Twitter told me this book was Heartstopper but sapphic (If You Still Recognise Me)

 

I can’t lie, when it comes to books, I’m either in or I’m not. Because of that, it doesn’t often take a lot to convince me to read a book if it’s the right thing. Today I’m talking about If You Still Recognise Me by Cynthia So, which I saw described as “Heartstopper, but sapphic”, and that was all I needed to read to be convinced. I would also like it to be known that I read the majority of this book on train journeys, so my notes may have been a little disjointed.

The blurb says that Elsie has a crush on Ada, the only person in the world who truly understands her. Unfortunately, they’ve never met in real life and Ada lives an ocean away. But Elsie has decided it’s now or never to tell Ada how she feels. That is, until her long-lost best friend Joan walks back into her life. In a summer of repairing broken connections and building surprising new ones, Elsie realises that she isn’t nearly as alone as she thought. But now she has a choice to make…

Chapter one opens with Elsie and her best friend, Rikita, having just finished their college exams for the summer before going to university. Now, here’s something immediately unrelatable for me about Elsie, she got into Cambridge. No, I’m kidding, slay for her honestly. She then thinks about her ex-boyfriend, who conceptually becomes quite a large part of the book later on, and then gets a message from Ada (who is, according to Elsie, one of two things making her heart race) saying that she wrote Elsie a fanfic for finishing her exams. And finally, Elsie is nervous about her mum bringing her grandma to stay with them for the summer from Hong Kong since she mentions to the reader it has been eight years since she, and I believe her family, have been to Hong Kong.

Chapter two shows us that Elsie is in fact a Tumblr girlie, which I was a big fan of because I love characters that are a certain brand of loser like me (Glee core). But she’s a Tumblr girlie for this comic she loves, Eden Recoiling, and she makes GIFs and edits for it. She then sees these two in the fandom who are fandom famous who got engaged and is like, “Hmm, but what if that was Ada and I”, and tells the reader that this is the summer she tells Ada about her crush on her. I’d normally have chapter three have its own paragraph, but all I’ve got to say about it is that this is where her grandma, her po po, is introduced to us and where Elsie’s culture comes in. You see her speaking Cantonese with her family, and her grandma tells her she sounds like a white person trying to speak Cantonese which did get a laugh out of me.

I really liked Elsie as a character. From the outset you got to see her struggles as a person, the disconnect she felt from Hong Kong and her culture. Someone tries speaking to her in Mandarin when she’s out with her grandma and she’s disappointed in the fact that she can only speak Cantonese, which, to me is already impressive that she speaks two languages. I speak English and know bits of French, that’s it. Homegirl was fully bilingual. You also see that she has this whole plan for what her summer was going to be, but things keep getting in her way and pushing against this plan. I did assume that with the blurb, I assumed that with Joan coming back into her life that she was likely going to have to choose between Joan and Ada. Like, perhaps Joan would offer her very real feelings there in front of her, and the conflict would have been that maybe Elsie didn’t want to move on from her crush on Ada.

I also appreciated Elsie being so deep into the fandom for Eden Recoiling. There were bits where she’d be telling us what was going on in the comic, and all of her thoughts about that. There’s also a bit where, and I mentioned this in my post about As You Walk On By by Julian Winters. Elsie makes GIFs and edits for the fandom, but she’s sort of jealous of the people who are making full on art, and people like Ada who write fanfic, since she doesn’t feel she has the talent to do so, so she’s not as in the fandom as the others. That’s something that I’ve definitely felt for myself since I am, embarrassingly, on Tumblr. I obviously follow a bunch of blogs for different fandoms, and I see people posting all of their GIFs, edits, art, and stuff like that, and I’m jealous because I’d love to have the skills that they do. I could write fanfic, but I prefer to write original stuff for myself. Something I’ll criticise Elsie for is her pizza order. Tuna and olives… Ma’am? Elsie?

There were occasionally points where I felt the dialogue could have slowed down a little. That might sound a little strange, but to me, some of the conversations that happened were very to the point, and don’t get me wrong, I would rather conversations get to the point sooner than wander around for so much longer than they need to. I did just think that the occasional conversation could have afforded to slow down, even though the book was already 400 pages. In saying that, it felt like not that much actually happened in the way of major conflict. Like, there were little things that popped up. I could definitely see this being a downside for some people. This book just sort of felt like you were coming along with Elsie as she was going through her summer.

This book also brings up white people fetishising Asian people. Very nice to read about it as it is one of those things that happens in real life. You often see, let’s not lie, white men going to Asia in search of an Asian wife that’s just going to be subservient to them. In this book, this is what I was saying about Elsie’s ex-boyfriend being very important conceptually, as he contributes to this. When Elsie and one of her friends discuss him, as I was reading it, the whole time I was just thinking, “Drag that creepy ass boy”. I feel like this is something you also see in the BL community too. I bring up BL, just because it’s a frame of reference I know, since I do consume a lot of BL content. You know, in BL, some people only watch it because they want to watch cute boys kiss. And because in BL, since the majority of it comes from Asia, they then view Asian men in a certain, unflattering way. So not only are they fetishising queer people, but they’re also fetishising Asian people too.

There was also talk about how white the Western media is and about how to standard of beauty in the West, especially for kids growing up, is all white as well. The book specifically mentions that people of colour are practically invisible, and then you get to see how this affected Elsie. She was fully there thinking that Chinese people and people from Hong Kong couldn’t be attractive, because of how they were represented in Western media, and that she had to be feminine, since that was the standard of beauty.

For my final point, I wouldn’t say that this was like Heartstopper, but sapphic, like I was assuming it would be from how I saw it described. I think the only ways that it could be considered to be like Heartstopper is in the fact that the both of them are coming of age, or at least contain elements of a coming of age story. To me, the two tell very different stories and cover very different topics. Considering the two main characters of Heartstopper are white, they’re not really going to be talking about race all that much in comparison to a book with a main character from Hong Kong. That’s not a knock on either, it’s just a statement. It’s in the same way that certain topics have come up in Heartstopper didn’t come up in this.

Regardless, I still enjoyed the book. I think it definitely was stronger in the second half. And I would say it was a solidly good book.

Okay, bye!