CANR
WORK TITLE: Rental House
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.weikewangwrites.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 415
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born ca. 1989, in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China; married (husband a chemist).
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A., 2011; Boston University, M.F.A.; Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, consultant, and writer. Worked in clinical research, 2011-13; has taught ESL, science, and math; China Educational Development and Consulting Associates, senior consultant; Boston University, Boston, MA, instructor; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, English instructor; Barnard College, New York, NY, adjunct assistant professor.
AWARDS:“5 Under 35” honoree, National Book Foundation, 2017, and PEN/Hemingway Award, 2018, both for Chemistry; Whiting Award for Fiction, 2018; O. Henry Prize, 2019, for “Omakase.”
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019, edited by Laura Furman, Random House (New York, NY), 2019, and Best American Short Stories 2019, edited by Anthony Doerr and Heidi Pitlor, Mariner Books (Boston, MA), 2019. Contributor to periodicals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Prick of the Spindle, Redivider, and SmokeLong Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Weike Wang is a contemporary writer whose short fiction has been published in the likes of Ploughshares and the New Yorker and who broke out with her PEN/Hemingway-winning debut novel, Chemistry. Born in Nanjing, China, she lived in many places as a child, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. She earned a degree in chemistry from Harvard University and, [open new]further pursuing a doctorate in public health from Harvard Chan School of Public Health, intended to become a cancer epidemiologist. About her undergraduate years, she told Alicia M. Chen for the Harvard Crimson: “I worked way too much. I had a pretty intense childhood and high school experience, and then college was also intense. I was pretty stubborn, so I just kept doing it.” At Harvard Wang wrote for the Indy, participated in the China Care volunteer mentor program, and supported friends in clubs like the Taiwanese and Chinese Student Associations. Later, while on the med-school track–but partly disillusioned by an unhinged cardiologist she worked for at Beth Israel–on an impulse Wang applied to the M.F.A. program at Boston University. She was accepted and pursued that degree at the same time as her Ph.D. At Boston University she was mentored by standout Chinese fiction writer Ha Jin and National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez, and Wang’s destiny turned out to lie in the direction of writing and academia.[suspend new] In addition to serving as a senior consultant for China Educational Development and Consulting Associates, Wang has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College.
In 2017 Wang published Chemistry, which was honored as “Most Anticipated Novel of 2017” by Entertainment Weekly, Millions, and Bustle. In the coming-of-age novel about a female scientist, the child of Chinese immigrants, the unnamed narrator is three years into her graduate studies as a chemistry student at a prominent Boston university. The pressure to succeed is overwhelming, especially as her research has run into snags and her parents are badgering her about her career and need to marry.
When her boyfriend, Eric, a fellow scientist whose career is on track, finally proposes, the narrator needs to pause. She didn’t plan to get married until her career, research, and academic standing were stable. Having spent much of her life saying yes and agreeing with others, like her parents and teachers, now she’s questioning her life, love, and academic goals, and surprised with herself that she doesn’t really know what she wants. She’s afraid to make the wrong decision and disappoint the friends and family around her, yet wants to assure her own happiness. Readers follow her over the next two years as she sorts out her life, choices, and obligations. “ Chemistry is a sort of anti- coming-of-age story: Instead of figuring out how to be an adult, the narrator learns to live with uncertainty and indecision,” according to Alexandra Alter in a review in New York Times.
In an interview with Scott Simon online at NPR.org, Wang explained why she chose not to name her main character and how that character can appeal to many readers: “I think when I hear a name, there’s something specific that is attached to it. And I wanted this narrator to have a little bit more of a universal sense around her. I think a lot of graduate students undergoing master’s program, Ph.D. programs can relate to a girl like this and also just the question of marriage.”
Writing in Psychology Today, Nando Pelusi called the book “a funny, wise debut about the heartache of uncertainty and the struggle to please others while forging one’s own path.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed: “The narrator is thoughtful and funny, her scramble understandable. It is her voice—distinctive and appealing—that makes this novel at once moving and amusing, never predictable.” In a review in Publishers Weekly, a writer noted the funny and painfully honest narrative voice, adding praise for “Wang’s gift for perspective—the dog’s, the chemist’s, the immigrant parents, and, most intimately, their bright, quirky, conflicted daughter.”
In the Washington Post, Jamie Fisher commented: “Despite its humor, Chemistry is an emotionally devastating novel about being young today and working to the point of incapacity without knowing what you should really be doing and when you can stop.” Noticing how Wang includes pithy scientific anecdotes or asides among the emotional strife, Leah Greenblatt wrote on the Entertainment Weekly website: “That it’s all so accessible and organic to the story is one of the book’s most consistent pleasures. So is the texture and tone of Wang’s language.”
[resume new]The manuscript for Wang’s second novel, centered on a high-strung Chinese American physician working the intensive care unit in a Manhattan hospital, was subject to a necessary makeover when, a month after she submitted it to publishers in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City and the country. As Bostonia interviewer Sara Rimer related, Wang “didn’t freak out. … Instead, she got to work interviewing her Asian American physician friends who were on the front lines of the pandemic and making revisions.” Wang told Rimer, “I realized I couldn’t write about this occupation without recognizing this big event.”
An attending physician who prefers machines and vital signs to social activities, the thirty-six-year-old protagonist of Joan Is Okay cannot help but notice that everyone seems to puzzle over her. Wealthy brother Fang and his wife are offended when Joan misses their Connecticut estate parties. Eager new neighbor Mark has trouble getting past idle chatter. Colleague Reese feels exhausted trying to keep up with her work ethic. When Joan’s father dies and she buzzes to China and back for the funeral, a forced bereavement break from work leads to reflection. When the pandemic hits and her widowed mother cannot get back to China, anti-Asian sentiment leads to tension.
A Kirkus Reviews writer found Wang’s second novel singularly successful, with her “wry and piercing” style producing neither a conventional rom-com nor a cumbersome drama, but a “character study about otherness … that manages to be both profound and witty.” The reviewer hailed Joan Is Okay as “a novel as one of a kind as its memorable main character.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer found in the novel a “tender and enduring portrayal of the difficulties of forging one’s own path after spending a life between cultures.” In Library Journal, Liz French remarked that Joan Is Okay proves “by turns touching, funny, observant, and thoughtful” as the “offbeat protagonist … straddles two cultures and tries to find her place in the world.”
A modern couple get caught in interracial cross currents in Wang’s third novel, Rental House. Having met at Yale, Keru, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, and Nate, a son of blue-collar Appalachia, fell in love and married. A number of years later, with Nate an entomology professor and Keru a business consultant, they host a series of family gatherings at a rented house in Cape Cod and, years after, a bungalow in the Catskills. Keru’s parents believe in hard work and humility; Nate’s science-denying parents are invested in pleasantries and occasionally let xenophobia surface in their interactions. Beyond the two sets of parents tugging and torquing their relationship in complicated directions, neighbors incidentally open up a rift in forthrightly reckoning them a classic “double income, no kids” household. The risk of a misstep is high when Nate, who earns much less than Keru, has a chance to invest in his deadbeat older brother Ethan’s latest business venture.
