BookBrowse Reviews But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

BookBrowse:

An immigrant (or "postcolonial") novel exploring the artistic process, racial identity, and Sylvia Plath.

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's But the Girl begins with the real-life disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. In March 2014, the passenger jet went missing in transit from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The narrator, a young graduate student born to Malaysian parents in Australia, relates becoming "an unintentional figurehead for Malaysia Airlines" that spring during a scholarship-sponsored stay in London, as people asked her what happened to the plane, as if she would somehow know. The actual disappearance of the plane marks a metaphorical disappearance for the narrator; others looked at her and saw a spokesperson for a tragedy. This superimposition of false, impulsive perception over a person's lived experience seems both violent and mundane, and highlights a recurring theme in Yu's novel.

The narrator, known only as "Girl" after her family's way of addressing her, backtracks to explain how she decided to take a break from working on her PhD thesis about Sylvia Plath when she was offered a scholarship for artists involving a residency in Scotland along with a brief sojourn in London. Girl suffers from an inertia common to the young and directionless, but is driven by the feeling that as the child of immigrants she has to distinguish herself, which is not the same as wanting to be visible. Describing her flight to London, she recounts the other passengers' anxiety that their plane would meet the same fate as the vanished one while she remained calm: "As always when something went wrong, I sat very still and did nothing. I thought about disappearing. It sounded quite pleasant to me."

Through Girl's blunt, often amusing narration, Yu explores the desire to make or remake oneself, to lose or gain a self in becoming a person, an artist, an intellectual. But rather than simply considering how institutional racism can hamper this process for marginalized people, or the usual coming-of-age challenges on the path to self-actualization, she questions the path itself. Is the accepted way to individual achievement and success possible for those who haven't been fully indoctrinated into the Western colonialist values that support this goal? And is it even good for anyone?

The plot and focus of But the Girl reminded me of Billy-Ray Belcourt's A Minor Chorus, in which an unnamed Indigenous graduate student in Edmonton decides to pause work on his dissertation and return to his hometown in rural Alberta, where he intends to interview residents as fodder for a novel that features the voices of a whole community. One key difference between the books is that Belcourt's character travels home in his search for understanding, while Girl tries to escape home (and possibly to escape understanding). Also, while Girl is working on a novel during her residency, it isn't one that has been entirely conceived on her own terms — she just wanted to propose a project she could focus on for the residency and said that she was writing a "postcolonial novel." But Girl's understanding of herself and the work she wants to do evolves anyway. During the residency, she ponders the validity of artistic individuality versus collaboration, she makes sincere efforts towards writing her novel, and she comes to realize that as much as she has wanted to escape her family — her parents and grandmother in Australia — her life is bound up in theirs.

If Girl's identity struggles and family backstory provide the substance of the book, Sylvia Plath's work offers the structure that hosts the main character's preoccupations. Girl fell in love with Plath's poetry as a teenager, and struggled with her feelings about the racism in The Bell Jar (see Beyond the Book), notably a scene in which main character Esther Greenwood self-deprecatingly compares her reflection to "a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman — staring idiotically into my face." Girl found significance in how the character still ultimately recognized this image as herself — "it was only me of course." She also found comfort in reverse-objectifying Plath's creation as her own specter in a mirror: "I thought Esther Greenwood would have been me at my worst: self-involved, so much so that other people could only ever be the backdrop to her own suffering … She was a 'big, smudgy-eyed white woman staring idiotically into my face' and yet she was only me. Of course." This reversal speaks back to the superimposition of imagined concepts on reality, and also forms a contour for the plot to follow. But the Girl contains echoes of The Bell Jar in its young-woman-out-on-her-own storyline, and the reader can entertain the idea that the book they are reading may be the "postcolonial novel" Girl intends to write.

Girl explains that she attached the qualifier "postcolonial" "to make it sound more legitimate." She later adds that she began swapping in the word for "immigrant" because "postcolonial" intimidated people while "immigrant felt like such a threadbare, sad word." This isn't necessarily or merely internalized racism, nor does it seem like a rhetorical portrayal of Girl's helplessness, but rather a recognition of power, the power of some words over others, the power a person with little more than a knowledge of words can still exercise. If we think of Yu's novel as the novel Girl eventually writes, we can assume that she may mean to exercise this power through it. The book takes on an anthropological bent as Girl examines what are, to her, exotic locales in the UK and views her fellow residents, in particular a quirky painter named Clementine, as curiosities. This not only legitimatizes her point of view over theirs the way simply being a main character does but poses her as a natural center by the standards of the dominant culture to which she expects to be writing.

And yet the narrative continually drifts back towards the kind of family-focused immigrant plot that an analytical, socially aware person like Girl might feel loses power as it fulfills fantasies of racialized suffering for white readers. But there are inevitably things more important than resisting this perception, more important than the approval Girl seeks from authority or how she wants to fight that authority. But the Girl is a sad story in the end, in a way that hits with an unexpected jolt, shaking all its puzzle pieces into place. Yu's novel isn't about family hardships or a young woman finding her place in the world so much as an immigrant daughter recognizing her own authority, and realizing what it really means for a person to disappear.

This review first ran in the November 20, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.