Whitcoulls Recommends: Boring Asian Female and A Place to Stand

Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu. This is narrated by Elizabeth Zhang who is a driven,100 percent focused student at Columbia University, desperate to make the right path for herself for which she believes admission into Harvard Law School is a necessity. She’s completely shocked when she doesn’t get in and can’t believe that one of her classmates, Laura Kim, did - and becomes obsessed with Laura, trying to figure out what she has that Elizabeth doesn’t. Anyone who enjoyed Rebecca Kuang’s Yellowface will love this.

A Place to Stand by Clare Ward. Clare is a GP who has spent more than 30 years practising in the Hokianga, in Northland. She’s acutely aware of being Pākehā in a Māori world, having gone there knowing next to nothing about te ao māori and developing a deep respect for the traditions and beliefs which make up that world. This is a real insight into a place and its people from someone who has come to love it there and has a profound appreciation of all that it has taught her. It’s also a really beautiful book - a lovely hardcover with black and white photos throughout. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks AB.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Joining me now is Joan mackenzie Wickle's head book by
good morning, Good morning, You've got a couple of really
interesting and quite different.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Books for us this morning. Very different, that would be fair.
What have we got? The first one is a novel.
It's called Boring Asian Female by Can Ween Ju, and
it's the story of Elizabeth Jang, who's an undergrade student
at Columbia University, and she's incredibly intense. She measures her
life and her self worth and percentiles, she measures herself

(00:43):
against other people for intellect and beauty and so on.
And she's desperate to get into Harvard Law School and
she thinks that she'll be a shoe and as her
grades are simply exceptional, so she's really stunned when they
don't accept her. And eventually she reckons she's worked out
why they see her as just another boring Asian female,
which of course is where the title comes from. And

(01:04):
then she's simply gobsmacked when they take on one of
her classmates, a young woman named Laura Kim, and at
that point Elizabeth becomes obsessed about what Laura has that
she doesn't, and I have to say, she becomes increasingly unhinged.
She starts to stalk Laura on Instagram and in person.
She becomes convinced that if Harvard would just rescind their

(01:25):
offer to Laura, she could take her place instead. But
of course, then reading the book, you have to start
wondering what she would do to make that happen. It's
really very clever and very well done. Some listeners will
know a book called Yellow Face, which Rebecca Quang wrote
a few years ago and at whit cause we just
loved it, and I suspect a lot of people listening

(01:46):
will know it. If you read that and you loved it,
then this is the book for you.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Okay, brilliant. Now you've brought another book, and it's called
A Place to Stand. It is a beautiful looking book.
It is one of those books which is a joy
to sort of hold. It's very tactile, very tactile, and
to flick through, but it tells an incredible story as well.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yes, it's set in Hokianga up in the far North,
and it's written by a woman called Claire Ward who
is a practicing gp up there. She's been there for
over thirty years. And I say two things about this.
I love this book and I would love to have
her as my doctor. It's a very thoughtful, in many
ways quite profound reflection on life and life as she's

(02:30):
discovered it over many years in the Far North. When
she first arrived, she was unfamiliar with Maori protocol and
custom and the way in which you need to manage
yourself and work with people in that community. And I
believe that she's part of a practice which has seven
thousand patients on its book and almost seventy five percent

(02:50):
of them are Maori. And over the years she's really
come to understand the importance of being respectful and.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Thoughtful.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
And this really is a book about bridging between two worlds.
I think it's a very special book because all the
way through she tells lots of stories about things that
she's been told by people who live in the area,
about their ancestors, or about their family, or about their
own place in the world. And she's put black and

(03:21):
white photographs all the way through it, which I can
only assume that she took. And it's very evocative of Hokianga.
I know that area reasonably well, and I absolutely love her.
And of course it's quite remote, it's isolated, and these
pictures really reflect that. But it is a thoughtful, lovely book.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Oh wonderful. Thank you so much, Joan. Boring Asian Female
by can Wenju is the first book. The second book,
A Place to Stand by Claire Ward. Thanks Joan.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
See you next week.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
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