In Library Journal, Lynnanne Pearson called Rental House “stellar,” offering a “sharp portrayal of a marriage and its fault lines” as it proves a “quiet, introspective novel of relationships, family obligations, and resentments.” In the International New York Times, Alexandra Kleeman suggested that the novel’s “elegantly off-kilter structure has a disruptive quality to it, like an uninvited guest. … The visitors peel back the layers of the central relationship one by one, exposing resentments and longings that they would rather keep out of view.” Kleeman observed that Rental House “dramatizes the riddle of adulthood: Even as you flee a family, you carry it along with you, in memories of how and who you learned to be in the past.” Porter Shreve, in the Washington Post, described the novel as “funny, deceptively keen and artful .” With the scenes set entirely in houses the couple rent, Shreve said the fact that “you can’t see their selves, their souls reflected in the rooms through which they move … gives the book, which on its surface is so quick and legible, a quiet depth and sadness.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer found Rental House “wonderfully acerbic,” as Wang “excels at setting the tone with biting prose,” whlie the “scenes of family drama are compulsively readable.” A Kirkus Reviews writer deemed her an “incisive writer with sharp psychological insight who does dialogue particularly well,” including through what goes unspoken. The reviewer declared that this “quietly engrossing novel is subtle and powerful in its cultural critique” and presents a “compelling portrait of family dynamics under pressure.” The Publishers Weekly reviewer hailed Rental House as a “tour de force.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2021, Terry Hong, review of Joan Is Okay, p. 84.
International New York Times, December 24, 2024, Alexandra Kleeman, review of Rental House.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of Chemistry; December 15, 2021, review of Joan Is Okay; October 1, 2024, review of Rental House.
Library Journal, January, 2022, Liz French, review of Joan Is Okay, p. 62; December, 2024, Lynnanne Pearson, review of Rental House, p. 85.
New York Times, May 26, 2017, Alexandra Alter, review of Chemistry, p. C18(L).
Publishers Weekly, March 20, 2017, review of Chemistry, p. 47; November 29, 2021, review of Joan Is Okay, p. 33; October 7, 2024, review of Rental House, p. 118.
Psychology Today, September-October, 2017, Nando Pelusi, review of Chemistry, p. 96.
Washington Post, June 12, 2017, Jamie Fisher, review of Chemistry; December 2, 2024, Porter Shreve, review of Rental House.
ONLINE
Barnard College website, https://english.barnard.edu/ (January 30, 2025), author profile.
Bostonia, https://www.bu.edu/ (January 30, 2025), Sara Rimer, “In Alum Weike Wang’s New Novel, Joan Is Okay, a Chinese American Doctor Navigates Job and Family,” author interview.
Entertainment Weekly, http://ew.com/ (May 26, 2017), Leah Greenblatt, review of Chemistry.
Harvard Crimson, https://www.thecrimson.com/ (January 24, 2021), Alicia M. Chen, “Weike Wang on Art, Science, and Career Changes.”
NPR website, http://www.npr.org/ (May 27, 2017), Scott Simon, “Chemistry: A Novel Is about a Scientist Whose Plans Get Reconstituted,” author interview; (November 30, 2024), Scott Simon, “Weike Wang Discusses Her New Novel Rental House.”
SheWrites, https://shewrites.com/ (December 1, 2024), “STEM, Humor and Minimalist Writing: Exclusive Interview with Weike Wang.”
University of Pennsylvania website, https://www.english.upenn.edu/ (January 30, 2025).
Weike Wang website, https://www.weikewangwrites.com (January 30, 2025).
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Chinese translator, see Wang Weike.
Weike Wang
Wang in 2021
Born Nanjing, China
Nationality Chinese American
Alma mater Harvard University (BA, MSc, PhD)
Boston University (MFA)
Occupation Writer
Notable work Chemistry
Awards PEN/Hemingway Award, Whiting Award
Website www.weikewangwrites.com
Weike Wang is a Chinese-American author of the novel Chemistry,[1] which won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award.
Her fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker,[2] and Redivider.[3]
Life
Wang was born in Nanjing, China. Her family emigrated when she was five years old. She lived in Australia and Canada before arriving in the United States with her family at the age eleven.[4][3][5][6] Wang once described the community in which she lived as "a very rural town, and everyone was white. I was the only Asian person in my school."[7]
After high school, Wang attended Harvard University, where she studied chemistry for her undergraduate degree and public health for her doctorate. While she was pre-med as an undergraduate, she reconsidered going to medical school. While completing her doctorate, she also attended Boston University, where she received her MFA.[8][9]
Career
In 2017, Wang was selected by author Sherman Alexie for the National Book Foundation's annual 5 under 35 list. In its citation, the National Book Foundation called Wang "a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family."[10] In 2018, she received a Whiting Award for Fiction, one of ten awarded each year to emerging writers.[11]
Her 2018 short story "Omakase" was selected for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2019 anthology by editors Anthony Doerr and Heidi Pitlor,[12] and in the 2019 O. Henry Prize Anthology by prize jurors Lynn Freed, Elizabeth Strout, and Lara Vapnyar.[13][14]
Writing style
Critics have often noted that Wang rarely names her main characters in her major works.[15] The Chinese American protagonist of Chemistry remains nameless throughout the novel, as do her parents and everyone except for the heroine's boyfriend, Eric.[16] Wang continued her trend of nameless characters in her short story "Omakase," which was published in The New Yorker in 2018.[17] "I am terrible at naming characters," Wang told The New Yorker in 2018, adding that she also considers context and her characters lives when she decides to leave them nameless.[18]
Bibliography
Novels
Chemistry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2017. ISBN 9781524731755.
Joan Is Okay. Random House. 2022. ISBN 9780525654834.
Rental House. Riverhead Books. 2024. ISBN 9780593545546. [19][20][21][22]
Short stories
"Conversations with My Father". Ploughshares. 42 (2): 137–139. Summer 2016. doi:10.1353/plo.2016.0104. ISSN 0048-4474. JSTOR 44738875.
"Omakase". The New Yorker. 94 (17): 56–63. June 18, 2018. ISSN 0028-792X.
"Hair". Boulevard. 34 (1): 13–18. October 28, 2018. ISSN 0885-9337.
"The Trip". The New Yorker. 95 (36): 62–67. November 18, 2019. ISSN 0028-792X.
"The Poster". Gulf Coast. Spring 2020.
"Flight Home". The New Yorker. 96 (8): 34–49. April 13, 2020. ISSN 0028-792X.
"Oasis Room". Ploughshares. 47 (4): 169–183. Winter 2021–22. doi:10.1353/plo.2021.0133. ISSN 0048-4474. JSTOR 27093342.
"Status in Flux". The New Yorker. 99 (18): 50–54. June 26, 2023. ISSN 0028-792X.
Weike Wang
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department
English
Office
501 Barnard Hall
Office Hours
W 12-2pm
Contact
Messages: 212.854.2116
wwang@barnard.edu
Weike Wang is the author of CHEMISTRY (Knopf 2017) and JOAN IS OKAY (Random House 2022). She is the recipient of the 2018 Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is in the 2019 Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prizes. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard.
