'Girl Overboard' - Justina Chen Headley

‘Girl Overboard’ by Justina Chen Headley was the book that inspired Bookgazing’s Women in Sport month. Any novel about a snowboarding teenage girl is going to stand out, although I wish I couldn’t say that, I wish there were many well publicised novels about teenage girls who snowboard. When Ari at ‘Reading in Color’ mentioned that ‘Girl Overboard’ is about a Chinese-American teenager from an extremely rich family, I realised just how far ahead it might be in the young adult originality race and put a copy in my basket.

Syrah Cheng is the daughter of Ethan Cheng, the self made telecoms billionaire. She loves snowboarding, but she was recently involved in a reckless snowboarding accident in Whistler and damaged her knee. Since then she hasn’t been able to snowboard and as the book opens she’s just trying to regain her confidence, so she can get back on her board and prove to her family that she can go pro.

I’ve noted in the first paragraph that ‘Girl Overboard’ sounds original and its characters are diverse and unusual in young adult literature. Syrah is a snowboarding sports woman and her Asian family is successful and rich. Neither of these are mainstream character types trending in the literary world. What that quick reference to original character types doesn’t explain is how this novel fleshes out the true, everyday reality of these two types of people. Headley weaves natural, specific details about the Cheng family’s participation in Chinese culture through her novel, which give Syrah’s world a conspicuous feeling of Chinese ethnicity without ever removing the focus of the novel from Syrah’s individual story of snowboarding love. The inclusion of these details don’t open the way for extended teaching moments, but quickly alert readers to simple complexities found within the culture. When Syrah tells the reader about Betty Cheng’s insistence that Syrah speak Cantonese not Mandarin any existing ideas about a monolithic Chinese culture begin to be dispersed. While Syrah’s Chinese heritage is part of who she is, she’s also a girl obsessed with snowboarding and Headley has managed to create a book where Syrah can think about snowboarding tricks and a future career (although sadly there’s less snowboarding than I’d have liked, as Syrah has lost her confidence), without obscuring the fact that Chinese culture naturally swirls through her life every day. The careful balance between these two important parts of Syrah’s life shows that ‘Girl Overboard’ is a novel which understand the multiple areas of interest in each human life.

Headley’s inclusion of comments about different Chinese languages demonstrates her interest in showing readers that Asian culture isn’t homogenous and this is an idea which she reintroduces subtly in a few other ways. Syrah draws a manga journal, an activity which I’ve not yet come across in other books with Asian characters. Manga is an art form that comes from Asian countries originally but drawing manga is not a mainstream, cross generational activity and would probably not factor in a traditional Western summary of typical ‘Asian culture’. Headley wants to make sure readers know that a nation’s culture contains many parts and that Asian characters don’t always have to be thrust into the duality of rejecting or accepting their culture. Instead they can pick and choose from within their own culture, based on their own interests, while also enjoying activities that originated outside their Asian countries. All this is possible without a character having to reject their cultural heritage, or dutiful subscribe to every activity someone might characterise as typical Asian cultural activities. Headley’s attempts to demonstrate the diversity within Asian culture are fantastic and she feels like an author trying to show that there need be no conflict between realism and originality, by thinking of details readers might be surprised to hear about.

While Headley’s rich, successful Asian characters add to the diversity on the young adult shelf Headley has no interest in making the Cheng family a set of one dimensional positive role models. Syrah’s family situation is complicated and painful, despite the public face of Cheng showing how happy their riches are making them. Her mother is a size zero nightmare, determined to make Syrah shed all her body fat. Her step siblings Wayne and Grace, born well before their father made his money, resent Syrah’s easy life. ‘Girl Overboard’ is a journey novel, with multiple emotional journeys for Syrah to make one of which is an emotional journey towards better relations with her family (and a surprising family related revelation which produces just wonderful character connections that I’ll let you discover for yourselves if you read it). Syrah’s quest to get to know her family better is so painful that sometimes I wished she could just shut down and cut them out, but in the end is wonderfully rewarding and probably the strongest and most emotive strand of the novel. I did wish there was a bit more of a confrontational resolution between Syrah and her father, especially once she bonds with her step-sister Grace. Ethan Cheng seems to have been a horrible father in the past. However, I was swept away by Grace and Syrah’s sisterly relationship, the positive influence of her Bao-mu (nanny) on Syrah’s life and Syrah’s mother’s revealed frailties.

The most obvious journey in this novel concentrates on Syrah’s return to the sport she loves, but other areas of her life need to improve for her to gain the confidence to get back on her board. There are at least five other emotional trips for her to make. It’s hard to pick my favourite, because they’re all more exciting than what I think of as being standard journey narratives, but I’d like to take a little time to talk about one area where Syrah’s attitude develops as it provoked equal amounts of joy and ire in me. When it became clear that ‘Girl Overboard’ was going to allow Syrah to find out that some girls could make nice friends I was just a little bit happy. Although I socialise with my friends boyfriends and our almost entirely male workforce, all my close friends are girls and I’m always excited to find books where female friendship grows.

