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Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Cook
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A perceptive and powerful debut of identity and belonging - of a young woman determined to be seen.
Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese American girl in New Jersey, Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly white school, and too white to speak to the few Asian kids around. After her parents' early divorce, they both remarried and started new families, and Willa grew up feeling outside of their new lives, too.
For years, Willa does her best to stifle her feelings of loneliness, drifting through high school and then college as she tries to quiet the unease inside her. But when she begins working for the Adriens―a wealthy white family in Tribeca―as a nanny for their daughter, Bijou, Willa is confronted with all of the things she never had. As she draws closer to the family and eventually moves in with them, Willa finds herself questioning who she is, and revisiting a childhood where she never felt fully at home. Self-examining and fraught with the emotions of a family who fails and loves in equal measure, Win Me Something is a nuanced coming-of-age debut about the irreparable fissures between people, and a young woman who asks what it really means to belong, and how she might begin to define her own life.
Paperback original.
Excerpt
Win Me Something
New York City, 2013
I didn't know what it looked like to take care of someone. I imagined that being a nanny meant watching a small person bounce her backpack home from school, microwaving chicken nuggets on a paper-toweled plate, and lying with an arm folded behind my head while the bright colors of a cartoon flashed. The intricacies of it hadn't occurred to me—that I'd have to sniff her palms to discern the citrus scent of soap and scrape dirt from underneath her fingernails. How I'd end up eating a room-temperature scoop of macaroni and cheese off her plate and raking lice shampoo through her soapy scalp. Maybe I couldn't imagine these moments because when someone asked about my childhood, my mind clenched and closed like two fists in a pool—fingers squeezing for something to come up with when everything around them was a different kind of matter.
I had parents. I had siblings. I had homes, multiple or zero, depending on how you looked at it. I...
Win Me Something isn't about Willa's suffering or lack of power. It isn't about her taking back power, either. It's a subtly rendered and satisfying story of someone on the verge of beginning to know herself — gentle and confident in its shifts of direction, blossoming in complexity like a fine wine as it opens into the reader's mind. Rife with social and internal tensions as well as the fraught mentality of late adolescence, it is a quiet, reflective read with a long, delicate finish...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Cathy Linh Che, author of Split
Kyle Lucia Wu's Win Me Something is groundbreaking in its exploration of blended families and a biracial Asian American consciousness. In subtle but strikingly observed scenes that depict race, class, and lives of having and not having, she explores the secret want that we all have: to belong to something, somewhere. Here we find Willa, a biracial Chinese American narrator seeking to understand where she belongs in the family of things. Here is a prose writer who relishes in the poetry of language. Under Wu's deft hand, each sentence unfolds like a miracle. Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me
Win Me Something is an observant, contemplative story about the complex reality of growing up with a mixed identity in two starkly different mixed families. Kyle Lucia Wu deftly weaves back and forth between Willa's teenaged years and her adult life to explore loneliness, uncertainty, and a singular, persistent question―where do I truly belong? Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk
Masterfully reveals the fury, hope, and longing that come with trying to be seen in a world that never looks for you.
Willa Chen, the main character in Kyle Lucia Wu's Win Me Something, mentions that her mother named her after the writer Willa Cather. This connection is significant in that Willa expects to be asked about her name in the context of her Chinese heritage, and is surprised when her employer's brother asks about the origin of her first name instead of her last. It is also significant in that Cather, now considered a quintessentially American writer, wrote stories about immigrants and characters who feel like outsiders in American society, as Willa often feels. As author David Burr Gerrard says in a blurb for the book, "Like a latter-day Willa Cather, after whom her protagonist is named, Kyle Lucia Wu has written a beautiful novel about a ...
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