(courtesy Hachette Australia)
We are all products of our past and present.
That might seem self-evident and startling obvious, but for all its lived veracity, the truth is that we often struggle to bridge the two or to fully understand and live out how the past impacts on the current life we’re leading because once its done and gone, it can feel like that our personal history never existed at all.
And that’s if, like many of us, you have documentation aplenty physically affirming that certain events happened involved particular people with known outcomes.
But what if you’re like Lily, the protagonist of Wiz Wharton’s emotionally novel Ghost Girl, Banana whose mother died when Lily was a child and who is shrouded in a mystery borne of lingering grief and broken relationships and a trenchant inability, and unwillingness, to know or face up to the past.
How does the Lily of 1997, trapped in a dead-end job after leaving university unexpectedly early and discordantly connected to her sister Maya, handle things when she is named with her sibling as one of the beneficiaries of the will of a man of whom they have no knowledge but who was clearly close to their mother Sook-Yin, who emigrated to the UK in 1966, the hopes of her family impelling onward?
The only way for her to claim is to travel to Hong Kong, then just months from passing back to China under the “One Country, Two Systems” agreement, and find out whether all the good fortune on offer is worth the cost of digging up the past.
Good Price was as good as his word and found me a room on a different floor. Once he’d left, I turned out my pockets. Ninety dollars and not even a passport. I threw myself onto the bed, foetused against the pillow, my stomach a web of panicked knots. How as I going to stay now? And how the hell would I get home?
Maya outright rejects the idea, even though the money on offer for each of the siblings is considerable – 500,000 pounds apiece – but almost on a whim Lily decides to go, reasoning that there’s nothing much going on for her in Britain which feels strangely unwelcoming despite being her home, in face of her English father’s relatively recent death and her dream of opening a musical school looking as moribund as her love life.
Much of Lily’s initial time in Hong Kong, which takes places in the latter half of the 49-day window of the grieving period following someone’s death – she must have signed on the dotted line by the end of the period or completely forfeit her inheritance – is spent trying to get bearings, not just physically but emotionally with slow-building revelations making her realise the life of her mother was a good deal more complicated than she’d ever imagined.
As she meets long-lost relatives, and makes new friends, some wholly unexpected, she begins that journey that anyone who digs into their parents’ past goes on, one that involves discovering they weren’t just a parental figure but a human being who grappled the usual raft of pain and joy, hope and disappointment that everyone goes through.
But the thing is, many of us don’t see our parents as fully-formed people, not really, and it’s fascinating and gently moving to see Lily coming to grips with who her mother was, who her father turned out to be in her presence (first a saviour of sorts, then manifestly not) and to witness her being transformed on the way.
(courtesy official Twitter account / image (c) Robert Logan)
This is perhaps what makes reading Ghost Girl, Banana so immersively compelling.
Like many children borne of two cultures, Lily has straddled them unequally, tending more towards her British side if only because that is where she was brought up, largely by an English dad, divorced from her Chinese roots and family members who may have bridged that gaping cultural divide.
The title uses two terms that refer to dual ethnicity with the implied idea, often sadly pejorative, that you are neither fully one culture or the other, and unacceptable in some ways to both sides because of that; possibly because of her insular English upbringing, Lily has never fully experienced and that and so when she comes across that attitude at the hands of various people in hong Kong, most notably her poisonous uncle and mum’s brother, she’s initially confronted by the raw judgement implicit in it.
But then at she goes on, discovering more and more of who her mother really was and how much she lost in coming to the UK even as she gained two daughters she loved, a healing of sorts takes place; not the kind that Hollywood loves so much with Road to Damascus epiphanies and singing angels on high.
Sook-Yin did not understand until the old woman stepped forward and spat at her. ‘Banana!’ she shouted in her face. ‘Only yellow on the outside. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
Rather Lily finds some sense of peace in uniting her two parts and her past and her present, and it creeps up on her, moving her from dislocation and disquiet through to curiosity and uneasy intrigue to a sense of peace and honesty with herself and others.
It feels wholly and affectingly organic, and it infuses the beautifully readable pages of Ghost Girl, Banana with an authentic sense of someone discovering how powerful identity can be when it’s based on all the information at hand and not simply what others choose to reveal.
As Lily pieces the shattered parts of her and Maya’s past back together, or at least holds all the pieces together since not everything can be fixed or healed, her sense of family and connection is restored too, leaving her no longer isolated and defensive but open to embracing a world that makes a whole lot more sense to her because she knows better who she is, who her family was and is, and what she wants from life.
Difficult though some of her discoveries, and fraught though the journey is at times, Ghost Girl, Banana also shows how quietly powerful healing of the soul can be and how knowing who you are, really knowing who you are, can quietly but fundamentally change you for the better,
There is such beauty to both the story and the exquisite writing used to tell it, making Ghost Girl, Banana one of those novels that is simultaneously a literary work of art but also a grounded insight, told with empathy and compassion, and not a little wit, into what happens when we are brave enough to search for the past unvarnished and unite with a troubled present, not knowing what will happen but hoping it is something better than what came before.