But the Girl

Title: But the Girl

Author: Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

‘I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals – that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me.’

Girl is spending the spring at an artist’s residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can’t stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a ‘postcolonial novel’? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?

Photography by Sarah Walker

Judges’ report

Deeply philosophical, But the Girl, artfully explores nuanced intersections of race, gender, class, and cultural heritage as it follows Girl travelling to Scotland for an artist’s residency. Girl’s project is to work on a ‘post colonial novel’ and complete her PhD on Sylvia Plath, yet she is soon questioning both her ability to write the novel and her commitment to Plath. Yu portrays the unescapable dilemma and complexity of a young woman with Malaysian heritage, discovering who she is rather than who she is expected to be while far from Australia and family. Studded with memorable lines such as ‘my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me’, the sharply observant and honest narrator interrogates whose voices dominate literature, and what it means to immerse readers in marginalised worlds and experiences. This is an eloquent, playfully subversive and astute new voice.

Extract

My Ah Ma told me all the time that she loved me. Though I don’t know if you would call ‘love’ what she called ‘love’. ‘Love’ is such a promiscuous, easy word in English. The ‘love’ in I love tomatoes is the same ‘love’ in to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. It’s strange and unnatural to say that unsayable word in Chinese unless you are a crying actress in a soap opera or a pop star with a new single to promote. Love is expressed in Chinese the way a poet writes about flowers – slantwise, in riddles, in rhymes, coyly. You have to read between the lines, be an intelligent interpreter of literature, to really understand it. Sometimes you have to read against the grain of the author’s intention and sometimes you think you’re crazy for imagining that love is even there. So, it’s hard to explain what I mean when I say she loved me – or as she said when she was especially angry at me – she sayang me.

I remember feeling the empty ‘oh’ of loss and recognition when a teacher in primary school asked us to describe our grandmothers. This was the kind of masak-masak that my parents said happened in Australian schools. Sitting around talking about grandmothers when there was real work to be done. Taylor, a girl who was more freckle than skin, said that her grandmother made the best apple crumble. And then a boy I don’t remember much more of said something about lemon drizzle cake. And another girl mentioned honey joys. Foods with childish but lovely names that sounded like a person was eating the sun. And I wondered why my grandmother had never so much as opened the oven in our house. She certainly hadn’t made anything with a silly, careless name like drizzle or crumble or joy.

When Ah Ma really cooked it was a long and bloody affair. For New Year’s Eve, she bought a live duck, and killed and drained it in the backyard. The next day she sat on the cement steps of our backyard plucking the feathers off one by one. Her day-to-day cooking was inevitably fried over a huge greasy pan on the gas stove in the backyard that blew out an ugly smog that choked you. As she cooked, she opened her fist and gave me Spam sliced up and fried as a snack. Campbell’s Chicken Soup boiled over the big fire with chopped-up frankfurters floating along inside it. Fried ikan-bilis with peanuts and sambal so spicy that just the smell made me cry.

Ah Ma was not the benign, cotton-wool-haired grandmothers of the other kids. She didn’t knit scarves or bake cookies or whatever other aesthetically pleasing and completely unnecessary housework they did. She pulled weeds out of the ground with her hands, the wrinkles in her palms caked with black dirt; swept up the flame-like petals of the magnolia tree as they decorated the grass and threw their beauty into the red bin; knelt down onto the wooden floors and washed them with a rag cloth; ironed shirts with mathematical precision; burned rubbish; pulled clean clothes out of my cupboard to wash them; gossiped about my mother on the phone to whoever would listen; watched TV covertly when she was sure that my parents were out for a while; basically did everything a live-in maid from the middle of Malaysia would do, which is what she had been for most of her adult life. Ma told me that she had tried to tell Ah Ma that she no longer had to earn her bowl of rice, but she didn’t believe her. She told me and anyone who would listen that my mother oppressed her, used her as free labour and held her housework to impossible and irrational standards, essentially she thought that my mother had made her life hell. She believed that she was still a kind of servant; of the house but not in it, essential to our lives but peripheral to them. She still didn’t really know how much she meant to me even now – a second mother, a third parent, a thorn in my flesh that I would never remove.

She was a hard, brown-skinned woman with a bad temper. Her stamina for anger made me think of Eliud Kipchoge. Her focus and motivation made the mental and physical discipline of bitterness feel like an athletic feat. She would get so angry with me sometimes that she would scream at me for hours. But she never stopped the housework for me – she would rant and rave while washing the dishes I had dirtied, hanging the clothes I had worn and pulling the weeds from the grass that I played on. If I ran inside the house to avoid her, quietly sliding the glass door behind me, she would scream louder so that I would still be able to hear her, and the neighbours too. Sometimes she wasn’t angry with me – it was Ma or, occasionally, Ikanyu that she was screaming about. But she still wanted me to hear her.

Sometimes I made her laugh. I was a kid, after all. But she felt that showing me her smile was like going out naked. As the laugh faded from her face she told me that she would punch me in the face and then I would know. This knowledge she was always trying to thrust onto me – what was it? An understanding of how the world’s hard face wouldn’t soften for me or something like it perhaps. She would laugh and laugh and then she would threaten to hit me and I would know that I was her favourite thing in all the world.

Being old and having worked too much, she was always in some kind of pain. She had gout which swelled her feet and legs, so they glowed with a raw shiny hurt. She had arthritis in her hands which made the housework she did everyday a ritualised torture. She had a heart condition which made her clutch her chest when we walked to the supermarket. She had slipped and fallen once while washing the driveway with soap and water and blood had unspooled from her brain. She applied pain to her pain like a balm as she scrubbed her hands raw with a thick brush and soap to get the brown colour off. She took a kitchen knife to the balls of her feat to remove the hard grey skin. I would walk into her bedroom after dinner and find her cutting at her feet, bleeding in her bedsheets, and watching Burke’s Backyard. She grimaced but she never said anything because she was afraid of hospitals and doctors and death. She was kiann-sí.

The orchids were the only thing she really loved. But they almost never had the chance to bloom because she pruned them every day, lovingly cutting them back to nothing. Twenty-six black plastic pots that only sprouted long, green leaves all year round. If I played outside, she would hover around me, telling me not to go near them. They were a kind of dangerous magic, the orchids. Anything could happen around them.