The ‘absurdist scheme of things’

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies
by Lindsay Wong 

Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2026 
$27.95 / 9780735242418

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

*

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies by Lindsay Wong (Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality) is a novel told in eleven chapters, each named after a body part. The protagonist, Locinda Lo, does not have many prospects. A former professional cuddler, an MFA dropout, and riddled with debt while living in the costly Vancouver, Locinda’s best option appears to be signing her life away to become a corpse bride. In one fell swoop, she can leave behind her debt, and hopefully, save her grandmother, Baozhai, and her sister, Samantha, from being killed. 

Locinda’s grandmother is a legendary Villain Hitter, a curse-mongering witch who looks suspiciously young and who prefers not to kill adulterous wives. Lucinda’s sister, Samantha, the golden child, is technically dead but constantly outshines Locinda. Being a corpse bride is not a fanciful invention by Wong, who explains the history in the epilogue thusly: 

During the Tang dynasty (618-908CE), a belief took shape—one that is still widely held today in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Taiwan … that no other person … should die unmarried, as it is considered a curse on the family. To prevent severe misfortune from befalling surviving family members, single individuals are often buried involuntarily with a stranger to become husband and wife in the afterlife.

Wryly, Lucinda points out that her worth as a corpse bride exceeds her current value in capitalistic terms: “What did it say in the absurdist scheme of things that I’m worth more dead to society than living?”

The novel uses asterisked footnotes profligately; I haven’t encountered so many since Sheung-King’s debut novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. Almost every asterisked footnote in Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies centres around Chineseness, with the precept that to be Chinese is “too much” for the imaginary reader—a middle-class white woman.

Asterisked footnotes have a special place in my heart. They remind me when I was still a teenager, drunk on David Foster Wallace, a secret believer in true love. On the one hand, I enjoy the visual paradox—they are rendered in a smaller font size, while at the same time, irrevocably changing the structure of the whole page, all while feigning self-effacement and modesty. It’s a grammatical shorthand for: “I have low self-esteem but also think I’m better than everyone else and by the way, sorry for existing, don’t mind me, but if you’re smart, you’ll pay attention because I have juicy tidbits.”

Overall, the effect is like watching someone gain and lose confidence, back and forth, within milliseconds. An asterisk is the grammatical version of a stranger unsparingly telling you their life story at the bus stop—part of you wants to listen, but the other part of you, invested in upholding norms and feeling safe, wants to scurry away in case their evident dysfunction is contagious. There is a dynamism, an unwillingness to be static. My pet theory? Behind every asterisked footnote is a resistance to authority, and, perhaps, a childhood where honest opinions were discouraged. 

In one asterisked footnote, Locinda writes:

Only in the margins can I truly be myself. Less curated, neither invisible nor visible. I can mope, be as honest and unfiltered as I want. Not forced to feel shame for my culture, my traditions, my language. Not reduced to the image of the model minority Asian female, good and obedient, Hello Kitty without her mouth. Yeah, I talk back, so what?

It is true the model minority Asian female is a ubiquitous stereotype, though I was curious about the omission of the largely pejorative term, ABG: Asian Baby Girl, antithetical to the model minority Asian female. The ABG is recognized by having conspicuously lightened hair, visible tattoos, drinking boba, and enjoying raves. Or, to borrow author Kaila Yu’s words, the “Asian equivalent of the valley girl.” Naturally, both the model minority Asian female and the ABG are ambivalent terms. 

In another asterisked footnote, Locinda remarks:

If I center myself in the story, you will likely hate and judge me, but so much of my villain origin story has to be censored, made palatable for white readers. As I write this, reflecting on my MFA days at Columbia, I am reminded of the common workshop note: “The characters, the plot, are all unrelatable. I couldn’t read past the first page because it was emotionally difficult. Can you try to make your life less traumatizing for readers?

Locinda’s bitterness about how she was treated by her MFA instructors and classmates is palpable. It seems evident to anyone with a brain that relatability has never been strictly necessary for enjoyment and it’s a rather odd thing to try and configure for something as subjective as creative writing. For instance, I imagine most viewers of The White Lotus are not nearly as wealthy as the characters depicted. Being literally unable to enjoy something because it’s different from your life experience is a surefire sign of a dreadfully limited imagination. After reading this footnote, I wondered if there exists, somewhere, a more feral version of this novel.

Much like in life, the value of a corpse bride has to do with beauty in very circumscribed terms. Failing that, a corpse bride with an Ivy League education—Locinda never completing her MFA, a source of shame for her, is conveniently omitted when she lists her positive attributes to Joyful Coffin & Co. Matchmaking Services—is prestigious.