Weike Wang
weike@post.harvard.edu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weike_Wang
Publications
News & Events
2019/10/08Weike Wang Wins Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House
2018/11/14KWH: Weike Wang, Cheryl J. Family Fiction Reading
2018/10/15Weike Wang announced as 2018 Whiting Award Winner in Fiction
Courses Taught
spring 2025
ENGL 3201.301 Flash Fiction Workshop
ENGL 3356.401 Asian American Nonfiction Workshop
fall 2024
ENGL 3026.401 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Real Science
spring 2024
ENGL 3201.301 Fiction Workshop: Flash Fiction
ENGL 3356.401 Asian American Nonfiction Workshop
fall 2023
ENGL 3026.401 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Real Science
spring 2023
ENGL 3026.301 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Real Science
ENGL 3201.301 Flash Fiction
fall 2022
ENGL 3016.301 Intro to Creative Writing: Writing Real Science
spring 2022
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: Longform
fall 2021
ENGL 010.302 Intro to Creative Writing: Fiction and Memoir
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: Autofiction
spring 2021
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: The Novella
fall 2020
ENGL 010.303 Intro to Creative Writing
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: Auto-Fiction
spring 2020
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: The Novella
fall 2019
ENGL 010.303 Intro to Creative Writing
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: The Novel
spring 2019
ENGL 115.302 Advanced Fiction Writing: The Novel
fall 2018
ENGL 010.304 Introduction to Creative Writing
ENGL 115.301 Advanced Fiction Writing: The Novel
Weike Wang is the author of CHEMISTRY (Knopf 2017), JOAN IS OKAY (Random House 2022) and the forthcoming RENTAL HOUSE (Riverhead 2024). She is the recipient of a Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories and has won an O. Henry Prize. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Barnard College.
Instagram: @weikewang
Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her debut novel, Chemistry, won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, a 2018 Whiting Award, as well as the John C. Zacharis Award. Chemistry is currently being optioned for a feature film by Amazon Studios. Weike was named a “5 Under 35” honoree of the National Book Foundation and her short story, “Omakase” which first appeared in the New Yorker was also published in the 2019 Best American Short Stories. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares. Weike currently lives in New York City with her dog, Biscuit.
Weike Wang on Art, Science, and Career Changes
“Science as its best, can be art. The best experiments are really beautiful and simple. One of the things I learned from synthetic organic chemistry, like with mathematical proofs, was how beautiful something could be on one page. And that’s kind of what I want to achieve with writing.”
By Alicia M. Chen
January 24, 2021
Before Weike Wang ’11 became a writer — her debut novel, Chemistry, won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway award — she was an undergraduate at Harvard, where she lived in Currier house, studied chemistry, prepared to apply to medical school, and spent a lot of time in Mallinckrodt Labs. Now, after a public health doctorate at Harvard and a simultaneous MFA at Boston University, she is working on her next novel and teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College.
I stumbled upon Wang’s work two years ago, when a friend recommended to me her short story “Omakase.” Shortly after, I read Chemistry in one sitting. The narrator is a grad student in synthetic organic chemistry at an unnamed Boston area university. She is ambivalent about her career and marriage to her boyfriend, who has proposed (and has a faculty job offer); she grapples with her immigrant upbringing, being a woman in a male-dominated field, her parents’ expectations. “It is a chicken and egg argument,” the narrator says. “Did I go into science because I liked it? Or because I was, in the beginning, very good at it and then began to like it?”
“Such progress he’s made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon,” the narrator says, referring to her father.
Wang and I chat over Zoom about career changes, creativity, chemistry classes, and leaving pre-med. This interview has been edited for clarity.
***
AMC: Over the past few months, my senior friends and I have been having a lot of conversations about why we want to do what we want to do. What were your 20s like?
WW: My 20s — now I’m 31, so my 20s were not that far — were pretty rocky. After undergrad I was in clinical research, and I did that for two years while I was applying to med school.
Then I had a change of heart with medicine, because I realized I was never a bedside care kind of individual. I’m not sure if I was ever that interested in research, I just don’t remember a summer where I wasn’t doing it, or learning science.
Now that I’m teaching English I often hear my students say, I want to study English because I’ve been reading my entire life and I guess I like to read. This was the kind of the same mentality when I went into epidemiology. I started a masters and then, I felt the pressure to finish. So I was in a doctorate for most of my 20s. I considered doing a postdoc, which I didn’t do — thank God.
The hardest thing about my 20s was the unknowing. And the intense pressure I felt to pick a path, because in the community that I grew up in, the path had to be straightforward, a to b or c. And saying you want to write, it’s almost like saying you want to go to the moon or become a cow.
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There was a lot of figuring out what I really want to do in the trenches. I use that word because for some of my friends, their calling is medicine. They really like being in the trenches of medicine, and they enjoy the day-to-day grind. Some people enjoy the day-to-day grind of research. I enjoy the day-to-day grind of writing. Like writing, rewriting a novel 50 times.
AMC: What do you like about the day-to-day grind of writing?
WW: The problem solving — piecing together a really big puzzle. There are many ways to do it, but there’s usually one right way to do it, and that’s pretty enjoyable to figure out.
AMC: What do you mean by the right way to do it?
WW: I’ve torn down projects that my editor felt were okay, but after a while I just thought weren’t right. That’s something I was never willing to do in science. If I, or the group, needed to just get the paper out, I didn’t really care about the narrative or the how, which is what PIs care about — getting the science perfectly right or doing that perfect experiment. But with writing, I do care. And I think caring about something is incredibly important.
You have to care, above all else. Your editor, your agent, your PI, your postdoc, whoever — they shouldn’t care as much as you do, and when you find a field in which you are the person that cares the most, then that is your field.
AMC: When you were in grad school, you also did an MFA. How did you feel about switching tasks, like when you were doing two degrees at once?
WW: Two degrees at once was just school, and school, for me, is very straightforward. It was like undergrad — when you do a lot of different classes and activities at once, you end up compartmentalizing. I liken it to switching between Chinese and English. But what happens after school, launching your own thing, that’s actually the stressful part.
I can’t believe I’m going to quote my father, but he has often said, school is the easy part, work is much harder.
And I totally see it. Now I have this writing career that I’m still trying to launch, and also my teaching duties, and also being an adult.
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AMC: On the subject of school, when you look back on your undergrad now, what are your main takeaways?
WW: I worked way too much. I had a pretty intense childhood and high school experience, and then college was also intense. I was pretty stubborn, so I just kept doing it.
Overall, I’m quite happy with my Harvard experience. Granted, that it was akin to being in a pressure cooker for four long years. Inevitably you get tired, or worn down. Some people are great at continuing that momentum, but after a while, someone with that kind of intensity becomes socially different, removed in a way. As an undergrad, that’s totally fine, as an adult, maybe not so much.
AMC: Do a lot of people you know have this type of intensity at 30?
