BelEdit Book Reviews
Boring Asian Female is a compulsive and horrifying train wreck, and anything but boring. Canwen Xu takes the ‘overachieving Asian’ stereotype and expands it into a portrait of a ruthless sociopath, literally driven mad by ambition.
The protagonist, Elizabeth Zhang, is a single-minded, high-achieving student from South Dakota whose goal is to get into Harvard Law School and become a rich lawyer. Xu cleverly draws on our natural inclination to sympathise with the quiet, bright girl who wants her qualities to be noticed and appreciated, gradually eroding that sympathy by revealing the paltry, shallow and ugly motives that drive her — empty ambition, envy, pride and greed.
“I didn’t even matter in the place that didn’t matter.”
Zhang views everyone through the lens of a ranking system, a meticulous percentile evaluation of their likeability, attractiveness and academic ability. It’s pretty reprehensible to rank people at all, but for Zhang it’s not just casual judgement for her own entertainment: it’s the very foundation of her relationships and life view. With an arrogance rooted in low self esteem (isn’t it always!), she convinces herself that she deserves success, and she’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.
She becomes obsessed with and infuriated by rival student Laura Kim, another ‘overachieving Asian’ woman who is outperforming her. When informed that she herself could be perceived as yet another ‘boring Asian female’, Zhang is desperate to get the better of Kim by proving that she is special.
As her obsession escalates, Zhang becomes more and more unhinged, sliding into mental illness. The more her life unravels, the more you see that her downfall is self-inflicted.
It’s an unsettling, increasingly dark story. You can’t help but reflect on the toxicity of a society that encourages young people to continually compare themselves to others, constantly evaluating each others’ successes and failures and trying to evaluate where they themselves fit in whatever ranking system they are judged on. And no, although social media plays a role in the narrative, this is not a facile critique of social media — it’s about broader questions of racism, sexism and other social hierarchies, and related expectations.
Boring Asian Female is a subversive and satisfying, if uncomfortable, read and a remarkably impressive début.
I dropped a half star, from 4* to 3.5, because I didn’t love the ending, but don’t let that hold you back. The pleasure of this novel is in the telling, not in the ending.
#BoringAsianFemale #NetGalley
My thanks to the publisher, author and @NetGalley_UK for providing an ARC. All my reviews are 100% honest and unbiased, regardless of how I acquire the book. And they are written by me, not AI.
You might also like: Karen Joy Fowler – We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves