playing mermaids 🧜‍♀️

review-turned-musing of Jade Song's novel "Chlorine"

Chlorine by Jade Song has all the makings of a book I’d love: competitive swimming, light horror, sapphic relationships, girls coming of age and into their bodies. But I have an easier time talking about books I have mixed feelings toward than books I love, and since you’re here, you know what that means: I both liked and did not like Chlorine.

The short, quick novel follows Ren, a high school swimmer who is devoted to the sport, despite the mental and physical toll it takes on her. The child of Chinese immigrants, Ren finds her identity in the water in ways she cannot on land, where she is constantly othered by her teammates and temperamental, abusive coach. Swimming is an overwhelmingly white sport, and Ren has to claw her way into belonging. Competitive swimming brings Ren isolation from her parents, her will-they-won’t-they best friend, and the world around her, but it isn’t always unwelcome. Ren is also obsessed with mermaids, and as the novel progresses she becomes increasingly consumed by her desire to live fully in the kind of isolation that can only exist underwater.

Almost immediately after I finished reading this novel, the swimming trials for this summer’s Olympics began and I tuned in every night. I was a competitive swimmer for much of my childhood, and it remains my favorite sport to watch during the Olympics. I marvel at Katie Ledecky and wish she’d been a role model during my own swimming-heavy years (at the time, Michael Phelps was still the star; my club team’s coaches would drag a tiny TV onto the pool deck so we could watch grainy videos of Phelps underwater and then, naturally, fail to mimic them). I shudder at the thought of ever putting on a race suit again; as horrible as wiggling into a too-tight suit inch by inch is, taking one off while wet is still one of my top sensory nightmares.¹

During every Summer Olympics, I reflect on memories I don’t think much about otherwise. I think about how all-consuming swimming, and sports in general, can be for teenagers, how much pressure is put on half-grown kids. Chlorine validated those thoughts as much as watching swimmers on TV, many of whom are still kids themselves.

My issues with this novel were also personal, though different: Once I get the editor’s itch to pull out a red pen and mark up the margins, I cannot turn it off. You can call me pretentious and you wouldn’t be wrong. But the writing style pulled me out of the story itself. It felt a bit stilted and awkward, as if unsure of itself. The tone almost reminded me of my angsty high school journals, down to the love-hate relationship with swimming and mediocre observations that I thought would be insightful but were simply myopic histrionics.

But the more I read, the more I wondered if the juvenile writing and dialogue were intentional, or at least made sense in context. Ren is awkward and unsure of herself as a human on land, and she feels herself coming into her power in the water. That inner turmoil leads to melodrama and clumsiness, naturally. In this context, I think the writing in Chlorine could be seen as quite clever; the author embodies teen angst so well that I felt as uncomfortable within the pages as I did in my own body at Ren’s age.

Still, certain elements feel disconnected from the story. There are brief epistolary chapters from the perspective of Cathy, Ren’s best friend and teammate, who is, mild spoiler alert, stuffing her letters into glass bottles and throwing them into the water, hoping they’ll make their way to Ren, presumably living in the depths as a mermaid.

Mild spoiler again: Nothing really comes of the letters, which makes their inclusion feel pointless and distracting. These letters could have been a plot device, but nothing Cathy writes about isn’t also covered by Ren’s chapters, the perspectives and stories hardly diverging. For me, the romantic tension between Cathy and Ren and the overall narrative would have been more engaging in another format. Instead, both perspectives feel half-formed and it’s hard to find a connection with either character beyond the natural sympathy you feel for their trauma, both shared and inherited.

Cathy and Ren remain at a distance throughout the entire novel, which is boring and surface-level at first glance, but the detachment makes sense: Cathy, unsure of her sexuality, and Ren, removed from human emotion, both miserable and overworked. Even still, justice for Cathy! She wasn’t perfect, but she was dealing with her own shit.

Girls’ obsession with mermaids runs deep, and I’m not quite sure where it originated, only that it feels like a natural extension of girlhood. My guess is that it has something to do with the female desire to reclaim our autonomy in a culture that is too afraid to grant us any agency. Teenage girls are a dichotomy in hegemonic structures; they are given power through the fear of those who aim to render them powerless².

But mermaids and sirens demand that their power be respected, targeting any man who dares stand in their way. Even the watered-down versions of mermaids designed for safe consumption, like Disney’s Ariel, find a type of freedom that feels aspirational to girls who learn far too young that they will be punished for attempting the same escape.

