46 pages • 1-hour read
Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All
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Themes
The Gift of a Wider Perspective
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and bullying.
The new connections Magnolia makes throughout her New York City neighborhood give her a wider perspective on other people and her own life, fueling her growth. Her broadened understanding helps her see others’ strengths more clearly and profit from their wisdom. As a result, she sees the blessings and opportunities in her own life for what they are and stops focusing so much of her attention on the obstacles she faces. Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All argues that a wider perspective lays the groundwork for greater empathy, contentment, and happiness.
Miller uses the limited third-person point-of-view to establish Magnolia’s narrow perspective at the start of her arc. As the story opens, Magnolia spends most of her time in her parents’ laundromat bored and lonely. She thinks often about how much her parents work and feels neglected by them as a result. She gets irritated and embarrassed at their frugality—they light a regular candle on her birthday instead of buying special birthday candles, for example. They say there’s no money for a summer vacation, and they reuse scraps of things that others might consider garbage. Structurally, Miller links the limitations of Magnolia’s internal perspective with the small physical parameters of her world. As long as she confines herself to the laundromat, she stays stuck in her narrow perspective and fails to see things from her parents’ point of view. Rather than seeing them as complex people with strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears, she only considers how they fall short of her expectations and desires.
Once Magnolia gets out into her neighborhood and begins connecting more deeply with the people around her, her perspective shifts. Even before the story begins, Miller emphasizes the role New York itself will play in Magnolia’s growth. Her illustrations on the cover and title page both highlight the story’s New York City setting: the cover shows Magnolia and Iris crossing a busy city street, and the title page shows Magnolia in an “I Love New York” t-shirt. At the start of the story, even Magnolia’s perspective on New York is limited and doesn’t allow room for opinions or experiences other than her own. When Magnolia and Iris first meet, Magnolia is offended at Iris’s characterization of the city she loves, and she insists that New York has “everything you need” (11). As Magnolia explores the city with Iris, she meets people everywhere she goes who teach her new lessons just when she most needs to hear them. For example, Carl teaches them to learn from mistakes and not let frustration stop their progress since a quest such as theirs will be full of “surprises and small victories” (32). His advice primes the girls to learn from their journey and find its unexpected rewards along the way.
For Magnolia, each of the lessons she learns expands her perspective, deepens her empathy, and increases her happiness. She learns to see her parents as complex individuals in their own right—a central trope of a coming-of-age narrative. As her perspective expands, she comes to understand that, in focusing on the ways her parents disappoint her, she’s overlooked their deep love for her and the warm affection they’ve always offered. When she stops focusing solely on her own feelings—what she fears, and what she hopes for—she can recognize that her friend Iris badly needs understanding. Because her parents and Iris are central to Magnolia’s happiness, these improved relationships buoy her spirits, and she ends the novel much happier than she began.
The Gift of Friendship
Across the narrative, Magnolia moves from being a lonely child longing for friendship to an empathetic person surrounded by new friends and connected to her community. The satisfaction and happiness she feels as a result of this change indicates the positive impact of friendship, support, and connection. The growth she experiences in her relationship with Iris provides a blueprint for her journey as she learns that to have good friendships, she needs to be a good friend in return.
The novel’s opening scenes establish the stakes of Magnolia’s need for friendship. Miller begins the narrative with a description of Magnolia’s feelings about her upcoming birthday: she will not be having a birthday party, because she has “not a single friend in New York City” (1). She feels trapped and bored inside her parents’ laundromat and imagines her classmates away on fancy vacations, having fun picking berries and catching frogs in places like Maine. Magnolia’s attempts to hold her parents’ fleeting attention reinforce her loneliness. When her parents bring out her cake, “Magnolia hesitate[s] before blowing [the candle] out, knowing that as soon as she did, her parents’ attention would be pulled back into work” (7). Magnolia’s initial isolation sets the stage for her meeting with Iris—the novel’s inciting incident.
Miller positions Iris as a model for Magnolia of what a good friend looks like. Everything changes for Magnolia when her mother introduces her to Iris, who immediately demonstrates her openness to experiencing Magnolia’s world by participating in an imaginative game of pretending to be butterflies. Iris’s ability to meet Magnolia exactly where she is prompts Magnolia to decide “they [are] going to be very good friends,” establishing an instant connection between them. (15). When a customer yells at Mrs. Wu, Iris checks in with Magnolia right away to see how she is feeling. She proposes the game of returning the solitary socks to their owners even though the city intimidates her, demonstrating an understanding of Magnolia’s inner world and the things that are important to her. In Miller’s illustrations of their first few stops, she draws Iris looking concerned and clinging to Magnolia as they make their way around the city. Iris’s willingness to let Magnolia demonstrate why she loves New York models an openness to change for the sake of their friendship.
