By Sarah Sukardi
What exactly is the phrase, “Win me something”? Perhaps a demand, or a call to arms, or a request made between companions. For one to ask another to win a thing for them implies a certain kind of relationship that is richly complex in the way it conceives of power and closeness between two people. For it is ultimately an act of intimacy, to both accrue and accept a debt.
But there is also something troubling about the phrase. For what, exactly, is something—that ever ambiguous word beneath which might linger all sorts of peril? Why is the relationship between the speaker and the recipient contingent upon material acquisition? And what is the unspecified debt, and what are the consequences of not paying it?
In Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel, the eponymous phrase “win me something” is not the defiant, declarative statement it first appears to be, but an offhand comment made between the protagonist Willa Chen and her mother during Willa’s childhood. In the scene, Willa’s mother sends her to school after pulling her out for a “mental health day.” In a twist, the day off is a maneuver which Willa correctly discerns as selfish, for Willa’s capricious mother demands these days of her, and though her mother’s impositions are cloaked in the language of self-care, Willa has no choice as to whether she may take the day off. One of the days she must skip is that of an important spelling test. Her mother shuttles her off to school the next day, now conscious of the test, but unaware that the test was the day before and therefore, that there is no test left to win.
This small moment is a microcosm of the emotional landscape of Wu’s debut novel and how it vividly renders a mind warped by a lifetime of emotional precarity. Willa, a child of divorce, is a victim of this mode of treatment from both of her families: her white mother who has more white children, and her distant Asian father who has a new, more perfect family whom she rarely sees.
Thoughtlessness itself lives in the borderlands between care and outright neglect. This is a novel preoccupied with liminal conditions of all kinds—Willa is never seen as entirely white or Asian, lives in “multiple homes or zero,” feels neither loved or unloved, is ignored and misinterpreted in the few moments in which she is visible. Loneliness and muted resentment are the natural outcome of this condition. This is the context into which Willa, now in her twenties, enters a job working as a nanny for the wealthy Adriens, a white managerial-class family living in Manhattan.
So what is a person whose condition is determined by precarity, liminality, and loneliness to do when confronted with what appears to be the opposite of her condition—that is, the condition of a white, wealthy, precocious, 9-year-old named Bijou, living with her married parents in an unsullied, sparkling home? This is the central question which Wu considers throughout the novel, as Willa shepherds Bijou to and from school, attends museums and Chinese language lessons with her, tries on Bijou’s mother’s clothes and even her name. Wu is especially interested in how the pattern of liminality divulges itself in the fraught nature of the home space: Willa, the one with multiple or no homes, finds herself again in this condition as she considers becoming Bijou’s live-in nanny. The Adriens’ home functions as Willa’s workplace, and the place to which her employers come after they finish working. In moving in, it becomes both Willa’s workplace and home, and thus simultaneously neither.
The genius of Win Me Something comes in the care with which it considers these questions of identity and belonging, but also resists answering them easily. For though the Adriens’ life may appear immaculate, the need for a nanny is tacit acknowledgement of parenting that is insufficient in itself, a hairline crack in the seam of what initially appears to be a flawless family that Willa squeezes herself through. It is a fracture that Wu explodes, revealing the discomfort that comes from desperately wanting to love someone to whom one is also beholden: Bijou to Willa, Willa to Bijou, a daughter to her mother, a nanny to her charge, an employee to her employer.
Wu’s emotional palette is considerable. She is always feinting at different ways a scene can be perceived, thinking her way into a narrator for whom every scene is laced with a certain low-grade anxiety. This is a novel in which every sentence is finely hewn, and even the way that an egg is cooked is drenched with meaning.
Win Me Something is a dazzling literary debut from a voice I’m certain we will see more from. It is also a subtle book, with a roiling undercurrent of feeling that never falls prey to sentimentality. It, too, resides in the borderlands of emotion; is neither gentle nor un-gentle. Nevertheless, the novel never precludes hope, and I’ve rarely seen a text in the landscape of American letters that speaks so eloquently to the heartbreaking, gorgeous complexity of the Asian American biracial experience.
Win Me Something is available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, and Yu and Me Books.
Sarah Sukardi is an essayist and occasional critic who lives in Brooklyn. Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.