Excerpt from But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One

It was an undecided and hazy spring, the spring that MAS370 disappeared, and I didn't know what I was doing in London. 

Everyone kept asking me what had happened to the plane. I had become an unintentional figurehead for Malaysia Airlines. I was Australian (at least that's what it said on my blue passport) but my parents were Malaysian (red passport). And I looked like I knew something about it. 

I wished I did. All I knew was that I was lost and probably wasting my time here. 

I had been against Australia remaining a Commonwealth country and opposed to the British monarchy until I received a Commonwealth scholarship from a philanthropic organisation that had been set up in 1926 by King George V. The scholarship invited me to travel to London for a week to be 'enriched by culture' and then to Arbroath in Scotland for a month-long artist residency. Then I was going back to London to present my work at a postcolonial literature conference. Now I liked the Commonwealth and I decided that the idea of the monarchy was a mysterious and seductive one like religion or a beautiful stranger on a bus. 

A man named Leon had been the one to email me telling me I'd been awarded the scholarship. I hadn't applied for it and I wasn't used to things appearing out of nowhere so at first I thought it was a scam. But then he had called me on the landline at home and he seemed real. He told me he was the arts manager at a philanthropic society in England that had been set up to lend Commonwealth countries a helping hand. He said that they had read some of my writing in magazines and such and liked it and that usually these scholarships were for visual artists but there was some interest in gradually introducing writers into the programme and did I have any projects I was working on just now? I told him I was enrolled in an English PhD programme here but I had always wanted to write a novel, a postcolonial novel, I added, to make it sound more legitimate.

Leon said I could choose the flight and he would book it. I took full advantage and chose a good airline at a cost I wouldn't have been able to pay myself. He told me it needed to be cheaper. So I chose a budget flight but he told me he couldn't be liable for what might happen on a Smart Wings transfer flight. In the end, the only flight that fit his criteria was a Malaysia Airlines flight, which was a proper airline but heavily discounted because no one wanted to disappear. 

The transit flight to Kuala Lumpur was completely empty. I spread out across three seats and lay down to sleep. When I got to KL airport, I bought a copy of the Star which didn't mention anything about MAS370. It was as if it had never happened. Ikanyu had told me he thought the gomen knew more than they would ever let on. Of course, before this everyone had thought that planes couldn't disappear. But now that it had happened, it felt like if it was to disappear from anywhere it would be Malaysia. I supposed this was why Ma and Ikanyu and Ah Ma had immigrated in the first place. I knew that Ma had been heavily pregnant with me when she got on the flight. She said she'd held on tight to her pelvic muscles to keep me in until they got to Australia. I was born the day after they arrived. Her extreme willpower meant that I got the passport but I'd never quite got away from Malaysia, and I didn't know whether I wanted to or not.

The plane to London began to toss and turn like an insomniac and our food trays slid back and forth. Our chairs rattled like we were on a rollercoaster and a redundant turbulence announcement came on. The old man next to me yelped while the boy on my other side held onto his armrests. I could tell they were worried we would disappear. As always when something went wrong, I sat very still and did nothing. I thought about disappearing. It sounded quite pleasant to me. 

Excerpted from But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu. Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu. Excerpted by permission of The Unnamed Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.