Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu
Review of Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu
Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu (2021). Published by Tin House Books
Win Me Something is one of those books I have heard about naturally, just by being a writer active in the scene. I’d first seen Kyle Lucia Wu not as a writer, but as a nonprofit person working at Kundiman. Being a broke Iranian-American writer myself, Kundiman was one of the few organizations that’s available for people my ethnicity to get support and attend workshops, or even have the chance to attend one of their retreats as a fellow, and so I saw Wu a few times at the workshops I’d attend because she worked there. Naturally, when she had the book come out, I knew pretty quickly because the literary scene in New York City is quite small if you know the people in it, and so they were all promoting the book.
And so as soon as I got the chance I picked up the book, just because I was interested in the person (I had no idea she wrote, but because I’d seen her in Zoomland I was like: Yes! I need to read that!). I hadn’t read the plot beforehand, but having been [again] a broke kid who briefly lived in New York City as a young adult, this was a book I vibed with on a certain level. If you’re ever lost in life and living in New York City with no money, you’re going to understand the unique struggle going on here.
Anyways, I’m rambling quite a bit, so let’s get on with the review.
Willa Chen, while having an existential crisis, is thrust into the world of nannying for the rich.
Our main character in this novel is Willa Chen, a mixed-race girl from New Jersey who seems a bit lost in life. She’s twenty-four years old, has a degree in psychology, is living with her roommate/former co-worker, and doesn’t know if she should go to graduate school or merely exist on this plane of life for a bit longer. But her world begins to change when her roommate recommends her to a rich family in Manhattan to nanny their daughter Bijou, who seems to have the life that Willa isn’t.
Bijou and Willa seem to be complete and utter foils of each other. Willa doesn’t know how to cook, but Bijou, at age nine, is already whipping up fancy foods that the average person can’t afford and dreams of opening up her own restaurant. Willa can’t speak any Mandarin, despite being Chinese-American, but Bijou has been getting all these private lessons in Mandarin for almost a year now.
We also see Willa constantly alone outside of her position as a nanny; her only friend seems to be her roommate, who, after finding out that Willa got offered a chance to live with the family, immediately is just like “bye I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”
The novel does this entire split timeline situation as almost every chapter alternates between the past and the present. We go back into Willa’s childhood and spectate the impacts of her parent’s divorce. She doesn’t fit in with her father’s new family, not Chinese enough for them, but she also doesn’t fit in with her mother and her new boyfriend.
She feels completely and utterly alienated in her childhood, which is why she’s lowkey a mess as an adult. Willa does come across as self-victimizing in these sections because of how she presents her story—because of the first person perspective, we’re forced to really get personal with this girl.
Her biggest character traits are that she’s too in-the-moment and is quite the lonely person. I say she lives too in the moment because of how she neglects some of her duties with Bijou, then even goes into Bijou’s mother’s closet and tries on her clothes when she’s gone. She attempts a relationship of sorts with Bijou’s uncle, a PhD student at Princeton, which is an unwise decision that may or may not have gotten her dismissed from the position.
She loses the girls she’s in charge of at the birthday party, almost leading herself into another disaster yet again. Willa is almost quite self-destructive because of how she doesn’t plan ahead, as she thinks she’ll be in this job forever. But, eventually, Bijou grows up and that comes in less than a year of being in the job.
However, at the same time, she manages to fall in love with this family of sorts. She has constructed this fake identity around her, a mythos of sorts, and that’s what the Adriens know of her. Whether it’s a passive aggressive remark or a sly statement that can boil down to stereotyping because she’s Asian, Willa so desperately accepts all of this because she wants to live the quote-on-quote perfect and ideal life that this family is living. But by digging into her past, we learn why this’ll never be. She wasn’t born into privilege like them, nor will she be able to casually rise to the top.
We also see how this rejection of her is ingrained in the family itself. When Willa is slapped on the butt by Bijou’s nine-year-old cousin, the mother merely waves it off. But then when the mother’s brother, the PhD student, attempts to get on it with Willa and tries to be disgustingly slick, he straight up gaslights her and makes her think that she’s the problem. And that’s the reality for so many women, especially Asian-American women. They are led, or forced to believe, that they are the ones to blame for everything gone wrong in their lives.
However, this depiction of Willa can be considered extremely stereotypical of the classic Asian woman. While it humanizes the story and turns it into something that is palatable, more human for readers, it makes these kinds of narratives more accessible. Am I capable of thinking that it subverts the stereotype? No. The story merely ends with Willa being fired and nothing else happens. So what is the point Wu is trying to make? I feel like I’m missing something with this book but can’t place my finger on it, which is what ultimately ends up frustrating me.
Overall Thoughts
It’s well-written. I just don’t think I’m the audience for this book because I found myself grasping at what exactly the point of it was. It gives a bit of a “woe is me” kind of vibe when it comes to Willa’s situation, when, to be honest, she doesn’t have it that bad when she’s nannying with the rich family. Willa is someone who was able to escape from her family dynamics and was capable of winning something for herself, but she doesn’t know how to. It’s really sad to think about how lost this girl is and how she clings to the prospects that the present moment gives her, but, at the same time, this makes her unlikeable as a narrator. She needs to find a home, yes, but the novel ends much too soon in order to give me a satisfying ending that’ll make me nod and understand why all of this needed to happen.
