Excerpt from But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I only spent the money I'd been given, though. I was born to immigrant parents who had me at the hospital the second they were in Australia, which is another way of saying I was born financially anxious. It's impossible to explain this to someone who wasn't. This was always what had been so hard about being with my friends at university who never seemed to worry about money at all. They thought talking about money was crass because they had never had to think about it. I could never afford their respectability. 

Perhaps this was why I felt so guilty about the shopping. That whole week, I would buy clothes on Oxford Street and feel beautiful for a moment and then I would hate myself for my lack of self-control and shove them under my hotel bed like a bad feeling. Every night I hid my new clothes under the bed so I could sleep. And every day when I returned to my room someone would have come into my room and the clothes and also the towels and bathrobe and sheets would be folded perfectly and hung, and the teapot and cups cleaned and replaced. No matter what shape I'd left the room in. It was the magic of hotels. Even the embarrassment of being cleaned up after, the kind of thing Ah Ma would do conspicuously in front of me, so I knew how disgusting and lazy I was, even this happened invisibly while you were gone at a hotel. So you could avoid both the drudgery of cleaning up after yourself and the shame of someone else cleaning up after you, and calling it love

Excerpted from But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu. Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu. Excerpted by permission of The Unnamed Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.