Longing to Be Seen: On Kyle Lucia Wu's "Win Me Something"

Kyle Lucia Wu | Win Me Something | Tin House | 2021 | 272 Pages

On one hand, Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel Win Me Something captures the particular season of life in which everyone else seems to have it together. Twenty-four-year-old Willa Chen doesn’t know what she wants to do for a career, and muses to friends that she’s “thinking about grad school.” She wanders New York City, marveling at the people she passes in bars, “speaking without thinking, laughing without swallowing, like it was nothing, like it was easy to find somewhere to belong.” But Win Me Something is not just any other coming-of-age story about a twenty-something New Yorker feeling lost. Willa’s own isolation stems from her experiences as a biracial Chinese American woman who grew up in two blended families and has never quite felt at home anywhere. Wu takes readers on a powerful, introspective journey that explores race, class, and family dynamics as Willa begins nannying for the Adriens, a wealthy white family in TriBeCa.

Caring for nine-year-old Bijou starts off well enough. The Adriens encourage frequent outings to museums and parks and Willa admires their apartment, where “the light from their ten-foot windows fell inside honey and golden.” Willa and Bijou cook sofrito together “like sisters, maybe,” but many factors soon complicate Willa’s fondness toward the family, such as their relatives' ignorant microaggressions. Since childhood, Willa has always patiently, self-effacingly defused any racism directed at her: “all I ever did was smile weakly, laugh a little, and wait for the moment to pass, without making a big deal of it. The most important thing was for them to think I was a good sport about the whole thing.” Willa may appear reserved to other characters, but readers experience her inner agitation thanks to Wu’s clear-eyed, intimate prose. After Bijou’s uncle Ethan rudely comments that Willa doesn’t “get that Asian flush” when drinking alcohol, he holds up his hands in defense. “That gesture,” Willa thinks, “that was why I hated him, how he could do or say anything he wanted so long as he held his hands up and said he didn’t mean it.” Wu excels at capturing seemingly small moments like these that carry much larger emotional heft, with the power to inflict lasting wounds. While Ethan may remain unaware of the harm his words cause, Wu ensures that her readers certainly do not.  

Readers also come to understand why Willa has never felt truly seen thanks to frequent flashbacks to a childhood with well-intentioned but emotionally distant parents. Willa’s white mother shows little awareness that she is raising a mixed-race child; at the same time, Willa’s father rarely talks about the Chinese heritage he shares with his daughter, even when she broaches the topic. In one particularly affecting scene, over dinner, Willa tells him how she learned in school about Afong Moy, the first recognized Chinese woman to come to America: “she was like a museum exhibit. People paid admission to come look at her, because she was Chinese. Then she was sold to P.T. Barnum, and she disappeared.” Her father changes the subject to the tripe they are eating. When Willa then asks him about coming to the United States as a child, he only says that it wasn’t easy. Willa deeply loves her father and yearns to know more. She feels she understands his experiences on a subconscious level despite not knowing the specifics: “Sometimes I felt the weight of something larger than me, as if it had slithered into my bloodstream, as if it had passed down a heaviness hanging somewhere behind my eyes.” Her questions go largely unanswered, leaving her to bear an inherited sadness she can’t quite articulate. As both her mother and father remarry and start new families, Willa must process her emotions mostly on her own, prompting a sharp desire for connection that also plays out in the book’s present-day scenes.  

Internal emotional tension propels the novel instead of dramatic plotting. Willa has trained herself to remain composed no matter what comes her way, and the level of action in the book, at least on the surface, mirrors her reserved manner. Unlike more typical nanny fiction, Win Me Something subverts readers’ expectations by exploring complex characters and concepts rather than relying on plot. Willa jumps at the opportunity to move in with the Adriens when they ask, but also begins to feel somewhat resentful of Bijou, raised “in the lemon glow” of her parents’ love, with access to so many opportunities. Bijou’s private school offers yoga classes starting in the first grade and eventually Mandarin. “The irony was not lost on me as I dropped Bijou off to learn my father’s first language and sat waiting outside,” Willa notes. “Lately, life felt like a permanent state of sitting outside doors, thinking of things I didn’t want to, while Bijou got better at things I’d never know.” Willa’s internal strife doesn’t result in any sort of dramatic confrontation; readers anticipating a big climactic scene will be left waiting, and yet this becomes part of the book’s quiet power. Wu’s affecting first-person prose achieves enough on its own, capturing the emotional toll of living with an upper-class family as a paid employee. Willa is physically present for so many intimate moments of the Adriens’s lives and yet still, somehow, shut out. “It was more luck than I could bear,” she thinks, “and here I was, being paid to stand by and hold watch.” 

A beautiful debut brimming with poetic interiority, Win Me Something explores one woman’s desire for belonging. Wu unflinchingly tackles issues of race and class while also zooming in on the nuances of her characters’ daily interactions. On Christmas Eve, when the Adriens’s doorman makes the second delivery of that day, Willa shoots him a purposefully knowing look. Even this small moment, like so many others in Wu’s novel, is more complicated than it seems. Willa had hoped to convey an unspoken message to the doorman, “something like, does it ever end with them?” And yet, once he leaves, she admits to herself, “sometimes I wished it never would.”