But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel is a delicate investigation into intergenerational immigrant subjectivities
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel But The Girl is a dissonant tour through the inner landscapes, neuroses and overlapping inheritances of the colonial, traversing the intersection between British-Australian contemporary culture, Malaysian-Australian second-generation immigrant experiences, and the complicated relationships these subjectivities hold in the UK.
Our protagonist slips in and out of the character of Girl, an epithet also applied at times to her Ma and Ah Ma, creating an interwoven duality where disparaging remarks bind them in a common experience of gender, race and circumstance. The yawning differences between them are simultaneously cast through this intertwined lens, each of the characters growing out of the other, forever enmeshed in these sticky spaces of the family, love and culture.
Written in a flowing, internal narration that occasionally moves into moments of not-quite-real, observations of the minutiae of everyday microaggressions build up to depict the internal landscapes that minorities must uncomfortably navigate. Yu explores the difficulty of existing in a body shrouded in memories of always being read as wrong, mapping generational residues of trauma and the trapped subjectivity of what it means to be 'the lucky one', in order to examine the tension between the supposed utopia of the West and the lurking complicated spectre of colonialism.