Lily, living in London, receives a mysterious letter naming her in an inheritance from a stranger in Hong Kong. To claim it, she must travel to Hong Kong. Her older sister, Maya, has received the same letter but chooses to ignore it. A successful lawyer, Maya feels no connection to her mother’s birthplace and doesn’t wish to feel beholden to anyone, especially a stranger. Maya resembles their late father, Julian, with blond hair and light eyes, while Lily resembles their late mother, Sook-Yin, with dark hair and dark eyes. Lily is convinced she embarrasses Maya because she is a constant reminder that they come from a complicated background. Just how complicated is something that Lily will soon discover when she flies to Hong Kong in late June 1997 without informing her sister.
The title of Wiz Wharton’s debut novel, Ghost Girl, Banana comes from two of the derogatory names she’s been called as the biracial child of a Hong Kong Chinese mother and white British father, setting the tone for a story inspired by her own family. Both terms will likely be familiar to anyone who has passed any time in that part of the world: a “banana” is someone “yellow on the outside and white on the inside” while “ghost girl” is “gwai mui” (the feminine of the more familiar “gwailo”), particularly cutting for someone of Asian heritage.
Wharton’s mother left Hong Kong for London in the 1960s and Wharton grew up in London in the 1970s and 1980s identifying with neither her mother’s nor her father’s background. Wharton’s mother died unexpectedly in 2009 and during the early months of the pandemic, Wharton came across digital copies of her mother’s journal, outlining her struggles as an immigrant in a place that was not always welcoming.
The scenes in Hong Kong will be familiar to people who know the city. There are views on the Peak, meetups in Mongkok, and a stay at the notorious Chungking Mansions, where Lily has a slow time adjusting.
I followed the herd along Nathan Road, through the miasma of shops and eateries, my throat itchy from hunger and thirst. At a café in Ashley Road, the smell of pork buns and ramen drew me in and I ordered one of each with a Coke. The place was clearly an oasis for Westerners, and it was only as I paid my bill that the waiter examined me closer. “Filipina?” he said. “Taiwanese?”
I grinned. Though not definitive proof of my looks, I was pleased that he thought I fitted. “My mother is from Kowloon.”
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.
Lily also hopes to remember her own time in Hong Kong when she and her family moved there for a half a year in the late 1970s. As much as Sook-Yin struggled to make a living in London, her husband, Julian, had an equally difficult time finding work in Hong Kong. Their marriage is not easy as both Sook-Yin and Julian are up against barriers constructed by culture and family.
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
At the end of the book as the Handover arrives, Lily learns the answers to her family’s many secrets, which allow her to move on with her life.