WW: Yes, most of my peers/friends went into PhDs, MDs or MD/PhD programs, some went into consulting/finance, all 80-100 hour work weeks, and they like that, since if you’re not dying on the job, then what are you doing it for (the Harvard mentality I guess). But operating at that high intensity after a while does change people. I’m not saying that I’m not an intense person — I do have a pretty intense writing schedule — but the intensity in STEM is slightly different. There’s no, or sometimes no, emotional core. Even though most STEM people are quite emotional, they simply bury it. Still, spending a long time in an intense environment can truncate your personality, I’ve noticed, in the same way that going to Harvard, after a while, can truncate your personality.
I keep saying this and that about Harvard but truly I’m grateful for the opportunities the school gave me. Steep learning curve, opened my eyes, etc. And if I didn’t go there, I wouldn’t have taken the writing classes I took, met the people I did, or had the experiences. Harvard is one of those things where if I knew what I know now about the school, I’d probably be too scared to go. But now that I’m on the other side, I’m grateful to have survived it.
AMC: When you say that you worked a lot in undergrad, what did you spend your time working on?
WW: Mostly classes. I had a few extracurriculars. I should have done more, but it was mostly lab work. There was no work life balance.
AMC: Did you do organic research?
WW: Yeah, I did organometallics. I did systems bio one summer, and then organometallics the last three years. I’m not a big organic synthesis person, I didn’t love synthesis, so my research was mostly kinetics based, reaction mechanics.
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AMC: What else did you do?
WW: I wrote for the Indy. I was part of a mentorship program called China Care volunteering. And then I supported my friends in clubs like Taiwanese Student Association or Chinese Student Association, and helped them out with posting posters and organizing events.
I know that if I hadn’t been premed, I would have done stuff that I enjoyed more. But as a premed, you need volunteering, shadowing, clinical research, you need exposure. Being premed is insane, the way you have to stack your resume to make yourself seem human, which is the opposite of what being a human is supposed to mean.
AMC: When did you start seriously questioning going to med school?
WW: I worked for a mildly/totally unhinged cardiologist for two years at Beth Israel. Mostly hung out around cardiologists and their research scientists, and during this period, I got even more disillusioned than I already was.
Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate my entire journey through science, having taken some years away from it. I love learning science. I love being able to go from basic principles to larger ones. What I really hated was all the other crap that came with it, how it could get petty and non-collaborative, yet wrapped under the ruse of objectivity and truth seeking.
I’m sure other people have good clinical research experiences, so maybe I was unlucky with mine. I did have great mentors and post-docs in all my other basic science labs, although most were also pretty stressed and unhappy. It kind of just turned me around. When choosing a forever path, you need to have role models. When I decided against premed, I had no role models in medicine. I do still have role models in science: My husband, who is a chemist, and some other friends who stuck it out with research. But when I was 23, 24, I was too hard on myself and sort of naive. I was going through a slow falling out of love with the scientific work itself, because there’s so much more than the work, and again my care for the work was waning. I felt that shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn't be waning in my love for clinical research at 23.
AMC: I feel like it’s very easy to be caught up in the grind. And when you’re in the middle of the grind, it’s hard to think about what’s outside of the grind.
WW: To be honest, medicine, if you get through the first 10 years, can be an easy career.
If you want to be a writer or go into the arts, you have to have a vision. You have to have material and something to say, contribute. It’s the same thing with going into independent research and starting your own lab.
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In medicine, you don’t need to do any of that. Some of my friends are attendings or fellows now, and while the hours are long, especially with the pandemic, they clock in and clock out on a schedule. In a regular work week, once they’re out of the hospital, they’re out. They don’t need to think about it on their days off. If you’re an ER doctor, you take six shifts and then maybe you go to the Caribbeans. Unfortunately, and inevitably, I think about writing 24/7. Sometimes I wake up from nightmares of not being able to fix something on the page, and that’s when I know the novel isn’t going well. It’s perpetual anxiety and angst. Did I make a mistake choosing this? Was everyone around me right that science is what you do for a living and writing is just a hobby? Unhelpful questions of course, self fulfilling prophecies.
AMC: What do you think about the grind in terms of writing? Is it linear?
WW: No, it’s the most inefficient system I’ve ever dealt with. It’s hard. But overall, I think it’s worthwhile, because there are a lot of things I believe in that I want to get down. I might not get it right on the page every time, it might not be art every time, but that’s the goal. And I’m not pressuring myself to write the next great Asian American novel, but I would love to be able to write something that is reflective of my experience and of people who are important to me. My parents and I came here for opportunities that they didn’t have, and truthfully, writing is one of them, even if I know they believe that medicine or science is way more secure. So I do believe I’m honoring them in that way.
AMC: When you describe writing as art, what do you mean?
WW: Creating something with clarity and beauty. Taking a very small part of your experience and polishing in a way that’s beautiful and not cliche. Science as its best, can be art. The best experiments are really beautiful and simple. One of the things I learned from synthetic organic chemistry, like with mathematical proofs, was how graceful something could be on one page. And that’s kind of what I want to achieve with writing.
AMC: Out of curiosity, did you take Chem 30?
WW: Yeah, Brian Liau was actually a TF for it then, and he’s one of the people who makes chemistry look like one plus one. And I also took Chem 206.
AMC: Advanced organic synthesis.
WW: My entire lab pressured me to do it. They were like, Weike, you’re not going to be a chemist if you don’t take 206. Clearly, I didn’t become a chemist, but I still took 206.
AMC: I shopped that class. They call it something else now.
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WW, laughing: That class was why I was in lab so much. I was trying to get everyone to help me with my last synthetic project because I couldn’t figure out how to make my molecule.
AMC: What were your favorite and least favorite classes? Anything in particular that stood out to you?
WW: I didn’t like the big life sciences classes. I really loved the smaller biology classes that were seminar based, and where they taught you how to dissect scientific papers.
I liked Chem 135: Experimental Synthetic Chemistry. We were there overnight a couple times, because once the compound was in the column, and it wouldn’t come out, you just have to stand there and wait until it does. But it was really fun, because I was with a small group of three other people and we all got along.
I loved my workshop classes. Two classes with Amy Hempel, one with Darcy Frey (audited this class while I was doing my doctorate), outstanding workshop classes if you can get into one, and where I learned so much of my craft. I took a seminar with Elaine Scarry about the Brontes; that class was phenomenal. I personally excelled in a class that was smaller because I’m naturally kind of shy. So if it’s a class of even 30 or 40 people, I just didn’t say anything. But if it was a class of 10 or 12, I found myself more able to voice my opinion and ask for help.
On the humanities side, there were so many great teachers. It was like a warm bath going into the Barker Center.
And then you go to Mallinckrodt, and then, you’re just like, I just want to cry.
AMC: Pfizer lecture hall. I spent a lot of time there.
WW: Yeah.
AMC: The doors are right in the front. So when you walk in, everyone sees you.
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WW: Everyone sees you, and if you’re late, you know…
AMC: Yeah.
WW: So much time spent in Pfizer, that place will always be burned in my memory.
In Weike Wang's novel "Rental House," a couple invite their families to visit them on vacation.
