Being a teenage girl is a horror show. The body is undergoing so many changes, feelings are massive, and the body hair situation is enough to drive one mad.
Even before the isolation of the COVID years, balancing school and family with a hormone-driven desire for personal freedom and boundary-testing lent itself to the realm of the grotesque. The body-fluid containment an ordinary teenager experiences alone rivals anything from George Romero’s imagination.
Stephen King’s “Carrie” worked precisely because she was a teenage girl; there is no one more cruel or more vulnerable than a teenage girl, and both of these elements could cause anyone to snap. The constant judgment of the teenage gaze thrives next to the pubescent awkwardness of the developing body. It’s a wonder anyone makes it out of high school alive.
It’s easy to see why Pittsburgh-native Jade Song picked a teenage girl for her protagonist in “Chlorine,” a dark coming-of-age body-horror mermaid novel that balances the visceral and the marvelous. Protagonist Ren Yu swims for her Pittsburgh-area high school, and she’s good enough to take it seriously.
While maintaining perfect grades, Ren does her best to make her demanding mother, coach and team happy, without realizing that she’s slowly drowning in the process. As someone who studies mermaids, though, Ren doesn’t see drowning as an ending.
Apt Pittsburgh setting
Ms. Song wrote her novel during the pandemic, while living in Brooklyn, but she knew that her native Pittsburgh was an apt setting for a teenage horror gothic. Ms. Song’s familiarity with the city — she attended schools in North Allegheny — echoes throughout “Chlorine,” from the highways cutting through hillsides to the gothic architecture of Oakland. Pittsburgh was the perfect location for Ren’s story, she told the Post-Gazette, a city of rivers, forever calling to a swimmer who longs for freedom, and a city of ghosts.
Pittsburgh is full of the dead and forgotten, after all — especially for the Chinese-Americans who grew up here. Most people in our city don’t know that Pittsburgh used to have a thriving Chinatown at the end of the 19th Century, but the construction of Boulevard of the Allies in the 1920s completely destroyed it, forcing hundreds of Chinese-American Pittsburghers to leave the city.
Ms. Song remembered visiting the Chinese graves in Allegheny National Cemetery, understanding that a person, or an entire community, can simply vanish. What does it mean to grow up Chinese-American in a city where Chinese-Americans were effectively evicted from its history?
For Ren, growing up in Pittsburgh yields a certain isolation. Her peers find her exotic, her coach finds her relentless, and her mother does her best to understand a child who feels increasingly foreign to her. The pressure on Ren, as a high school sophomore, is unbearable. Perhaps becoming a mermaid would be less painful than disappointing everyone she knows?
Ms. Song was a swimmer for her high school, and that experience informed the plot of the book, but also its writing. “I understood that a creative project of any form can't just happen the next day. It requires day-to-day discipline — like swimming back and forth in the pool — constantly rewriting a sentence, constantly repainting one little scene in like one tiny corner of a chapter.”
Discipline and obsession
According to Ms. Song, writing required embracing compulsion and discipline. For her protagonist, swimming involved a much deeper commitment — the sport becomes an all-consuming obsession. Ren constantly debates the value of her pool-centric routine — does swimming make her happy? Or does she do it because it’s a ticket to something else? But there’s no time to think, there’s only the next task, the next stroke, the next practice, the next meet.
“Teenage girls are going through so much, their bodies are completely out of their control,” said Ms. Song. It made sense that a girl would try to find solace in a routine designed to make her a champion.
Ren loves her body, for what it can do. But she worries constantly about its limitations, about the shape of her muscles, and the efficiency of their motion. “Chlorine” is about body dysmorphia, yes, but it’s also about how our bodies contain our purpose. When Ren comes up against her own limitations, she takes matters into her own hands, making a body for herself that fulfills a greater purpose, no matter how much blood is involved.
“There are so many young people,” Ms. Song said, “young queer folks, or Asian kids, from cities like Pittsburgh, who have sent me emails saying the book makes them feel seen. In a lot of ways, if you fall under these identities, life is horror.”
“And to be able to find horror in the mundane,” she continued, “allows us to transcend that horror, to see it for what it is, can be comforting. You know you’re not alone. No matter how bloody it gets.”
Adriana E. Ramírez, author of “Dead Boys,” is a columnist and InReview editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: aramirez@post-gazette.com. Her previous column was “The case against legacy admissions.”
First Published: July 14, 2023, 3:00 p.m.
Updated: July 14, 2023, 3:08 p.m.