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However, the format really kept you intrigued as you joined Lily on a discovery of her mother's past, helping her to come to an understanding of not only what lead to her mother's death, but also her own ghosts within her past. The author's writing style is stunning and immersive and pulls you along through Lily and Sook Yin's stories. Lily’s mother, Sook Yin left Hong Kong in 1966, for London to train in becoming a nurse but failed due to circumstances. She met Lily’s father, Julian, who seemed to good to be true. Life was not easy and the bed was not always full of roses. Sook Yin was faced with challenges just by being her in a foreign land. Sook Yin left Hong Kong as she was told that she didn’t belong there, and now leaving London because she was told the same too? So, where did she really belong? This element was particularly well done with each timeline providing the reader with information pertinent to the other timeline, while keeping me emotionally connected to the characters in both.
At the end of the book, the author has a lovely note explaining how the book was inspired by her own mother’s diaries which she found only after her mother’s unexpected death.After giving them to her sister, who had a disc reader, Wharton received a phone call. “She told me they were Mum’s diaries, which she had started when she moved from Hong Kong to the UK. My sister said I shouldn't read them because they were so heartbreaking, but I wanted to. When I was growing up, Mum was stoic, as was typical of her generation but also because of the racism she had faced when she first came to the UK. I felt I only knew one side of her, and reading them was my way of getting to know her after she died in 2009.’
Lily is her mid-twenties and having battled with her mental health for many years, her life is beginning to stagnate. She received a letter stating she is a benefactor of a wealthy businessman in Hong Kong, her mother's homeland. Having lost her mother at a young age, and her father and sister shutting down any discussion of the same, this offers Lily the opportunity to connect with and unravel her mother's past. At the end of the book, the author has a lovely note explaining how the book was inspired by her own mother’s diaries which the author found only after her mother’s unexpected death. The title of the book is derived from two racial slurs: In Hong Kong, Lily is called “gwei mui” or ghost girl, because she doesn't fit the mould of Chinese. Her mother is called “banana” by her family because while she's ethnically Chinese, she is perceived to have become westernised on the inside. The novel is in short chapters with two alternating timelines and narrators, one for the mother in the 1960s and 70s and another for Lily in 1997. The story is about reclaiming identity, but it’s also a saga of a complicated family that holds many secrets. Lily takes it upon herself to uncover these secrets. All of Wharton’s characters are complicated and sometimes self-destructive, but Wharton also allows each a sympathetic side to each The book describes the dramatic and sad life of Sook-Yin in 1966 Hong Kong, beginning with her flying to London to study nursing, pushed out of her home by the jealousy and sibling rivalry of a vengeful older brother. Then we follow the suspenseful search of Sook-Yin's British daughter Lily some 30 years later into her mother's early life in Hong Kong. My mother is from Kowloon.” Over the years I'd evolved into the present tense and used it now by default. I found it more accessible for strangers; people were more amenable to what they expected rather than the thing that might have been true.Ghost Girl, Banana is an epic yet deeply intimate novel. I could feel the vibration of these women existing in the wider world; their stories are so skilfully shot through with the hum of change' Kate Sawyer, author of Costa prize-shortlisted The Stranding
Sook-Yin leaves HK in 1966 to her (horrible) brother's demand to make something of herself and restore respectability to their family. We follow Sook-Yin's struggles as she tries to develop her life in an alien and often hostile city. An intriguing, beautifully written study of the stories we inherit. I loved being in Lily and Sook-Yin's heads, my heart breaking for them . . . I loved it!' Nikki May Set between the last years of the “Chinese Windrush” in 1966 and Hong Kong’s Handover to China in 1997, a mysterious inheritance sees a young woman from London uncovering buried secrets in her late mother’s homeland in this captivating, wry debut about family, identity, and the price of belonging. Wharton’s ambitious first novel extends beyond this complex family saga about immigrants’ trials and tribulations to interweave two narratives of mother and daughter like a double helix. While Sook-Yin’s secret history in the 70s is told in the third person, the novel is framed through Lily’s searching first-person voice. Highly recommended for an excellent storyline, wonderful characters and the way the author includes insight in to the racism and culture clashes experienced in both timelines.After a mishap in front of her guesthouse at Chungking Mansions, the executors of the inheritance book Lily into the Peninsula. As she learns, the inheritance is from an old family friend named Hei-Fong, both a childhood friend of Sook-Yin’s brother, Chor-Kit, and an early love interest of Sook-Yin’s before she emigrated in the 1960s. Lily is determined to find out why Hei-Fong left Maya and her a million pounds to be split evenly. Her only living relative in Hong Kong is her Uncle Chor, a professor at Hong Kong University. I’m not sure I’ve read a book that made me feel so deeply for someone moving to a foreign country and trying to fit in. The writing was powerful and the characters were complex and flawed in the most magnetic ways. The path of both mother and daughter mirror each other beautifully and the battles faced by dual heritage families in 1960s London and a daughter of dual heritage in a tense Hong Kong during the 1997 handover. Lily’s story alternates with that of her mother, Sook-Yin, who came to London from Hong Kong in 1966 and when a letter about a mysterious inheritance sets Lily on a path to Hong Kong on the eve of the Handover, Lily’s and her mother’s stories begin to converge in compelling, heart-breaking ways. The complexities of relationships in Hong Kong spins Lily in circles when she goes to China to get information on the early life of her mother. I sometimes had a hard time jumping timelines from Sook-Yin in the 1960s to Lily in the 1990s and wish the book had a list of the characters that we could refer to. It may be that the final copy will have such a list of the Chinese and British names.
I was interested to learn more about the inheritance and Sook Yin's past; however, the whole story did not particularly stand out to me over other family dramas. While I liked the short chapters and found Sook-Yin's story more captivating, I sometimes got bored with the plot. And I also thought there wasn't enough depth or detail about the characters to make me truly care. However, Lily was still remembering a little bit of memories of her life in Hong Kong as well as the flight returning to London after her mother’s sudden death. She felt like there was an unfinished business. Although Maya, her elder sister, kept saying there was nothing, Lily knew there were secrets that Maya and their father had kept and she needed to return to Hong Kong to find out. The title of the book is derived from two racial slurs: In Hong Kong, Lily is called “gwei mui” or ghost girl, because she doesn't fit the mould of Chinese. Her mother is called “banana” by her family because while she's ethnically Chinese, she is perceived to have become westernised on the inside.
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Lily suffered the worst among the two daughter of Sook Yin. Maya, her elder sister was the successful one and Lily feeling like she fall short of expectations lives in gloom and depression, severely shutting herself and her hardship was hard to read sometimes. I applaud her courage for standing up to find the truth, to understand her life better, to seek for the lost connection, to actually wanting to live. This story also highlights on the independence of Hong Kong for being its own country from China. Years later, when Lily receives an unexpected inheritance from a mystery benefactor in Hong Kong, she decides to travel to her mother’s birthplace to find out why – and uncovers the secrets her family have been hiding for so long.
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