Lily Chu, bestselling author of The Stand-In and The Comeback, is back. Her latest novel The Takedown (Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2024) is a delightful rom-com that offers much more than just a satisfying happily-ever-after.
Set against the vibrant backdrop of contemporary Toronto, The Takedown follows Daiyu “Dee” Kwan, a newly-hired diversity consultant with a penchant for affirmations and a head for trivia. When Dee is hired to help improve workplace diversity at Celeste, the chic, high-end fashion brand owned by Teddy’s father, and embroiled in a scandal.
The Toronto-based Chu, of Chinese Malaysian descent, has become known for her sharply-drawn Asian characters and her significant contribution to the representation of biracial individuals in literature. In The Takedown, both Dee and Teddy are of mixed Chinese and white heritage, though with distinctly different upbringings. Their relationship, which begins as an online gaming rivalry, blossoms into a real-life romance against the backdrop of corporate policies upheld by the old guard.
“When I start writing, I usually have a general idea of where I want to centre the book,” Chu explains. “In this case, I knew it was going to revolve around Dee and her job as a diversity consultant.” The fashion industry setting emerged organically when Chu was thinking about Dee’s role and Teddy’s character. “I’d been reading a lot about fast fashion, textile waste, and the social impact of fashion, and I thought that a character like Teddy would be involved in trying to mitigate these important issues.”
While The Takedown delivers the light-hearted charm expected of a rom-com, Chu deftly weaves in more sobering themes. Her exploration of privilege, racism, and toxic positivity is nuanced and direct, offering readers plenty to ponder, alongside the story’s memorable characters. “I write escapist rom-coms but, like many of us, my characters struggle against the challenges presented by racism, sexism, and mental health issues,” Chu says, her tone becoming more serious.
Her goal is to illuminate these broader societal issues, and “to show how they affect the characters, and how in the end they are able to cope with, or fight against, injustice.” And these themes are deeply personal, drawn from her own experiences and those of her friends. “Very little of it came from my imagination, sadly,” she notes. To help readers engage further with these issues, Chu provides a booklist on her website, offering titles that delve deeper into the novel’s themes.
The protagonist Dee’s character arc, in particular, resonates with Chu. “Poor Dee. Her mother is toxically positive and completely invalidates any negative emotion,” she shares. “Dee is raised to think she is naturally sunny, which impacts how she deals with the people in her life, and leads to her difficulty in saying no – for fear of being thought negative or a bad person.” Consequently, Dee finds herself strong-armed into sharing her home with her parents and prickly estranged grandmother. Writing Dee’s journey toward greater self-awareness became a reflective process and emotional honesty for Chu herself. “A lesson I took from writing her story was to think more about how I look at my own feelings and how I react to other people’s. It’s okay to feel bad feelings…. It sucks, don’t get me wrong, but they exist. And ignoring them doesn’t help. I wish it did!”
Chu’s thoughtful characterization extends beyond Dee to the diverse supporting cast. Vivian, Dee’s manager at the consulting firm, stands out as a personal favourite. “I love Vivian. One of my editors described her as the ‘adult in the room,’ and I based her on the many incredible women I’ve worked with, who could simply walk in and just handle things.” Chu thought about Vivian deeply as a character, and how Dee reconciles the admiration and respect she has for Vivian with the fact that she doesn’t necessarily agree with Vivian all the time. Chu’s commitment to authentic representation is also clear as she discusses the care taken in crafting Vivian’s character, which included consulting with a sensitivity reader to ensure that this portrayal of Vivian’s experience as a Black woman in the workforce rang true while not falling into stereotype.
As always in Chu’s novels, Toronto itself emerges as a vibrant character. From subway rides to romantic walks through the University of Toronto’s St. George campus and along the Danforth, Chu brings the city to life immersively, with personal touches. “I love setting my books in Toronto!” she enthuses. “There’s never any risk of running out of fantastic locations, although I should have added more transit delays, to make it more realistic!” she chuckles. And foodie, take note: “I recommend all the places they go to eat! They go for Japanese soufflé pancakes and pho, and although neither place was mentioned by name, people have DM’ed me to correctly guess that it was Fuwa Fuwa and Pho Hung, respectively. And they play trivia at Sneaky Dee’s, where I used to go religiously for years.”
A unique element of The Takedown is Dee and Teddy’s relationship beginning with an online gaming rivalry, pulled from Chu’s own experiences with gaming culture and love for hidden object games. “I started playing video games back in the days of cassette tapes and floppy discs, but I tend to play on my phone now,” she says, with a tinge of nostalgia. The inspiration for Questie, the game her characters play, “began with geocaching, where you hunt for real-life caches from online clues.” She laughs as she recalls nearly putting her hand in a wasp’s nest near the Butterfly Garden in Etobicoke while searching for a cache. And she offers a hint of a possible future by acknowledging, “I’d love to do a book that looks at gaming culture and e-sports in more detail. It’s fascinating.”
As our interview winds down, Chu invites readers to consider her earlier works, which are also set in Toronto. “The Stand-In is about a woman who steps in as a doppelganger for a famous Chinese movie star (and has to work with the star’s irritating and irritatingly handsome co-star). And The Comeback is about an ambitious lawyer who finds out the guy she’s fallen for is a world-famous K-pop idol.”
Whether tackling the complexities of privilege or crafting tender romantic moments, she has quickly amassed a devoted readership. Her novels provide not only the much-anticipated happy ending but depth, as well as humour, within stories so absorbing that readers find themselves devouring each page while not wanting the story to end.
The Takedown is available now from Sourcebooks Casablanca. All three of Chu’s novels are available in print and as Audible Originals narrated by Phillipa Soo.
Chu appears at two events at this years’ Toronto International Festival of Authors: “Rally the Tropes: Romance Showdown” on Saturday, September 21, 2024, 4:00 pm and “Swooning for Romance Novels” on Sunday, September 22, 2024 ,1:30 pm.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2024