Iris’s interactions with Aspen demonstrate how to empathize with others and understand their complexity instead of judging on first impressions. As she models these skills for Magnolia, Magnolia learns that she has been judging people on partial information. Once she gets to know people more fully, she starts to connect with them and accumulate new friends—Aspen, Jessica, and her cousin Alan, whom she had previously written off as “boring and serious” (45). Following Iris’s example and digging deeper helps Magnolia realize that Alan, like herself, suffers from his own fears and insecurities, allowing her to connect to him.
Initially, Magnolia struggles to return the gift of friendship to Iris, establishing the central conflict of the narrative. She ignores or downplays Iris’s feelings of homesickness and makes no effort to learn more information about Iris’s story before they meet. She doesn’t understand or empathize with Iris’s feelings of jealousy about Jessica. Their first argument threatens their friendship, forcing Magnolia to realize that “she [doesn’t] know the responsibilities of her new position” as a best friend (105). Miller emphasizes the devastation over the potential end of her friendship with Iris in the illustration of her sitting alone on a bench and sobbing (108).
The threat of losing Iris pushes Magnolia toward self-examination and active change. When she builds the beach in the supply closet, she demonstrates that she understands how important it is to show she cares about Iris’s feelings of homesickness. She spends time really listening to Iris’s story, allowing Iris to feel fully seen. She takes action on behalf of their friendship and becomes someone who can return the gifts Iris has given her. Iris and Magnolia are like the pairs of socks they have devoted themselves to restoring: temporarily separated, finally reunited, and perfectly matched.
Developing Confidence and Finding One’s Voice
Across the novel, Magnolia moves from passive to active in her life by developing confidence and finding her voice with the support of her friendships. Like all people, Magnolia’s life has its obstacles and discontents. She starts the novel by making note of these challenges without taking action to address or change them. Magnolia feels as if her parents ignore her and do not pay her enough attention. She dislikes spending all of her time in the laundromat during the summer, and she feels bored and lonely. She’s hurt by the racist comments of the laundromat customers, the changes in her cousin Alan’s behavior, and Aspen’s perpetual bullying, but feels unable to assert herself, express her feelings openly, or instigate change.
Meeting Iris helps Magnolia see that it’s possible to take action. During her adventures with her new friend, Magnolia learns how satisfying developing confidence and finding her voice really is. When Iris first suggests the project of tracking down the owners of the singleton socks, Magnolia realizes that “it ha[s] never occurred to [her] to take action to return the socks herself. She [has] thought of life as something that unfold[s] around her and happen[s] to her while she [is] content being an observer” (24). Iris, by contrast, is someone with the confidence to take action. She rescues the socks from the street, proposes the mission of returning the socks to their owners, and decides that the best way to start feeling comfortable in the city is to get out and experience it.
At the start of this quest, Miller characterizes Magnolia as easily intimidated and held back by her fears even though she wants things to be different. She doesn’t want to make mistakes, be embarrassed, or expose her vulnerabilities. She looks forward to turning ten, for instance, because she dislikes even being associated with the number 9, which looks “small and easily stomped” (1). Her fear prevents her from speaking up against the racist comment about Mrs. Wu not being able to speak English or Aspen’s bullying. Iris’s proposed quest pushes Magnolia out of a passive role and into an active one. On their first mission, Magnolia gets out of the laundromat and steps into the role of a confident guide, showing Iris around the city and giving her tips about how to navigate it successfully.
Each of the people Iris and Magnolia encounter on their quest provides a lesson that builds Magnolia’s confidence, highlighting the impact of community support on personal growth. For example, Carl points out that since everyone makes mistakes, they’re nothing to get flustered by. Lisa tells Magnolia that her spelling mistake is not “wrong,” it is “creative,” reframing a negative perspective as a positive (36). Magnolia has never thought of herself this way, and her confidence grows a little more.
Talking to Aspen for the first time represents a turning point in Magnolia’s arc. Backed by Iris’s support, Magnolia feels confident enough to not only stand up to him but also to attempt to understand him, establishing a thematic link between healthy confidence and a capacity for empathy. Attempting to understand Aspen’s complexity, Magnolia learns that Aspen, too, struggles with feelings of fear and vulnerability, establishing common ground between them and turning an enemy into a potential friend. Later, she finds out that her cousin Alan also struggles with confidence and uses stoicism and condescension as a mask to protect himself. Magnolia realizes that neither Aspen nor Alan are particularly happy because they’re constantly on the defensive.
The construction of the artificial beach in the novel’s resolution evidences Magnolia’s growth across the story. She’s learned valuable lessons about taking chances, building confidence, and speaking her truth. She builds the supply closet beach despite her mother’s objections and her fear that it will not turn out right. She even speaks up and finally tells Mrs. Wu how neglected she feels, even though she risks her mother being angry or hurt. By acting courageously, Magnolia gets her best friend back and feels reassured of her parents’ love—her confidence in seeking what she wants is richly rewarded.
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