Hard truths
Like her ‘Win Me Something’ character, Kyle Lucia Wu struggles to find her place
Willa Chen’s mother is remarried, with a new son. Willa’s father is remarried, with two daughters. And Willa doesn’t feel caught in the middle so much as she feels left out in the cold, with no one deeply invested in her and her future.
As a biracial Asian American woman who works as a barista and then a nanny for a wealthy Manhattan family, Willa feels further alienated, either unseen and unheard or denigrated by microaggressions from oblivious New Yorkers.
Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel, “Win Me Something,” doesn’t feature much in the way of plot. Instead, it immerses readers in a poignant, often painful character study. We enter Willa’s constricted world and diminished dreams as she wanders through life. She’s continually uncertain of what her next step should be, whether it’s in her future or in her relationships with Nathalie and Gabe Adrien and their daughter, Bijou, for whom she works.
Wu, 32, grew up with divorced parents and moved to New York for college when she was 18, but while the heart-rending flashbacks to Willa’s family life may resonate, the story is not autobiographical.
Wu, who moved to Los Angeles about a year ago, talked by Zoom recently about isolation and loneliness and false ideas of assimilation, all of which resonate throughout her book. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
Willa feels frozen, unable to pursue real relationships or figure out what she wants to do with her life. How much of that is shaped by her feeling of being an outsider because she is biracial, and how much of it was feeling like an outsider in her own family after her parents divorced and each started new families?
A
It is the intersection of those things, of growing up feeling unsure of her racial identity but also of not having a nuclear family. Family is the first place we learn where we belong, and without that sense of stability she ended up feeling not part of one. You have to take risks and put yourself out there to make a connection, but it can be very difficult for people who don’t have a sense of trust or stability. Being vulnerable is really important, but it’s easier for some rather than others.
If you do feel that stability, it might feel easier to put yourself out on a branch and it doesn’t affect you as much if something doesn’t work out. But if you have a history where things don’t work out, that makes it difficult, and accumulated experiences make it easy for people to isolate.
Q
Did you have to struggle with this when you were trying to sell the book?
A
I certainly felt vulnerable putting this book out into the world and the publishing industry. This is a book that focuses on experiences outside the margins and is not part of the traditional Western novel of conflict and plot.
It was a long journey and at times a devastating experience. Agents would say things like, “I just didn’t really connect with her” or “I didn’t identify with her,” but the whole book is about how people can’t identify with Willa, so they were hitting on the problem within the book.
When you’re younger and starting out, there’s a lot of myths in your head about success and these easy paths. And you hope you’ll go that way rather than the ordinary way.
I certainly had times after being rejected by every agent where I felt very discouraged and thought, “I’m done. I’m not working on this anymore.” Then I won this fellowship at the Asian American Writers Workshop. That was a real blessing, and that vote of confidence was the main reason I went to work on the book again.
Q
You’ve written about you and your brother driving to your father’s one year and getting lost in a snowstorm and having to get out and shake off a sign to see what highway you were on. It seems like a great fiction scene and one which would have said a lot about Willa feeling lost going between her two families. Were you tempted to use that?
A
That’s a story my brother and I think of a lot, but the key difference is I was there with my older brother, who was an ally and who I always had.
Willa doesn’t have anyone. I didn’t put any things that actually happened to me in the book because our circumstances were different but also because you can often tell when someone takes a true thing and puts it in because it doesn’t quite align. I’m looking for emotional truths and so I’d rather create an action or event that’s resonant with the rest of the book.
Q
Does working for such a wealthy, high-achieving family warp Willa’s views in terms of these myths of success? And does that hold her back or drive her forward?
A
I think about Willa’s arc as proximal to that of assimilation. She gets very close to power and success and so it’s almost like she has power too and thinks it will rub off on her and she will ascend, but that’s false. Willa thinks, “This is how I jump ahead,” but the truth is that you often don’t, because those spots of power are fixed and predetermined. For Nathalie’s brother, Ethan, it’s different — no matter what Ethan does, his position is safe. And I think it’s positive that Willa gets to learn that difference.
Q
Eventually, we see her half-sister Charlotte perceives Willa and their family dynamics very differently from the way Willa explained it to us. Is Willa an unreliable narrator, or is she just a human narrator and we’re all tied to our own perceptions?
A
We’re all our own unreliable narrators because we are in our own experience. But also what is apparent is that Charlotte grew up with that sense of stability and whole family, so probably it’s difficult for her to understand what Willa feels. Perhaps Charlotte assumes Willa doesn’t feel this discomfort because she doesn’t. Similarly, Willa’s mom doesn’t understand her biracial experience growing up because she didn’t grow up with it. It’s examining the way we can overlook the experiences of others if we’re not conscious about the differences.