Money doesn’t make Syrah’s personal life any easier either. Having money means she is always suspicious of people who want to be her friend. She finds the girls around her are always looking for freebies. Bombarded with negative messages about her body, who spends lots of time dressed in baggy jeans boarding with boys, she has a hard time feeling really comfortable with girls as they only seem interested in judging her clothes and her weight behind her back, with comments like 'why would she wear boys' clothes when she can buy anything she wants?'. She’s friends with a few guys, but really Age (Adrian Rodriguez) is her only close friend (based on the fact that she doesn’t see, or speak to any of the other guys until the end of the book). So the book begins with Syrah hearing things like 'pretty good for a girl' (paraphrasing) as positive compliments and thinking about how all the girls around her, especially Age’s new girlfriend Natalie, are just poser snowboard girls. Sad to read, but I knew there was a journey of change a-coming so I persevered and eventually Syrah forms an uncertain friendship with a girl called Lillian, connects with her step-sister Grace and meets a female family member who makes her reconsider thinking of fashionable girls as a separate, evil species. She still has female enemies (the unkind Six Pack group), but she’s also learnt that they’re just nasty people and that other girls make great friends, because all girls aren’t inherently horrible. Hurray!

The problem is that despite Syrah ending up with female friends, there’s still subtle girl hatred going on in this book, coming from male characters and from Syrah herself (in my opinion her attitude to Age’s girlfriend is totally unreasonable and should have been addressed, even if readers would still sympathise because Syrah’s the main character and in love with Age). I really hesitate to say that because Justina Chen Headley is the co-founder of readergrlz, the most pro-girl reading community I know of. I want to add that I don’t think the author is trying to slag girls off, I think it’s more that the female gender is slagged off to create an atmosphere of sexist realism and then that girl slagging isn’t qualified explicitly enough to show how wrong it is. It could be that Syrah’s whole storyline and her new friendships with girls like Lillian, Grace and her cousin Jocelyn are intended to show how cool girls can be and quietly qualify the offhand comments, but that doesn’t work for me. Maybe Headley thinks smart girls will work out for themselves that the prescence of a strong confident heroine means disparaging comments about girls should be viewed as wrong, but these kind of attitudes sneak into our lives as jokes, as ribbing, as ‘Great technique, for a girl...’, or 'You're only playing sport because you want to pick up guys...' despite the prescence of many real life strong female role models, so I think these comments could have done with a quick bit of verbal qualification from one of the characters.

I don’t want to concentrate on Syrah’s negative attitudes to other girls too much, because I have a separate post coming about the problem of writing Excepto –Girls when writing sporting novels about women. Excepto-Girls are typically the only girl in the whole novel who is serious about sport and end up being positively contrasted with an impersonal, non-sporty, silly vision of girlhood. I’m afraid, asmuch as I like Syrah, I think she's been written as an Excepto-Girl heroine so she’ll be coming up in that post too. Let me finish with a reminder that there are many, many positive things in the book that made it a joy to read and all those emotional journeys I mentioned above are so interesting. Also Syrah gets involved in charity work and starts organising a sporting event. Geekily I like cool events organisation in books. It is a weird thing, I know. A good choice for Women in Sport month, if a little lacking on the descriptions of sport due to Syrah’s injuries.

Specifically Sporty

What sport/s does the heroine play?

Syrah snow boards. All the women in her family work out in the gym. ‘Girl Overboard’ has a lot to say about body image, so the Cheng women’s gym trips are not always a positive thing. Syrah’s does mention going to the gym for physical therapy and to regain strength, but she also mentions going to the gym because she thinks she is too fat (and Headley is obviously gunning against this mentality with bazukas).

How much sport does the heroine play in this book?

‘Girl Overboard’ is a book about a girl who has been injured by sport, so there isn’t a lot of sport in the book as Syrah is trying to recover her physical fitness and her confidence on her board. There are a couple of scenes where Syrah and her friends snowboard, but not many. If you want to learn lots of technical things about snowboarding, or women competing in snowboarding this novel probably won’t deliver everything you’re after.

Do any other girls play sports besides the heroine?

No. Well, Lilian’s little sister wants to be a snow boarder, but as she is sick she’s not riding in the book. Many background female characters pose on the mountains, or claim an interest in snowboarding, but they are all described as not being serious about snowboarding. I had a really big issue with the fact that Syrah appears as the only serious female snow boarder and she’ll feature in a discussion about sports women and the female sports community later in the month.

Other Reviews

Reading in Color
The Happy Nappy Bookseller
Dear Author
Paper Tigers
The Compulsive Reader