Wiz Wharton’s title comes with a sting in its tail. “Ghost girl” is a literal translation of the Cantonese gwai-mui, a term still sometimes used to describe white girls, while “banana” (being yellow on the outside and white inside) refers to westernised Asians.
Ghost Girl, Banana sets out to confront family secrets forged by intergenerational shame and uprootedness. In 1966 Sook-Yin is forced by her family from Hong Kong to London to train as a nurse and send money home. Her immigrant life is a case study for Murphy’s law – anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. Unable to find work, she becomes pregnant and goes on to marry blundering businessman Julian in misplaced hope, and to experience persistent racism.
Debts pile up thanks to Julian’s incompetence and alcoholism, and to rescue the marriage they have another child. When Sook-Yin convinces Julian and their daughters Maya and Lily to move to Hong Kong for a new life, misfortune prevails. Influenced by Sook-Yin’s shifty brother Ah-Choi, Julian gets involved with loan sharks in the notorious Kowloon Walled City. Trying to save him and the family, Sook-Yin reconnects with her childhood friend Hei-Fong, now a successful banker, but tragedy strikes.
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.
“My immigrant mother had died and left me with half an identity about as useful as a broken mug,” Lily says in London in 1997. Lost, depressed and feeling inferior to her elder sister Maya, Lily’s quest for her heritage is sparked when she is unexpectedly named in the will of a wealthy Chinese stranger. She faces the life-changing prospect of inheriting half a million pounds on the condition that she visits Hong Kong to sign the papers.
Many burning questions arise for Lily and the reader: who left her the money? Why? How is the inheritance related to Sook-Yin or Julian? Should Lily take it? Will Maya be jealous? Readers won’t be disappointed as Wharton ultimately resolves many mysteries in the book, though sometimes with a neatness that softens the surprise.
Heritage and inheritance are often two sides of the same coin. Reading Ghost Girl, Banana is like constantly flipping that coin. Wharton structures Lily’s narrative around the Chinese tradition of 49 days of mourning, marking her emotional milestones and her search for truth and a purpose in life. With short, alternating sections between Sook-Yin and Lily, chronicling their lives respectively in 1960s-70s London and in Hong Kong during the handover, Wharton sets up an intriguing pendulum in which time swings back and forth and is endlessly interrupted. It’s as if the world experienced by the biracial Lily is always incomplete.
This overarching structure puts the reader in a privileged position, often one step ahead of Lily. It also creates a poignant connection that Sook-Yin and Lily couldn’t have made together. Yet this approach can be formulaic and heavy-handed, introducing repetitions and lengthening the narrative. With Wharton’s extensive cast of subsidiary characters and a multilayered labyrinth of cross-generational secrets, the plot occasionally feels discombobulating, especially when Lily acts like an amateur heritage-detective in Hong Kong, painstakingly collecting information from neighbours, strangers and uncooperative relatives.
On the surface, Ghost Girl, Banana hinges on debt and identity, but Wharton has also written an unsettling tale about sibling rivalry and disbelonging. With truth in sight, Lily reflects that “maybe it was never that I didn’t belong but simply that everyone had something to hide from me”. Later, Lily watches the union jack being lowered at the handover ceremony and identifies it as “the moment when Hong Kong belonged to nobody”. Most memorably, when stuck in 1970s London, Sook-Yin “wondered if she was simply creating the illusion of authenticity”. These moments of wishful thinking come close to irony, as there is no family without secrets, no city without a country, and no authenticity without a counterfeit.
Wharton mentions that the book is inspired by her late mother’s diaries, and a reader can’t help wondering how it might have worked as a memoir. Nevertheless, her syncopated narrative suspense pays off. Once the mystery is solved, the cloud of self-doubt lifts and Lily triumphantly completes her project of self-growth. If you believe in strong closure in fiction, you’re in for a treat.
• Kit Fan is the author of Diamond Hill (Dialogue). Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
