Chlorine by Jade Song is not horror, but it’s also not not horror. In my browsing, I’ve seen it shelved primarily in general fiction. And while it certainly deserves recognition from the lit fic folks for its many accomplishments, it also deserves recognition from the fantasy and horror communities. This is a raw, visceral tale that should unnerve you—just maybe not for the reasons you think.
Ren is a competitive swimmer for her high school, but more than that, she’s a girl who belongs in the water. When she swims, she’s free. She’s at home in the water in a way she never is on land, but this is not a story about anything so simple as “finding her flow” or “learning to be fluid” or other marketing-esque metaphors. After all, as Ren herself puts it: “Swimming appeared a gentle sport, all waves and soft water, but this was a parent illusion, because no manicure, no styling, no body—no matter how hardy—could survive Jim’s practice unscathed (p. 189).
It’s not just the act of swimming that begins to weigh on Ren. As a Chinese American, she’s subject to regular micro- and macroaggressions, and she struggles to meet the sometimes competing expectations of different cultures. I should note that her parents, though they have high expectations, are not the villains here: the pressure they place on her is rooted in their desire to see her safe and successful, to have more than they have. Song is very careful to head off anything that might cause readers to dismiss this as a “tiger parenting” stereotype; everything Ren’s parents do is rooted in the best kind of love they know how to give, and her relationship with them is extremely nuanced.
At the same time, as Ren begins to explore her sexuality, she’s uncertain about her feelings for her best friend Cathy, and finds it hard to navigate power and consent with the boys she hooks up with—not least because male attention has been threatening her for so long, her coach and her doctors disgusting her with their inappropriate comments and wandering hands.
To survive the benthic pressure, Ren begins to rely on the mermaid myths she’s always loved. In the stories, mermaids are not divided in two by opposing cultural forces but exist as divine fusions, greater than the sum of their parts. No one asks them to change their favorite Faye Wong song to something more palatable to White American tastes. They’re powerful and self-assured, untroubled by men so thoroughly under their power. They don’t have confusing, upsetting encounters that they can’t fully process. They aren’t victims.
Although Ren has trouble examining what she considers human weaknesses, she is not averse to confronting the reader directly, and at one point she outright goads us: what is the minimum threshold of victimhood she should display in order to earn the reader’s sympathies? Must she be resolute in her chastity and reject any pleasure? Must she be a Strong Female Character and take full charge of her sexual encounter? The truth is more complicated, more ambiguous. Or, to use a more useful series of metaphors for this book in particular: the waters are murky. There is so little solid ground for girls to stand on; who wouldn’t want to be a mermaid, to be able to breathe even when your head goes under?
The prose sometimes veers into the overthought. No, it’s not overwrought, or not quite—it just feels like Song was hyperconscious of her debut, and spent a bit too much time tweezing her adjectives into place like garnishes on a Michelin-hopeful meal. But the story is better served when she goes for raw and bloody. When describing how her father leaves to take a job overseas, lines like “He disappeared and my heart cracked in recognition at our severance,” feel fussy and overdone compared to the simple, bludgeoning power of “If the father left home, the mermaid daughter could too” (both p. 27).
I’m confident that Song will continue to refine her prose, though. I could point to a dozen more instances of her ability to make poetry of bluntness, and in fact, my copy of Chlorine is dog-eared to mark many of them. When confessing the extent of her period pain to her swim coach, a line like “He was proud of me for bleeding” needs no embellishment (p. 39). Cathy’s wistful “I guess hearts are slippery because they’re covered in blood” says everything (p. 49).
If you’re noticing a theme of blood, yes, that’s accurate: blood and water, both essential to life; blood and pain, also inextricable. This is a book that does not delight in gore but does not shy from it, demanding witnesses to the ignored pain of women, of Asian Americans, of queer girls, and of female athletes.
