In her debut novel, Boring Asian Female, Canwen Xu has written a surprising page-turner about a seemingly mundane topic: graduate school admission.
Elizabeth Zhang is a senior at Columbia University in New York who has applied to Harvard Law School, fully expecting her superior academic record and extracurriculars to pave the way to acceptance. When she receives a rejection letter, she is stunned—even more so when she learns that a fellow Columbia classmate, Laura Kim, was accepted.
After a full blown panic attack, Elizabeth’s shock turns to anger and loathing. Her burning question: what does Laura have that I don’t? She surmises that Laura was admitted in a slot reserved for high-achieving Asian American women and that she, Elizabeth, was discarded into the “Boring Asian Female” bin. She refuses to accept the rejection, convincing herself that Harvard must have made a mistake.
Born and raised in South Dakota to Chinese immigrant parents, Elizabeth attended public schools and considers her family comfortably middle class. She rather comically judges the people around her through the superficial attributes of good looks, academic standing, and family wealth and status, rating them numerically. She ranks herself, for instance, in the 70th percentile for attractiveness, 99th for academics and 10th for likeability. Her assessments are not without emotion. Says Elizabeth of one of her best friends: “Leah was the kind of beautiful that made you want to hate her but also be her best friend.”
Elizabeth becomes obsessed with Laura and investigates her background and personal habits. At first her probing is relatively harmless, starting with online research, but the sleuthing takes a dark turn and becomes more and more intrusive. She follows and observes her nemesis, sitting next to her in class, noting what she orders for lunch, tracking her at parties, following her on social media. She communicates with Laura under a fake name, aiming to entrap her in various schemes to ruin her reputation, the end goal being for Harvard to rescind her admission.
The obsession fills Elizabeth with an exquisite kind of angst. “The proximity to Laura made my body buzz with adrenaline. I spent so much time looking at photos of her online that when I saw her in person, it was like seeing a celebrity.” At the same time, Elizabeth schemes to enhance her own resume. In one kooky gambit she thinks her recent pregnancy and subsequent single motherhood will mark her as distinctive and cause Harvard to reconsider its rejection.
Xu explores stereotypes of Asian Americans from the inside out, taking a fresh look at Asians’ perceptions of themselves and others from a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds: those with immigrant parents, mixed race families, families that lived in predominantly white communities and in Asian majority communities.
Xu can be witty and cutting. Describing one minor character, she writes: “Leo wasn’t bad looking, but he represented that specific type of Columbia student whose personality was based on hating things. He hated capitalism, neoliberalism, second-wave feminism, corporate greed, economics majors, iPhones, and the Supreme Court. When he wasn’t worshipping his gay dads who had adopted him from an orphanage in Vietnam, bragging about some trip that they took him on, he hated them, complained about their white savior complex, said they were even worse than the birth parents who abandoned him on the side of the street.”
The action picks up at the end of the novel, when one audacious move by Elizabeth follows another. As the story reaches its climax, she is spiraling and out of control. The lies grow thicker as Elizabeth increasingly deceives her friends – and herself.
The suspense builds. What will she do next? How low will she go? What will the consequences be of her reckless behavior?
You’ll have to read the book to find out!
David Takami is the author of Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle, numerous essays and online content about Asian American history, and dozens of book reviews published mostly in The Seattle Times. He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, NY and has lived in Honolulu, Tokyo and Seattle. He now lives in Kenmore, Washington.