Locinda’s low self-esteem pertaining to her looks is evident in how harshly she assesses others based on their appearance. When Locinda describes a man as “a lost cause with a personality and appearance that make him seem like he was exposed to pesticides in the womb,” I cackled. I haven’t encountered savagery so cutting since Andrew Lipstein wrote “like James Dean if James Dean was a little bit inbred” in Last Resort.

However repressed Locinda might believe herself to be, it is true that her interiority reveals herself to be cruel and pitiless and henceforth, unlikeable, i.e., supposedly the most damning adjective for a female character. But that’s nonsense. Locinda is an antihero voluntarily choosing an atonement requiring her own death—to save her own family, who, moreover, are not especially grateful. There is little to no touching sentimentality in this novel; it is cold, callous, and best of all, funny.

Where is the appeal in a morally upright, perfectly good character? Anyone with a soul can see that the level of harsh judgment Locinda has for others, is a reflection of the cruelty she enacts on herself. For instance:

But I’m better than you, I want to whisper-sob as I yank a wooden brush through my partner’s hair, shuddering at the amount of dandruff. She has an odd eyeball-shaped bald spot at the back. Smells strongly of eau de cabbage and cloying perennials. Premature lines around her mouth like deep cuts. Who was she even in our former lives? A nobody with lumpy skin and a scrawny neck. In our previous lives, we wouldn’t be associated, partly because I lived in East Vancouver and she probably harvested rice in some remote village in China. My urban artsy peasanthood upends her rural one. I’m far superior because I half finished a graduate degree at an Ivy League and possess an imagination. Our generation: born of survivalist self-preservation in the gig economy, incapable of intimacy, unkindness our natural state.

This is exactly the kind of remark that would probably give a therapist major side-eye, but I couldn’t help but nod along in assent when Locinda says: “Fury, warranted or not, is what sustains the average human being, makes dead people want to glom on to their continued existence.”

I have long suspected that eternal overachievers, laudably productive and with a convincing veneer of normalcy and upward mobility, and perennial underachievers addicted to video games and drugs, are behaving from the same feeling: shame. Of course, the latter category generally does not receive much in the way of external validation. But the feelings behind the actions are awfully similar. And there’s always the possibility that the eternal overachiever, insatiable for more adulation, realizes they are burnt and spent and done. And fall right into the second category. Locinda understands how delicate the false dichotomy between the respectably sane are from the dispossessed ciphers, how one bad day or missed paycheque can lead to catastrophe, when she states:

We are the ones that no one else can tolerate because we remind healthy, glittering people that they, too, have the potential to become frightening. Most of them are only one mishap away from forgetting to shower and isolating their closest friends. I know this because I once was someone who aspired to extraordinary things, who washed and self-bleached her roots with monthly regularity, made an effort to smile with sincerity and not condescension.

There’s a consistently enjoyable glibness, a tone that persists no matter the level of gore. For example:
 

Selling curses was not difficult work, but it took a certain type of personality, someone who could, without feeling poorly, demand a child’s appendage to be cut off. Parents often swapped children; it was easier to hold and slice off the tongue of a trembling nephew or neighbor’s daughter.

In perhaps her most Freudian moment, I particularly enjoyed this one-liner from Locinda: “‘Why does everyone want to kill their mother?’ I eventually say to defuse the tension.”

It’s not the only time Locinda sounds like a blunt psychology book: “If their parents only had one child, everyone would be less emotionally impoverished. For centuries, it seems, love has bled from a misunderstanding of situational obligation. It’s always been a scarce resource and it’s never split evenly.”

At one point, Locinda says: “I can’t perform the preferred qualities of feminine whiteness by being an engaging, extroverted, and kind narrator.” And thank God. Give me a wrathful, hot, dead mess any day. Villain Hitters for Vicious Little Nobodies is a confrontational exploration of both explicit and internalized racism, shame, and death, a scathing indictment of capitalism and certain traditions, and a middle finger to blandness. 

[Editor’s note: In support of her novel, Lindsay Wong will return to Vancouver for an event confirmed for Wednesday, May 13, 7:00pm at VPL’s Alice MacKay Room.]

Jessica Poon is a writer in East Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed recent books by Andromeda Romano-Lax, Linda Cheng, Neko Case, Karina Halle, Jen Sookfong Lee, Bal Khabra, Léa Taranto, Martin West, and Terry Berryman for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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