Ren internalizes the message from her doctors, from her teachers and coach, and from her parents: her pain—her human, female pain—doesn’t matter. The monthly torture of her periods, the confusing agony of trying to insert a tampon, and the knife-in-the-gut anguish of IUD insertion: these and more are obstacles for her to overcome, sometimes with the help of other women, but largely alone. Men either remain deliberately ignorant of her pain, like her sexual partners who either don’t see the toll of birth control or—as with her coach, who sees her transition into womanhood as an opportunity for his own stimulation—feel entitled to its benefits. Or, of course, they just don’t care, like her doctors.
If you think it’s excessive that a doctor would ignore even the kind of pain that makes a young woman scream and curl up on the floor, I can personally attest that it is not hyperbole. And I can likewise attest that Ren’s mother’s searingly awful response when she learns of her daughter’s severe condition is all too realistic: “first she asked if the ambulance was in-network, and then she asked if you were okay” (p. 180). The terror of perpetual medical debt looms over Americans with hideous ubiquity, something no serial killer or demonic clown could ever touch. Chlorine’s narrative reverberates with the horror of its accuracy: Ren’s experience is steeped in the banality of evil. There are no demons or Elder Gods; gynecologists and the American healthcare system are quite enough.
The only way Ren can cope with all of this is with the sports adage “pain is weakness leaving the body.” Yes, sometimes coping mechanisms are themselves harmful. For Ren, this cycle of harm reaches its apex in an act of such astonishing self-violence that it’s almost possible to forget that it is also an act of supreme calculation and self-control. In the shower stall of her triumphant swim meet, a Harvard recruiter waiting in the stands, she cuts and cuts and cuts her legs in order to sew them together.
Though shocking in some ways, Ren’s act of either self-transformation or self-mutilation (depending on your point of view) is also the least surprising thing she could have done. When her coach will not stop scrutinizing her body, literally marking it with ink to note its flaws and his own preferences, why wouldn’t she make it both perfect and perfectly distasteful for him? When parting her legs only invites agony or ambivalent sexual encounters, why wouldn’t she sew up that most pained place, suturing herself to heal over the wounds no one can see?
That’s the horror of Chlorine. Not the gore, not the extremity, but the utter relatability of her choices. When there’s another viable option, more women than you think would choose to leave humanity behind. When I was a teenager, I certainly would have. Not because I hate or hated being a woman, but because to be a young woman is to have no viable ways of reconciling the world to you. You can only reconcile yourself to the world, and that’s not an enticing prospect.
In one version of the ending to this story, a girl mutilates herself in mind and body to try to please people who cannot, fundamentally, be pleased. No matter what she does, the goalposts will always move. Her coach, Jim, will only ever be temporarily appeased by faster times and winning scores, his focus soon shifting to the next meet, the next gold medal. Her teammates grudgingly accept her presence and her attempts to fit in, and then ditch her when she becomes too difficult. The Harvard recruiter scurries away the moment Ren raises a commotion, uninterested in her distress or personhood. Only Ren’s parents care enough to keep showing up, to keep trying to understand her.
Well, her parents and Cathy. But, just as her parents can’t fully grasp the entirety of her selfhood, neither can her best friend and would-be girlfriend. Queer love can open the doors to salvation, but it isn’t, in itself, enough. Ren’s partners, her parents, her cultures, her achievements—none of them are enough. To be fully herself, she has to leave it all behind, and again, not in a cute, metaphorical way where she goes on foreign study to Italy or does ayahuasca.
In the other version of the ending—which has a lot of textual support, this isn’t a book about delusion—a mermaid uses the pain of her human life to spur her transformation, making it worthwhile. Attempts to dissuade her or tempt her from her path fail. With the support of her family and her friend/love, but mostly through her own self-assurance, she manages to achieve beyond all expectations, and in her apotheosis, shed her trauma.
I know which story I want to be true. I know which story I fear is true. And as a human still on land, it’s the fear that lingers.