RENTAL HOUSE, by Weike Wang
"Every happy family is unhappy in its own way" - is that the quote? Or maybe it's, "Every unhappy family is happy to stay that way," or even, "You only learn the ways in which a family is unhappy when they come to stay." With or without Tolstoy's wisdom, most couples know that extended visits from their in-laws reveal new edges to old dynamics between parents and children. Over the course of a friendly visit, tried-and-true ways of keeping the peace fail to function and new ways struggle to be born. It's in this strange clash of familiarity and friction that Weike Wang's third novel, "Rental House," makes its home.
Keru and Nate are young married professionals living in New York City with high-pressure jobs and a sheepdog. Keru, a corporate consultant, is the child of strict, highly driven Chinese immigrants who became United States citizens when she was young and instilled in her "the belief that to live was to struggle, and that to struggle was a given, yet one need not know why." Nate, a biology professor, is the first in his white, working-class family to go to college, and carries with him a sense of isolation born of climbing into the elite ranks of tenure-track academia. Their marriage is a merging of two cultural backgrounds into a functioning unit, oriented around their shared social status (even their dog's name, Mantou, the Chinese word for a tasty steamed bun, accords with what Nate calls "the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items"). But four encounters across the novel's two halves expose serious fissures in their relationship that have gone unperceived, and therefore unaddressed.
In the first half, the couple drive out to a New England cottage they've rented for a month in the summer, where they will host each of their families in succession. First Keru's mother and father arrive, armed with Mace and carrying coolers full of homemade food, afraid in the year since the onset of the pandemic to eat out or be unmasked around anyone outside their immediate family unit. When Keru's parents leave, Nate's show up: cheery Midwesterners whose goals are to see every lighthouse and eat every oyster in the area, while worrying out loud about whether Nate is doing enough to stay in touch with his prodigal brother, Ethan - an aspiring entrepreneur but frequent washout - and whether Nate is assimilating himself too much within the culture and values of his Chinese wife.
The book's second half takes place on another vacation several years later, after illness strikes both sets of parents and the progress of Nate's and Keru's careers means they're spending more and more time apart. In a lakeside bungalow two hours north of the city where the couple have gone to unwind, a meeting with their neighbors, a well-off Romanian family visiting from Brooklyn, turns sour; and then Ethan shows up to ask Nate to fund an ill-conceived business venture.
Wang's elegantly off-kilter structure has a disruptive quality to it, like an uninvited guest. "There is a tendency to take two halves of something and assign them equal weight," Wang writes at the novel's exact midpoint, just before the second half begins. "Marriage is 50-50, but who said that? Who believes this to be true?" The visitors peel back the layers of the central relationship one by one, exposing resentments and longings that they would rather keep out of view. Keru is ambivalent about her cultural difference: She can't help seeing the world through the immigrant striving she has replicated so well and yet she also hungers to fit in, to talk schools and real estate with a glamorous young mother she meets on vacation, and to go for a run, ponytail swinging, with Ethan's fit blond girlfriend. Nate, for his part, wishes mostly to get by without conflict, tolerating his parents' opinions about his life choices but feeling deeply wounded nevertheless when they fail to see and accept who he is.
Through these alienating moments the pair do not quite grow closer, but they do come to understand that they are alone - in their particular experiences of race, class and culture - together. Wang's two previous novels, "Chemistry" and "Joan Is Okay," skillfully draw humor from the foibles and ambiguities of finding your place in the world. In this one, similarly funny but more focused on the melancholies of place once you've found it, she dramatizes the riddle of adulthood: Even as you flee a family, you carry it along with you, in memories of how and who you learned to be in the past.
Of course, couples, if they stay together long enough, become families of their own, fighting against their own particular flaws and disorders. "Ease is an illusion," Keru's mother tells her early in the novel. "Nothing worth achieving can or should be easy, and if you chose to do something for its ease, then you have become complacent." For Keru and Nate, the vacation home is supposed to be a place for relaxation, an escape from the mundane stresses of life; but it presses them up against their problems without the escape of work. The two see each other laid bare, rife with neuroses, disappointments, insecurities - and only then do they see what exactly it is that holds them close.
RENTAL HOUSE | By Weike Wang | Riverhead | 215 pp. | $28
Alexandra Kleeman is the author, most recently, of the novel "Something New Under the Sun."
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Joey Han FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Kleeman, Alexandra. "Can a Marriage Survive a Summer Holiday With the In-Laws?" International New York Times, 24 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A821064462/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e8bb45fe. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
The acronym DINK (double income, no kids) has been around since neoliberalism first took root in the United States, during the Reagan years. It resurfaces now and then, as an enviable lifestyle - all that disposable income, so many places to travel to unencumbered, such an array of restaurants to choose from, the endless ways to pamper a pet - or, increasingly, it's used as a pejorative, as shorthand for selfish, shallow and materialistic. In Weike Wang's timely third novel, "Rental House," childless, mid-30s, dual income spouses Keru and Nate are knocked for a loop when a couple they meet on vacation call them the "textbook example of a DINK family."
It's a revelation, and the truth hurts: Keru is a high paid consultant, and Nate is a professor of entomology. They have wealth and status. They met at Yale, live in Manhattan. They have a 4-year-old sheepdog, Mantou, named after the steamed buns of Keru's native China and fulfilling Nate's "boyhood dream. The pastoral one, of endless fields and a friend about your height whose fur your small hands could sink into and who could guide you into the magical woods."
If the modern equivalent of the magical woods is a well-appointed Airbnb, Mantou has led her owners into a New England picture postcard: a gabled cottage on Cape Cod a short walk from the beach. But there's a catch to this vacation, and Keru and Nate have only themselves to blame: after settling in and enjoying the peace and quiet far from sirens and street noise, they've invited their in-laws for visits, back-to-back in successive weeks.
First up are Keru's cleanliness-obsessed, ultracautious parents, who drive 24 hours nonstop from central Minnesota, post-covid, still afraid of hotel germs. This wonderfully delineated pair, comic in their utter seriousness, includes a father who insists that Keru hand-wash the dishes because "to use a dishwasher is to admit defeat," and a mother who reasons that "to suffer is to strive and to set a bar so high that one never becomes complacent. To become complacent is to become lazy and to lose one's spirit to fight, and to lose one's spirit to fight is to die. So, to suffer is to live."
If the suffering is bad with Keru's parents, it only gets worse when in through the revolving door come Nate's. They've arrived from the outskirts of Boone, North Carolina, ready to taste their first oyster, tour the local lighthouses and share their political opinions just up the beach from the Kennedy compound. Nate hasn't visited home since Donald Trump shocked the world in 2016 and his parents shocked him by admitting they were supporters. Tensions are high, and it doesn't help that Nate's parents don't respect his choice of career and make racially charged comments suggesting that he doesn't have what it takes to stand out. "Certain groups are better at science and math," his mother says, "They like to work themselves to death."
If there's something the pair of parents can agree on beyond fear of the other, it's a desire for grandchildren and frustration that Keru and Nate haven't given them any. "Kids are the future," Nate's mother argues. Plus, "most adults on this planet are parents, and to understand most adults and your own parents, you must become parents. Else you will never understand anything."