I love the idea of mermaids as powerful, mythical creatures, and it makes sense in a light horror novel like Chlorine. But I can’t lie — I love the silly little depictions of mermaids too.

I wanted to be the mermaid in Aquamarine so bad that I dyed the back of my hair bright teal in the bathtub at home. The show “H2O: Just Add Water” was a staple for my sisters and me growing up, and we’ve rewatched it as adults more than I’d like to admit. None of the teenage girls in these depictions turn into fearsome monsters, but they do possess a power that mere mortals could never, even if it’s packaged as a cutesy white girl.

All little kids “play mermaids” as soon as they’re old enough to hold their breath long enough. The girls on my swim team and I thought we were mermaids, too, even if we were stuffed into lycra and latex swim caps, the scent of chlorine lingering so long on our skin that we believed we were sweating it. We all pulled out the same party trick with our non-swimmer friends (and one that makes an appearance in Chlorine too): Even if you hadn’t been in the pool for a few days — and, to be fair, that respite was rare — you could lick the back of your hand and the wet spot would still smell impossibly like chlorine.

Despite the pain and exhaustion that came with it, I think most of us felt, like Ren, that we belonged in the water and felt more comfortable there, and though I can’t speak for other ex-swimmers, I still feel that way 15 years later. I still feel clumsy on land in a way I never have in the water.

Even the language we used primed us to believe we were meant to stay in the water and everything in between was simply preparing us for submersion; any practice we did out of the water, whether that was running miles or doing lunges around the perimeter of the pool or lifting heavy in the weight room, is called dryland, as if it were unnatural rather than the element we were supposed to belong to.

From the perspective of a swimmer, it’s easy to see why Ren is convinced she really does belong to the water, that she is a mermaid. It was the only identity that felt entirely hers and defined on her terms; not dutiful daughter, or athlete, or object of desire.

Ren might have been a little too dramatic about it for my taste (one line that sums it up perfectly for me comes as a response to the ER doctor asking her about her pain levels: “How was I supposed to differentiate between the pain due to the concussion and the pain due to the agony of everyday human life?" Be so for real, girl). But at the same time, what can I expect from a teenage girl up against misogyny, racism, and men and boys sexualizing a body that doesn’t feel like hers?

This book is categorized as horror, and more specifically body horror, but I quibble with that. There is one scene specifically that you could classify as horror, but readers expecting a disturbing or gruesome novel will be disappointed. Instead, the horror is the oppression Ren faces, that all girls face. And, well, yes. I didn’t need this story to tell me that.

My swimming career did not dazzle like Ren’s, but it didn’t end with a bang either; it fizzled out after a boy broke my collarbone in three places, horseplaying after I’d asked him to stop. I was 15, co-captain of the varsity team at my high school and swimming regularly for my club team year-round alongside a best friend. It was the age I’d need to make a decision — buckle down and aim for a college scholarship, or accept that my time was over.

I jumped back in the water as soon as possible after I’d healed, too scared of what my identity would be without “swimmer” attached to it, but I could never quite find the competitive edge needed to subject myself to a sport as mentally grueling as it is physically again. My time out of the water gave me the space to reassess, and I decided I was done smelling like chlorine, enduring hours of practice a day, pretending to be a mermaid.

One day, I unceremoniously took my swim cap off for the last time at the end of my last practice, hair tangling in my face underwater like seaweed. I grew up and I grew away from swimming, though I guess the real mermaids like Ren never do. They belong to the water, chlorinated or not.

And I cannot resist the opportunity to, as always, continue oversharing and include photographic evidence of my swim team days. I made my mom send me this picture of my sisters and me during our summer team’s picture day just so I could embarrass all three of us on the World Wide Web.

why do we have our skinny little mid-2000s glasses on?

the millennial peace sign is TIMELESS, BABY (silly bandz were not)

Before you go: Find me on Instagram, Goodreads, StoryGraph, or Letterboxd to keep up with my oversharing and obsessive tracking habits in real time.

1. Fun fact, some of the popular suits from my day are now banned by FINA, the swimming governing body, because they worked TOO well. My mom was too smart to shell out for one anyway (the current iterations are $500-$600, though the men’s version is $100-$200 cheaper), and while I was furious at the time, I thank her now for sparing me.

2. Another book that I think covers this power dynamic of teenage girlhood is The Lightness by Emily Temple. It has some of the same elements — troubled teens convinced of their own power but desperately trying to prove it to the world, a slow burn toward the sinister, infatuation — but I think it gets the point across a little better.