Boring Asian Female by Canwen Xu
“This is just a mistake. I’m going to get all of this sorted out in no time. They just need to know that they made a mistake.”
In Canwen Xu’s Boring Asian Female, Elizabeth Zhang has it all planned out. She’s maintained a 3.9 GPA at Columbia and picked all the right professors for letters of recommendation to Harvard Law School, from which she will leap into a high-flying career in corporate law and prove to everybody that she is a person who matters.
There’s just one little problem. Harvard Law has inexplicably not accepted her. Obviously just a clerical error. And then she learns that her fellow Asian American classmate Laura Kim — pretty, well-dressed, popular and supposedly going into banking — has taken her spot instead! Because that has to be it. Laura must have stood out in some way that Elizabeth did not. But how?
Determined, she digs into Laura’s life and past, stalking her social media, her friends, her professors. Elizabeth’s mission is twofold. First, “hypothetically speaking,” if Harvard rescinded Laura’s acceptance, that would open up Elizabeth’s spot again. And if Elizabeth could just find out what made Laura so interesting to Harvard, she could arrange for that, too. She could present herself as a different, even better, candidate. She would have to be careful, of course. She didn’t want to come across as some psychopath, for God’s sake.
“I always knew that I was destined to be extraordinary and that the path to becoming extraordinary was not always linear.”
What follows will have you gasping, as Elizabeth crosses one boundary after another, each transgression flowing into the next, each one determined to be the logical course of action as far as Elizabeth is concerned. The result is a disturbingly entertaining deep dive into obsession, but also something much more: a razor-sharp exploration of caste, race, identity, ambition and otherness; of how others view us and how we view ourselves.
And there are twists that you will not see coming.
Elizabeth is not going to be just another boring Asian female.
“Technically, this is the first novel I’ve ever written,” says the author, “but that statement is a little misleading. The novel has changed so much from my first draft to the version now being published that it feels a bit like I wrote three novels, and am finally seeing the third make it to print. In the first draft, Laura didn’t even exist, and there was no obsession plot.
“However, the common thread from start to finish was the character of Elizabeth. I wanted to write about what happens when you wrap your entire identity around an external goal that you ultimately don’t achieve, and I knew I wanted to write about this from the experience of a college senior. It’s such a pivotal time in a person’s life. So I picked law school as the goal that Elizabeth ultimately fails at achieving, as it would also allow me to make this a coming-of-age story.”
The press release accompanying the book has a quote in it from Xu: “Like Elizabeth, I experienced an event during my senior year that made me completely lose my bearings. It was such a shock — everything I had worked for, everything that made me worthy — poof, gone.” How much of that is in the book?
“I would say that the starting point of the novel was taken from my own life, and the rest of the events that proceeded were a thought experiment of ‘What would’ve happened if I had been kind of a sociopath and extremely unhinged?’
“For instance, I spent most of my childhood in the Dakotas (both North and South) [Elizabeth is from South Dakota], and experienced a huge culture shock when I got to college. However, unlike Elizabeth, I did not pick the school because of a TV show, and I honestly didn’t even want to move to New York. It was just the best school that I got into, and they gave me great financial aid.
“So I would say that the biggest experiences I drew upon were emotional. In college, I thought I was going to go into finance, and that didn’t work out, and suddenly I was just completely lost. I didn’t know how to navigate the world now that I was no longer on a linear professional path, and I had to completely reconstruct my identity and self-worth, which had been so predicated on external things.”
As Elizabeth becomes increasingly unstrung, was there ever a point when Xu thought, “Is this too much”?
“Nah. I give myself a lot of leeway when writing. Usually, I just think to myself, ‘Well, this is pretty wild. But let’s just go with it and see what happens.’ There was one scene where I took things too far, and my agent made me cut it out. I’d like to think she’s my voice of reason.
“Usually, I find that I just can’t overthink it. I literally just need to sit down at the computer and start writing, and that’s how I get my best ideas. Sometimes I’ll take a walk and think to myself, ‘Wow, I just had a brilliant idea for what to write,’ and then I’ll try to put it on paper, and it just doesn’t work.
“The hardest part about writing this novel (before I got an agent) was pushing through self-doubt. There were many days when I told myself I was just completely wasting my time and should feel embarrassed that I wasn’t doing something more productive. But I just had to grit my teeth and say, ‘You told yourself that last week, too, and the next day you felt better. So maybe tomorrow you’ll also feel better.’
“I actually queried some agents in 2023 with the novel. I got a couple of full-manuscript requests, but no offers of representation. One of these agents gave me very detailed feedback. I had an honest conversation with myself and decided that I needed to spend more time editing the manuscript. I spent another year editing and rewriting. In 2024, I felt more confident and had a much stronger draft. I sent queries out at the beginning of the year, and signed with my agent a couple of months later. We spent about two months editing and then went on submission.”
And it was promptly snapped up. Meanwhile, Xu’s TEDx talk, I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype, has reached more than 3.7 million viewers, and she has spoken about Asian American issues at several schools. As for her next book: “It’s about a serial killer. That’s all I’ll say.”
But we’ll be waiting.
About Canwen Xu
Canwen Xu is a debut author whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, Chalkbeat, Areo Magazine, and more. She is a graduate of Columbia University.
