti, the fractals of the cracks in the walls. In another life these skills might have been useful. In this one I was merely a clock-watcher.

I gathered the mail from the hallway and began to sort it on the living room table, matching it up as I went: Dave's Disco, takeaway, therapy, like that game we used to play called Remember. That only left the newest envelope, which didn't fit with anything. I picked it up and examined it. It was yellow and thin in my hand, the paper the wrong side of luxurious, as was the careless slant of its address. I shook it free of the rain and then tore at an unlicked gap in its corner and pulled out the letter within. Commissioner for Oaths, it said, along with the details of a London solicitor located at Gray's Inn Road.

RE: In the matter of Miss Lily Miller, formerly known as Li-Li Chen, daughter of Sook-Yin Chen, of Castle Peak Road, Kowloon.

Phrases jumped in and out of my vision, the black ink morphing into shapes across the paper. We are writing to inform you ... An inheritance ... Please call us at the number below.

It had to be some kind of scam. You heard about these things all the time: soft approaches by so-called Good Samaritans; innocent people giving up their life savings. As if.

Despite this, something small and barely perceptible tried to creep past my notice and take root in the darkest of spaces. I perched on the sofa and shut my eyes.

Five things I can see, four things I can ...

Did that technique really work for anyone?

Dr. Fenton said I worried too much and maybe I should stop overthinking things—one of those typical therapist mantras, along with no caffeine after 4 p.m. or being grateful for the person I was. Easy for him to say.

The day that letter arrived, I hadn't been allowed to think of my old name, or any of the memories that went with it, for more than twenty years.

Two
Sook-Yin

Kowloon, June 1966

On the morning of Sook-Yin's exile, the harbor was fuller than the gutters on market day. The islanders had always taken their status seriously. If you could get into the sea you could fish, they said, and if you could fish you would never go hungry. A family's survival depended on money—people casting their hopes to the tide aboard dinghies and leaky sampans—and now she was paying the price because she had never been able to make enough of it, or at least not the right kind for her brother. She could have scrubbed floors till her fingers bled, boiled laundry from Kowloon to Guangzhou, but she would never become an intellectual, a person that he could respect. Numbskull, shame of the family, a woman of twenty-two with no more than a fourth-form education. Isn't that what ah-Chor had said?

Some money was more equal than others.


Passengers had started to board the liner. As Sook-Yin peered up from the shadow of the dock, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun, they looked like minnows in the palm of a giant. The Carthage—Pacific and Orient. The same words she'd read on her ticket when she'd gone with ah-Ma to the embassy that morning. Later, she'd looked them up in her dictionary:

Carthage
proper noun

1. An ancient city on the coast of north Africa. Founded by the Phoenicians. Finally destroyed by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War.

She considered the gleaming paintwork, the shiny reflections piercing its windows, the muscular heft of its ropes. Nothing about the ship looked destroyed. A lucky omen, perhaps—the same way Kowloon had risen from its ashes.

Excerpted from Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton. Copyright © 2023 by Wiz Wharton. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.