[usr 3]

“She wanted her story to be told and, although it’s more than a decade later, I hope she would have approved.”

This is the rationale given by Lynne Williams for why she chose to write “Girl with the Butterfly Hands”, a self published memoir of her stepmother Chin Yu’s life.  It is a good rationale – while I believe everyone has a story worthy of being told, objectively Williams’ stepmother lived a life more eventful than most.

It is difficult for me to be honest about this book given the subject seems to mean a lot to its author, however I cannot gloss over the reality – this book is unintentionally comedic, and for that I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

It is linear and literal to a fault. Instead of telling a story in which we explore and understand Chin Yu’s internal world and experiences, the book reads as a record of everything that happened to Chin Yu, starting from birth and ending literally at her death.

Equal weight in the form of page length is given to her experience of returning to Hong Kong from Australia in a period before imminent Japanese invasion as is her life in 1960 where her coworker in a play had kitchen appliances to cook gourmet dinners and Chin bought a new two-door sedan.

Another issue is the lack of storytelling.  As we are told, in report form, about what happened to Chin Yu, we are also given a small glimpse into how she felt about the events, but these thoughts do not go deeper than a single sentence stating how happy or sad or heartbroken she was. 

I suspect Williams wrote her story exactly as Chin Yu told it to her. Chin Yu may have spoken about her wartime experience with stoic optimism, preferring to express happiness in the face of horror, but this makes for a book that feels very emotionally disconnected.  The icing on the cake are typos and grammatical errors – acknowledgments is spelt ‘aknowledgements’, Lilian’s name alternates between Lillian and Lilian, and incomplete sentences abound.  Petty as it feels to point them out, they do also contribute to the unintentional comedy of the book.

With all that said, it is a testament to Chin Yu’s life that my interest was sustained despite the faults with storytelling.  If Chin Yu simply wanted her story to be told because she lived an extraordinary life, this book counts as a success.