Authors like Edgar Allen Poe and Patricia Highsmith know a scary truth about humans—if given the opportunity, sometimes we’ll resort to nefarious tactics to get what we want. Readers enjoy characters like Highsmith’s Tom Ripley because they allow us to experience what might happen if we gave into our worst impulses.
In her amazing debut Boring Asian Female, author Canwen Xu lets us deep inside the head of this kind of protagonist. Columbia senior Elizabeth Zhang thinks she’s something special. The smartest kid—and only Asian—in her North Dakota high school, she went to Columbia because all of her classmates were obsessed with a TV show that took place on the Upper East Side. Next on her list is Harvard Law, which will fulfill her dream of becoming a rich corporate lawyer, so she can return to NYC and live out her materialistic fantasies.
Sadly, Harvard Law has other plans. Despite Elizabeth’s stellar grades and nearly perfect LSAT score, Elle Woods’s alma mater turns down Elizabeth, while it offers a spot to her classmate Laura Kim. Elizabeth is dumbstruck—she knows she’s smarter than Laura. WTF? When she meets with the law school counselor, he tells her that Harvard has a limited number of slots, and there are too many smart Asian females for them all to be accepted. In other words, Laura took her slot. She must be more interesting than Elizabeth.
But what’s so great about Laura? Elizabeth starts to stalk Laura—whom she’s disliked since freshman year, when she told Elizabeth’s best friend she wasn’t Korean enough to understand her—to figure out why Harvard chose her instead. At the same time, Elizabeth plots to become more interesting in order to write an addendum to her Harvard application. Eventually, though, she realizes it’s not enough. For her to be accepted, Laura needs to be rejected. And Elizabeth needs to make that happen.
Boring Asian Female may be the closest first-person point of view I’ve ever read. Xu gives us pages and pages of Elizabeth’s thoughts, delivering a detailed map of exactly where, when, and how Elizabeth goes off the deep end. Isolated in North Dakota, feeling rejected by a father who returned to China and had another family, Elizabeth’s drive and ambition are understandable. It’s also understandable how she sees Laura Kim as the living embodiment of her rejection. Who hasn’t had a nemesis? Or wondered why the boy you liked chose another girl, or the editor with your manuscript decided to publish another writer? Who hasn’t felt not good enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough? Who hasn’t used social media to stalk and sock puppet?
The novel follows a predictable, albeit enjoyable trajectory as Elizabeth’s stalking of Laura heats up. Subplots include Elizabeth’s friendships with her violinist best friend, drama in her friend group, and her hook-ups with a Tinder date. Interestingly, Xu didn’t include anything about the Gaza protests for which Columbia is well known—a strange oversight since Laura and Elizabeth are in a middle east history class together. But Elizabeth is so self-centered, maybe she didn’t notice the library being taken over.
I had one small quibble with the book: There are two important plot points that happen without Elizabeth taking action, which runs counter to having such an active protagonist. But overall, Boring Asian Female is an engrossing book, an up-close look at a person following their worst instincts. It’s anything but boring.
Thanks to Berkley for the book in exchange for an honest review.
Enjoyed this post? Never miss out on future posts by following us.
Listen to this book on Speechify!
No comments:
Post a Comment