Such logic, of course, proves unconvincing. It's not until later, after the parents have left and five years have passed and Keru and Nate are on another trip, this time to a luxury retreat in the Catskills, that their vacation neighbors, Europeans with one son, introduce them to that vaguely accusatory acronym, DINK, sending them, bearing down on 40, into a crisis of soul searching. "Have you noticed that [our friends with children] don't invite us to things anymore?" Keru asks. "They don't invite us because they think oh, look here come those DINKs again," Nate says. "What can you possibly talk about with a DINK?"
Though much of the present action of this funny, deceptively keen and artful novel takes place in one rental house or another, it's a curious title for the book. The settings are too staged to feel like anything more than the luxury interiors from one of the couple's favorite real estate shows. Since nothing is theirs, you can't see their selves, their souls reflected in the rooms through which they move. All of this gives the book, which on its surface is so quick and legible, a quiet depth and sadness. Is it better to bring a child into a world where one can never work hard enough and to suffer is to live? Or is it better to be together without children, to move heirless, like ghosts, through borrowed spaces? As in any good novel, the answers are few but the questions multiply.
- - -
Porter Shreve is the author of four novels. He directs the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
- - -
Rental House
By Weike Wang
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Shreve, Porter. "In 'Rental House,' a childless couple face society's contempt." Washington Post, 2 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A818684947/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3904d05. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Rental House
Weike Wang. Riverhead, $28 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-54554-6
In this wonderfully acerbic outing from Wang (Joan Is Okay), a married couple from New York City face pressure from their in-laws and others on two separate vacations. First, Nate and Keru host Keru's Chinese immigrant parents on Cape Cod, where they've rented a house. On their final night together, they debate the virtues of suffering, which Keru's mother prizes as essential to a person's success. Then they host Nate's parents, blue-collar Trump supporters from the Blue Ridge Mountains who Keru struggles to connect with, especially after Nate's mother complains about the house being too small. Five years later, the couple rents a bungalow in the Catskills, where comments from neighbors about their "double income, no kids" household activate a long-dormant fault line in the couple's relationship: Nate, a scientist, earns far less than Keru, a business consultant. Later, Nate's deadbeat older brother makes a surprise appearance, talking up his newest business venture, a gym, and pressuring Nate to invest in it. Wang excels at setting the tone with biting prose, describing the Catskills' fall foliage as the "mass death of deciduous leaves," and the scenes of family drama are compulsively readable. It's a tour de force. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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Harris, Joy. "Rental House." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 38, 7 Oct. 2024, p. 118. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812513470/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=30ba27f3. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Wang, Weike. Rental House. Riverhead. Dec. 2024.224p. ISBN 9780593545546. $28. F
Wang's (Joan Is Okay, Chemistry) stellar new novel is a sharp portrayal of a marriage and its fault lines in between two family vacations. Two or so years after the start of the pandemic, married couple Nate and Keru rent a house for a month on Cape Cod. They met at a college party and eventually married, despite their vast differences in values and temperament. While at the Cape, they host their parents one at a time. Keru's parents, who immigrated from China when she was a small child, value hard work and suffering and bristle at the expensive surroundings at the Cape. Nate's deeply conservative parents are nice to Keru on the surface but are still occasionally xenophobic. They are also science deniers, even though their son is a scientist. Keru, as a consultant, out-earns Nate. This fact, plus their decision not to have children, causes conflict with each of their families. Five years later, a vacation in the Catskills brings Nate's ne'er-do-well brother to their expensive rental house. VERDICT Wang writes a quiet, introspective novel of relationships, family obligations, and resentments that build over time and what makes a family. Highly recommended.--Lynnanne Pearson
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Pearson, Lynnanne. "Wang, Weike. Rental House." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 12, Dec. 2024, pp. 85+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A820431142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5d99c5e2. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Wang, Weike RENTAL HOUSE Riverhead (Fiction None) $28.00 12, 3 ISBN: 9780593545546
An interracial couple vacations with both sets of parents.
Following the success of her novelsChemistry (2017) andJoan Is Okay (2022), Wang returns with the story of Keru and Nate, a Chinese American woman and a white man who meet at Yale, fall in love, and get married. Some years later, they go on two vacations--to Cape Cod and the Catskills--during which both sets of parents, as well as some unexpected visitors, come to stay with them. As they share rental houses with their families (and their large dog, Mantou), racial, cultural, and class tensions come to the surface. Keru's Chinese immigrant parents are demanding and rigid, while Nate's white, Appalachian, working-class parents (the couple argues at one point about whether they're "white trash") have their own set of particularities and prejudices. Keru chafes against Nate's parents' rural conservatism, occasional racism, and constant need to keep up appearances through pleasantries, even when conflict lurks beneath the surface. On the other hand, Nate feels intimidated and judged for his amateur Mandarin skills and reliance upon bourgeois comforts that Keru's parents, as immigrants who have had to live in less ideal conditions, feel are lazy. (In one memorable incident, Keru's father proclaims that "to use a dishwasher is to admit defeat.") Caught in the crossfire of these contrasting mentalities and expectations, Keru and Nate are forced to reflect on the values that shape their relationship and their burgeoning family. Wang is an incisive writer with sharp psychological insight who does dialogue particularly well, revealing what is not said in conversation just as much as what is said out loud. This quietly engrossing novel is subtle and powerful in its cultural critique and will surely be relatable for anyone who has in-laws.
A compelling portrait of family dynamics under pressure.
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"Wang, Weike: RENTAL HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810315251/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56867c9b. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
HOST: SCOTT SIMON
SCOTT SIMON: There's a scene that might resonate this week - a woman sits around a campfire with her husband, Nate, and her in-laws at a rental house on Cape Cod. It's several days into their togetherness when all of a sudden - or maybe it's been building for a long time - the woman picks up a hatchet, she digs it into a flaming log and throws both into the rental house.
WEIKE WANG: (Reading) Someone screamed - it wasn't Keru. When the smoke cleared, three people stood in the kitchen, scrutinizing the wet piece of burnt wood and the black streaks it had left. One by one, they turned their wax heads to Keru. Why were they looking at her like that? Why the confusion, the fear? She, for one, had neither. Her head was perfectly clear. At least now they could get back to that seedless watermelon and the task of coexistence. A fire alarm flashed and blared somewhere. The large security deposit she paid was gone. A one-star review awaited her upon checkout. Blame me, she thought. I'm the bad one. In the meantime, she sat back down by the fire and beckoned for her chosen family to come out and join her.
SIMON: "Rental House" is the new novel from Weike Wang. She joins us now from our studios in New York. Thank you so much for being with us.
WANG: Thank you.
SIMON: Why does Keru throw that burning log into the house?
WANG: So this is - the scene that I read for Keru happens in the middle of the book, this climax moment. And she had just spent a month at a Cape Cod vacation home. First couple of weeks were with her parents and second couple of weeks with her in-laws. Over that period of time, the tensions in the family have boiled, and they've had, you know, to be together in this cramped space with their big sheepdog for an extensive period of time, spending quality time together. And I think it's a frustration that a lot of people can relate to how we want to be with our families, but then, in those moments of disagreement in conversations, it can be incredibly challenging.
SIMON: Yeah. I don't want to overlook the meet-cute that Keru and Nate have at a Halloween party.
