'I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English': a vivid, playful debut disrupts clichés of docile Asian womanhood
Mercifully, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, But The Girl, is effervescent on the page.
- Mercifully, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, But The Girl, is effervescent on the page.
- As the narrator says,
I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English: it hurt me, and it gave me acute pleasure. - I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English: it hurt me, and it gave me acute pleasure.
Telling it slant
- This self-awareness of movement against expectations infuses the book’s unapologetic over-sharing through the chatty, first-person narration with a sense of doubt and uncertainty.
- It’s a refreshing commitment to self-critique and a refusal of foreclosure.
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Homage to Sylvia Plath
- This theme of tribute, disappointment, critique and conversation – of holding Plath close – continues as verse and refrain throughout the novel.
- For instance, Clementine, a fellow artist in residence in Scotland, attempts to paint a portrait of the narrator over a portrait of Plath.
- This probing of Plath’s work continues, as the narrator retrospectively charts her growth towards a less hagiographic and more open-eyed apprehension of Plath.
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Cultural cringe and unstable ‘home’
- There are the expected responses of shame and cultural cringe at Australia’s provincialism.
- But they are complicated by the unstable category of “home”, where “home” is not just Australia, but also Malaysia.
- Sometimes I wished my parents had immigrated somewhere else; being a child of immigrants always made your birth country feel so random and unnecessary.
- This particular positioning of the self also plays out in the way the female Asian body is perceived and possessed.
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A love letter
- This novel is also ultimately a love letter, especially to the narrator’s formidable Ah Ma, a former maid, now “a matriarch demanding the best of the best for her and for her alone”.
- It is also a love letter to the narrator’s parents, Ma and Ikanyu – an exploration of all that is inherited, all that is suffered and all that is owed.
- “To hit you is to love you,” the narrator is told after being smacked by her father when she calls her mother “a grouch”.