WIN ME SOMETHING, by Kyle Lucia Wu • Book Reviews

Fiction by Kyle Lucia Wu, reviewed by Annie Cao
WIN ME SOMETHING (Tin House)

In Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu’s enthralling debut novel, Willa Chen is a biracial Chinese-American girl who starts a nannying job for the Adriens, a wealthy family in Tribeca. Willa has always struggled to feel a sense of belonging when it comes to community; she’s not fully Chinese but not fully white either. She faces racial prejudice and microaggressions while living in New Jersey as a child and New York as an adult. Her parents are divorced and have started their own separate families, but she has trouble feeling connected to either one. Whether because of her racial background or family situation, Willa exists on the margins—she sticks out due to her differences and is never truly understood.

At the beginning of the novel, Willa claims that she just “[floats] silently through” the world, no one recognizing her struggles. Her life lacks defined movement; when Nathalie—her employer—asks about her future career plans, Willa indicates that she never had any. She might even want to be a nanny forever. The novel’s structure switches back and forth between Willa’s past experiences and current job with the Adriens, which demonstrates how she is still haunted by her childhood, unable to move on with her life. Her nannying duties constantly evoke memories of her family, and Wu interweaves moments in the Adriens’ apartment with reflections about Willa’s own personal history. Because Willa is always reminded of the past, she is never fully situated in the present. She doesn’t have a healthy sense of time, direction, or purpose.

Willa’s nannying job is used to explore her childhood and identity. When she interacts with Bijou—the child she nannies—and studies the Adriens’ family dynamic, Willa is not only brought back to decades-old memories of her parents and half-siblings, but also offered a model for the family she always wanted but never had. When Willa first starts nannying, Nathalie makes paella with her and Bijou. Willa marvels at Nathalie’s attentiveness, and while standing with Bijou at the kitchen counter, she pictures the two of them as sisters collectively under Nathalie’s care. She thinks, “I felt a hot kind of jealousy for how Bijou would turn out, having been raised in the arms of someone who knew what she was doing. For how she woke up in the lemon glow of Nathalie’s attention.”

Nannying reminds Willa of the past, but also gives her a sense of belonging and hope for the future. She learns to cook and take care of the household, becoming acquainted with the intimate details of not only Bijou’s routine, but also the Adriens’ family life. She begins to feel like a part of the Adrien family. As Willa is immersed in the environment of her job, her self-image also changes. When Willa and Bijou get food poisoning, Nathalie takes care of Willa alongside her own daughter, giving her cold compresses and allowing her to stay in the guest bedroom. In other words, Willa’s role as the caretaker is reversed. “Maybe I wasn’t a good nanny,” she contemplates. “I barely thought about Bijou…I had been thinking of myself…how I wanted to have a mother to return to. But Nathalie asked me to stay. And then I had thought only of her.” Nathalie meets Willa’s need for “a mother to return to,” inadvertently compensating for Willa’s neglected upbringing. As the novel progresses, Willa develops a sense of attachment to Nathalie and the Adriens as a whole, and starts to imagine a life where she belongs to their world.

Wu, like Willa, is also biracial with divorced parents. In an essay published by Catapult, she describes how she faced similar challenges to Willa, feeling out of place in both her family and racial community. However, when Wu tried to write about these experiences, her teachers, agents, and editors found the story unremarkable; they were unable to connect with it. In a workshop, she was told that Willa’s life was too “ordinary,” that there was nothing “incredible” about it.

But this is why Win Me Something is valuable to read—it illuminates difficult experiences that might otherwise be glossed over as unimportant, helping marginalized and forgotten individuals like Willa be seen. At the end of the novel, Willa explains to the reader, “I guessed what I wanted more than anything was for someone to share my view of the universe, to step inside what things were like for me, and say it was real.” Willa wants to be understood, for someone to know “what things were like for [her],” and this is exactly what the novel does—it shares her story with a wide audience, allowing others to feel her sense of disconnect, her racial and familial isolation.

Wu enables readers to understand Willa through a vivid depiction of her inner state. Willa describes all her feelings, observations, and experiences with truthfulness and vulnerability. The novel is notable for her sensitive perception of life and the emotional revelations that surround it. Aside from Willa’s remarkable interiority, her story’s authenticity is also enhanced by Wu’s realistic portrayal of the characters. Willa, for instance, feels common human emotions like embarrassment, selfishness, and frustration. She has many insecurities and is easily affected by the world around her. Wu also doesn’t oversimplify the Adriens into a flat, superficial depiction of ignorance, but gives their characters nuance and complexity—for example, despite her indirect prejudice and microaggressions, Nathalie is still considerate of and attentive to Willa. Willa also admires her, noticing how hard she works at her career and taking care of Bijou. Through Nathalie and others, Wu generates a realistic and thought-provoking discussion about the different ways racist attitudes can manifest in society. Willa’s genuine, transparent inner life and the realism of the novel’s characters not only make it easy for readers to follow and absorb the story, but also encourage them to comprehend the novel as a representation of real-life experiences rather than just fiction.

Despite the honesty and realism of the novel, Willa is sometimes less straightforward as a narrator. Her actions and memories can be metaphorical or significant in an ambiguous way, rather than explained clearly and directly. At one point, Willa and Bijou are making collages from magazine catalogs. After Bijou opens up to her about her deceased grandmother, Willa “[turns] the page to an advertisement for a horror show, and [cuts] around a dangling key.” Wu’s choice to have her do this is specific and symbolic; there is something touching, perhaps hopeful, about this act of extracting a key from the context of a horror show. The novel is filled with motifs of food and flowers, which convey themes of culture, community, and appearance that readers can interpret for themselves. When passages reflecting on her childhood are interwoven with ones about her nannying job, Willa doesn’t spell out the relationship between past and present moments—instead, the audience must read between the lines and autonomously come to a conclusion. When readers learn to understand Willa on their own terms rather than being spoon-fed every piece of information, they can build a stronger connection to her.

Wu’s storytelling is often suggestive and intriguing, perhaps even poetic—she weaves subtle details and metaphors into the narrative, which draws readers into the complexity of Willa’s story and compels them to search for deeper meanings and connections. Like its characters, many of the novel’s messages are nuanced and ambiguous, but Wu keeps the story grounded in reality by balancing abstractions with direct explanations of Willa’s inner thoughts. Whether it be through narration that is suggestive or specific, Win Me Something ensures that the reader gains an understanding of what it is like to be Willa. And beyond that, Willa’s life is relatable even to those without the same racial background or familial circumstances as her. It speaks to anyone who has ever felt out of place or forgotten in their community, capturing universal sentiments of loneliness and yearning for love, understanding, and belonging.

Annie Cao is from Colorado and studies at Princeton University. Her writing appears in The Kenyon Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Hunger Mountain. She has been recognized by the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of the UK, and Columbia College Chicago, among others.