WANG: Right. It is the first - one of the first parties she attends in college. She shows up poorly dressed, and they meet. She starts interrogating him. What do you want to do with your life? Things like that. He's kind of fascinated by her. She's sort of like a light bulb. For him, he's the first in his family to go to college. He comes from a rural working-class family, and he and Keru meet at Yale. So it's this kind of huge intergenerational jump in class for both of them because she comes from a immigrant family. So they are actually very similar in that they're kind of both black sheeps of their family, but they're also incredibly different.
SIMON: And Keru's family lived in China...
WANG: Yes.
SIMON: ...Under the Cultural Revolution. How does that stay with them?
WANG: Well, that was during a formative period for the parents, and they emigrated, in my mind, probably in the '80s, to the States where they had Keru. And I think it's the sense of immigration and then assimilation and the sense of we don't want turbulence. We really want safety. We really want security. And so that's kind of what's staying with them. Keru and her family don't really talk about the past. They want all of that to be just packaged up. And she's always curious about that.
SIMON: Why does Keru's father have such contempt for dishwashers?
WANG: (Laughter) I think that touches on his sense of - part of this book is the sense of pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, doing things on your own, being very proactive. And for some reason, he feels like using the dishwasher is a sign of too much comfort.
SIMON: You've given interviews in which you've said, I think one of the hallmarks of fiction is making your character suffer.
WANG: Yeah, a little bit (laughter).
SIMON: Well, help us understand. I'm sure you say that with love.
WANG: I...
SIMON: Actually, I'm not sure that's true, but go ahead.
WANG: Say that with love. Another way to say this that I would say in class is you have to put obstacles in front of your characters. You have to be able to kind of push them through uncomfortable situations, right? I think about Jane Austen's "Emma," in which Emma starts handsome, clever, rich, and the entire story is about how she is humbled. That idea of pushing characters through some sort of suffering, some sort of trial by fire, is innate to any writing. And it's also fun for, I think, readers to read dysfunction. It's not your dysfunction. It's someone else's dysfunction, and that can be entertaining.
SIMON: It didn't occur to me until a couple of days after I finished your book. But this stays with me now. Are even the words rental house meant to remind us that so many of our problems, irritations and anxieties are something that we take on in our lives and then grow out of them?
WANG: Yeah. There's a sense of temporariness for the rental house. I think that's also why I picked choosing the lens of vacation, that there's this, like, controlled period of time that I can look at this family and look at the intensity of their issues. And then those issues either stay with them, and they do. There are certain issues that don't leave them, but then they come in waves. There's a peak, and there's a trough, and that I think is family life, that I think is marriage, dealing with problems that come again and come back and recede, but then push forward.
SIMON: Let me dare to suggest something to you on this holiday weekend. And I say this from a family that is absolutely mixed myself. My parents were a mixed marriage. Our family is from all over the world - China and France. This is America.
WANG: Right.
SIMON: We're all different. In fact, I'd say the differences are part of why we love each other.
WANG: I agree with that. And it's one of these things that in a family like this where there are differences, there are differences in opinion and values, when you're in a family, you also can't disengage. You have to be around these people. And it's not just family. It's friends, it's your neighbors, it's your community. We love our differences. We hate our differences. There's a sense of embracing and, I think, mutual respect and sort of the word I wrote coexistence. It can be bumpy sometimes, but it can also be beautiful. And also, for me, you know, this kind of creates a lot of creativity in terms of new ideas.
SIMON: Weike Wang, her new novel "Rental House." Thank you so much for being with us.
WANG: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BRIAN SETZER ORCHESTRA'S "SWINGIN' JOY")
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"Weike Wang discusses her new novel 'Rental House'." Weekend Edition Saturday, 30 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A818327187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b348c2b3. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
BOSTON, MA -- The following information was released by Boston University:
Author will read from her work at virtual Ha Jin Lecture on Thursday, March 3
February 18, 2022
Sara Rimer
In February 2020, after more than two years of work, Weike Wang turned in her eagerly anticipated second novel to her publisher.
Less than a month later, New York City was overtaken by the pandemic--and so, essentially, was Wang's book, Joan Is Okay (Random House, 2022). The heroine, Joan, is a self-effacing, misunderstood, workaholic Chinese American physician who is deeply devoted to her job in the intensive care unit of a Manhattan hospital.
That first version of Wang's 224-page novel contained no mention of the word COVID.
But Wang (GRS'15), who lives in Manhattan with her husband and their cockadoodle, Biscuit, didn't freak out. This was perhaps not surprising for an author who earned a PhD in public health from Harvard and an MFA from Boston University at the same time, whose acclaimed first novel Chemistry (Knopf, 2017) won the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting awards, and whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker. Instead, she got to work interviewing her Asian American physician friends who were on the front lines of the pandemic and making revisions.
"I realized I couldn't write about this occupation without recognizing this big event," Wang says.
Two years after Wang first turned in the manuscript, Joan Is Okay hit the bookshelves earlier this year. Naming it one of 16 books to watch for in January, the New York Times wrote: Joan "is solitary, literal-minded and extremely awkward--all of which contributes to the hilarity of this novel."
From Kirkus Reviews: "A character study about otherness set partly against the backdrop of early-pandemic anti-Asian sentiment that manages to be both profound and witty."
Joan tells her story in the first person, her rich inner life flowing beneath deadpan humor. The first time I put on my white coat, it felt like home. From having moved around so much and with no childhood or ancestral home to return to, I didn't think myself capable. I didn't prioritize home or comfort, because if everyone did, then immigrants like my parents, brother, and sister-in-law couldn't exist.
The novel opens with the death of Joan's father back in Shanghai, and the bereaved Joan navigating between the ICU and her family--her rich financier brother, Fang, who doesn't understand why she doesn't want to open a lucrative practice in Greenwich, Conn., where he lives, and her sister-in-law, who wants Joan to get married and have children, as she did. Then her newly widowed mother arrives at Fang's house in Greenwich, and jet-lagged and unable to sleep, startles Joan by calling her at 2 am, wanting a heart-to-heart.
"Joan-na, I would've chatted with you before, but I didn't want to waste your time. More mothers should learn to let go, but what I hoped for you was a busy life.... I'd like to be there for you...so feel free to call me anytime...."
Wang, who was born in Nanjing, China, and grew up in Australia, Canada, and the United States, earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Harvard and was on the path to becoming a cancer epidemiologist when, practically on a whim, she applied to BU's MFA program, and got in.
Chemistry was a coming-of-age tale about a female scientist whose academic career blows up. "I knew after Chemistry that I wanted to write a doctor character," says Wang via Zoom from her apartment in Manhattan, with Biscuit sprawled at her feet. "I had shadowed a lot of doctors because I'd been premed. Doctors are so fascinating to me. It's wild what they do. They talk about patients and it's the numbers, the stats, the vitals.
"I was sort of able to adapt the voice of Joan to that," says Wang, who teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. "I like thinking about machines and that's why I picked the ICU in the first place. Joan would lean into that robotic stereotype that's often placed upon someone like her. I wanted to play with that perception. I wanted to use this character to investigate aspects about her identity, or placing model minority cliches around that."
