For a character I identify with, I couldn’t help but think of Mei. Ever since we started Small Beauty, there was just something about Mei that drew me to her as a character, although I would not say her life experiences are similar to my own. Mei, or at least the way Wilson-Yang writes her character, goes from words on a page to a person I could see before me.
It wasn’t until we started talking about the disjointed narrative in class that I understood why I gravitated toward Mei’s story. It is a stream-of-consciousness to an extent. The book is written in the omniscient third-person (knowing the experiences and thoughts of all the characters), but Mei’s parts are not sequential or even logical leaps. They go from one topic to another, twisting and turning down every little path that you couldn’t have guessed a minute ago. At least for me, staying on one thought for too long often proves difficult. So it could be the way the book is written to keep me engaged in Mei’s story, or it could be me attributing the writing style as an inherent trait of Mei to think wildly that I see in myself. But more than identifying with a trait, I think Wilson-Yang tells the story in a manner to paint Mei as more human to us. Thought is a dynamic and uncontrollable thing because it comes from so many parts of our identity, experiences, behaviors, and traits. It doesn’t just take from one place, and I think Wilson-Yang utilized this concept to make Mei seem more real. Mei’s story and ultimately identity came from so many places: her family, her friends, her queerness, her past experiences, her worries, her grief, and her dreams. They were all playing some hidden role in Mei’s actions that led me to identify with Mei more and more.