A Reflection on Wondrous Woo

Abstract

As a second-generation Chinese Canadian immigrant, I reflect on and respond to my first encounter with Chinese Canadian literature: Carrianne Leung’s The Wondrous Woo. The Wondrous Woo is a YA novel following a Chinese girl, Miramar, who resides in the suburbs of Toronto as she navigates through university, relationships, and family hardships. My lack of exposure to Chinese Canadian literature combined with my desire to see Asian Canadians represented in popular media creates certain expectations for the novel. When The Wondrous Woo fails to represent my own experience of cultural hybridity, I find myself grappling with feelings of anger and frustration. The narrative forces me to ask whether novels like The Wondrous Woo can sustain novel quality while encouraging readers to explore complex dimensions of a diverse society, or if they address racism using stories with hidden objectives to commodify Chinese culture. By reading The Wondrous Woo through Nai-Hua Kuo's article "Depictions of Chinese Americans in Young Adult Literature," to problematize what it means for a novel to be a quality multicultural text, I begin to gain a new understanding of what Carrianne Leung is trying to illustrate in The Wondrous Woo.