When I stumbled across the debut novel from Angela S. Choi Hello Kitty Must Die, I must admit that I was instantly captivated by the title and eye-catching neon pink cover art – which features a twisted version of the Hello Kitty icon made out to look like a skull and crossbones – and I knew immediately that regardless of what this novel was about, I had to read it.
Imagine an intensely intimate, emotionally poignant story that deals with the culture clash that many Asian Americans must deal with – between the hedonism and self-indulgence of America versus the more traditional values and idiosyncrasies of their parents’ or grandparents’ culture; comparable in many ways to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Now blend this storyline with the one from Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which follows an obsessively style-conscious investment banker whose hobby happens to be serial killing. This gives you a very superficial idea of what Choi’s novel is about – but it’s so much more than that. The narrator, 28-year old San Francisco corporate lawyer Fiona Yu, is sarcastic, intriguingly complex, tragic, cool, and, above all else, deeply disturbing. Almost 30 years old, she still lives at home with her parents, Chinese immigrants who want nothing more than to see her married with kids and living in suburbia. But if she were deflowered, the pressure – and soul-crushing burden – of shouldering her family’s honor would over…
The novel begins in audacious fashion as Fiona makes a life-changing decision: “One week before my twenty-eighth birthday, I decided to take my own virginity with a silicone dildo coated in two-percent Lidocaine gel. Silicone dildos are the best. Firm, smooth, easy to clean, and most importantly, you can boil them in water. We Chinese folks love to boil things. Our chopsticks, our teacups, our pots and pans, and especially our drinking water. Nothing goes inside our bodies without being boiled in water first.”
But when Fiona discovers that she was born without a hymen, she decides to see a doctor who specializes in restoring women’s hymens. She wants a hymen so that she can “pop it” herself: “For nearly three decades, culture, parents, and upbringing all intertwined my self-worth with my hymen. If it was indeed valuable, I should want to rip it out, freeze-store it in a little plastic bottle and leave an instruction in my last will and testament to be buried with it. Either that or stuff it in a glass vial and wear it around my neck like Angelina Jolie did with Billy Bob’s blood.”
When she visits Dr. Sean Killroy, she realizes that he is a long-lost friend from elementary school, a handsome and dangerous boy who had a penchant for violence. Sean is charismatic, unpredictable, sardonic, ill mannered, and white, the exact antithesis of the man her parents want her to marry. But as their friendship is renewed, Fiona finds herself drawn to Sean’s liberating sense of freedom and joie de vivre , although she realizes that when he “works” at night, he is most definitely stalking and killing female targets in San Francisco bars.
Drowning in the absurdity of her existence – her father sets her up with disastrous blind dates on a weekly basis – Fiona finds herself desperately trying to escape the chains of her family, her friends, and her employer, who see her as the literal equivalent of Hello Kitty.
“I hate Hello Kitty. I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty. She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger… tell anyone to go and f@%& his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.”
And when her serial killing friend Sean’s life philosophy suddenly starts making sense to Fiona, she embraces it wholeheartedly and chaos ensues…
With a cool, witty narrative fueled throughout by lyrics from the ‘80s grunge band Nirvana and numerous forceful contrasting images between Chinese and American culture (foot binding versus wearing stiletto heels, for example), this multi-layered novel is a gutsy, empowering, stand-up-and-applaud, storytelling tour de force.
Chick lit meets crime fiction, you will never read a book quite like Hello Kitty Must Die!
