Vanessa’s clairvoyant ability and coping strategies in roselle Lim's Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop

This study aims to analyze the representation of Vanessa Yu’s clairvoyant ability and the Coping strategies she develops in response to the psychological burden associated with that ability in Roselle Lim’s Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop. Vanessa Yu is portrayed as a young Chinese American woman who possesses an inherited clairvoyant gift that enables her to foresee future events through tea. Although this supernatural ability is accepted as a natural part of reality within her family and community, Vanessa perceives it as a source of emotional distress because her visions frequently reveal tragic events, loss, and suffering. Based on this background, this study addresses two research questions: (1) how Vanessa Yu’s clairvoyant ability is represented in the novel, and (2) how Vanessa Yu copes with the psychological burden caused by her clairvoyant ability. This study employs a descriptive qualitative method. The primary data source is Roselle Lim’s Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop, while secondary data are obtained from books, journal articles, previous studies, and other scholarly sources related to magical realism, psychoanalysis, coping strategies, and literary criticism. The data consist of words, phrases, sentences, dialogues, narrative descriptions, internal monologues, and character actions relevant to the representation of Vanessa’s clairvoyance and her coping strategies. The collected data are analyzed using W. B. Faris’s theory of magical realism and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The findings reveal that Vanessa’s clairvoyant ability is represented as an inherited gift, a supernatural phenomenon, an ability integrated into everyday life, and a source of psychological burden. Through the framework of magical realism, clairvoyance is portrayed as a natural element that coexists with ordinary reality and is accepted without rational explanation. The study also finds that Vanessa employs three dominant coping strategies to cope with the psychological pressure caused by her ability: denial, avoidance, and rationalization. These mechanisms function as psychological strategies that help her manage anxiety, insecurity, emotional instability, and emotional distress resulting from her visions of the future. Overall, the study demonstrates that supernatural abilities represented through magical realism can generate significant psychological conflict and influence the coping strategies developed by literary characters.