Joan's family worries about her returning to the hospital amid the rising anti-Asian sentiment over what then-President Donald Trump called "the China virus." (Wang herself hasn't been a target, but the media reports made her more cautious around the city.)
Videos had started circulating online, most I couldn't even watch through. Clips of Asian people being attacked in the street and on the subways. Being kicked, pushed, and spat on for wearing masks and being accused of having brought nothing else into the country except disease.... I was going back because, for better or worse, this was the job.
Near the end of Wang's novel, Joan's mother wants to go home to Shanghai, but flights keep getting canceled because of COVID. Wang knew about this firsthand. Her 87-year-old grandmother, who lives in Nanjing, had been visiting Wang's parents in Detroit before the pandemic hit. Wang chronicled her grandmother's months-long struggle to fly home in an essay, "Flight Home," which appeared in The New Yorker in April 2020.
With China closing its borders, says Wang, "I hope I see my grandmother again, but who knows?"
At BU, her mentors were National Book Award winners Sigrid Nunez, a College of Arts and Sciences creative writing lecturer, and Ha Jin (GRS'94), a CAS professor of English and creative writing. "Ha Jin told me the second novel is the hardest one to write," Wang says. "The second one was pretty hard.
"Sometimes you want to say something and you don't know why you can't say it right. even though you've been staring at the sentence for a day or two. And sometimes it comes easily. But that's just making art. That's the path."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 States News Service
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"IN ALUM WEIKE WANG'S NEW NOVEL, JOAN IS OKAY, A CHINESE AMERICAN DOCTOR NAVIGATES JOB AND FAMILY." States News Service, 18 Feb. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A695534942/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=486d3bfb. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Wang, Weike. Joan Is Okay. Random. Jan. 2022.224p. ISBN 9780525654834. $27. F
Wang's second novel (after Chemistry) is by turns touching, funny, observant, and thoughtful. The title character is a Chinese American attending physician at a New York City hospital, where she's always willing to pick up extra shifts rather than face the confusing chaos of family obligations and other social activities. A math whiz and assiduous chronicler of vital signs, she works better with machines than with people and doesn't always pick up on social cues. Is Joan OK? All around her are people who want to help. Her pushy new neighbor loads her down with cast-off possessions; her wealthy brother Fang and his wife berate her for blowing off the lavish parties at their mansion in Connecticut; even her doorman tells her how to stand in the elevator. Then her father, who moved back to China with her mother when Joan and Fang were grown, dies suddenly. Joan makes a 48-hour trip to China for the funeral, confounding her coworkers. Her mother comes to Connecticut and is unable to return when the pandemic hits, accompanied by a wave of anti-Asian hostility and fear. VERDICT Though the book ends abruptly, readers will enjoy spending time with Wang's offbeat protagonist who straddles two cultures and tries to find her place in the world.--Liz French
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French, Liz. "Wang, Weike. Joan Is Okay." Library Journal, vol. 147, no. 1, Jan. 2022, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A689495035/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=47e5bd2e. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Wang, Weike JOAN IS OKAY Random House (Fiction None) $20.44 1, 18 ISBN: 978-0-525-65483-4
The loss of her father forces a young doctor to confront her past and present.
By most people's estimation, Joan is more than OK: In her mid-30s, she's an attending physician in the intensive care unit of a Manhattan hospital. She's such a dedicated doctor that when her father dies, she flies to China for the funeral and back in a single weekend. (She's puzzled by other characters' objections to feeling like cogs in a machine at their jobs: "Cogs were essential and an experience that anyone could enjoy," she muses.) The hospital director is so impressed with her that he's wooing her to stay with an impressive salary and perks. But she's also different from just about everyone she knows. Straightforward, literal, utilitarian Joan is a puzzle to her wealthy brother, Fang; to her widowed mother, who doesn't understand why she doesn't enjoy womanly pastimes like shopping or jewelry; to her new neighbor, Mark, a bachelor trying to figure out how to get beyond her stoic exterior; to her colleague Reese, who feels he may be in the wrong field because he can't keep up with her work ethic. When HR forces Joan on a bereavement break, she's finally left to process her father's loss and her roles as the child of immigrants, a career woman, and an Asian American. In the wrong hands, Joan's story could have been a rom-com with familiar contours or a heavy existential drama. But Joan is such an idiosyncratic character, and Wang's style so wry and piercing, that the novel is its own category: a character study about otherness set partly against the backdrop of early-pandemic anti-Asian sentiment that manages to be both profound and witty.
A novel as one of a kind as its memorable main character.
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"Wang, Weike: JOAN IS OKAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686536744/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9b2e4635. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Joan Is Okay.
By Weike Wang.
Jan. 2022.224p. Random, $27 (9780525654834).
Complicated intergenerational relationships have long fueled fiction, with immigration notably adding further challenges to parent-child understanding and bonding. Wang's provocative sophomore novel (after Chemistry, 2017) again centers on an accomplished Chinese American Harvard graduate with uneasy social, professional, and familial connections. Here Wang dissects the titular Joan's singularity, interrupted by seeming demands from her hospital co-workers, her overfriendly new neighbor, and, most urgently, her immediate family comprised of wealthy older brother Fang, their late father, and surviving mother. "Hitting is love, berating is love," is the Chinese adage her parents used to mold her. At 36, U.S.-born Joan is an exemplary ICU doctor in New York City, committed to her career. Her father's funeral--her parents reverse-emigrated back to China when Joan entered college--is merely a weekend disturbance. When Fang installs their mother in his sprawling Greenwich, Connecticut, compound, Joan only learns of her arrival when Mom uncharacteristically calls to just "chat." An enforced grief leave finally forces Joan to disconnect from work and learn new ways to be okay. And, yes, add Wang's latest to the growing list of pandemic tides.--Terry Hong
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Hong, Terry. "Joan Is Okay." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 8, 15 Dec. 2021, p. 84. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698156056/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b461d52c. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Joan Is Okay
Weike Wang. Random House, $27 hardcover (224p) ISBN 978-0-5256-5483-4
Wang's profound latest (after Chemistry) portrays two generations of a grieving Asian American family. Joan, a 36-yearold self-possessed physician, works long hours at her Manhattan hospital's ICU and lives alone in a sparsely decorated apartment despite the insistence of her well-to-do brothet, Fang, that she move to Connecticut to be closer to him and his family. But when their father, who has lived in Shanghai with theit mother ever since Joan went to college, dies after a stroke, Joan begins to feel unmoored. Their mother then returns to the U.S. after 18 years, only to be stranded in Connecticut due to the pandemic travel bans. Because of language barriers, her old age, and lack of a driver's license, she depends on her children to get around and to communicate. Wang offers candid explorations of family dynamics ("berating is love, and here I was at thirty-six, still being loved," Joan reflects after Fang shames her for not going with him and their mother on a fancy Colorado skiing trip), and Joan's empathy for her ailing patients, as well as het disapproving brother and sister in law, are consistently tefreshing. It adds up to a tender and enduring porttayal of the difficulties of forging one's own path after spending a life between cultures. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Jan.)
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"Joan Is Okay." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 49, 29 Nov. 2021, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686559057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5e7edf7e. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.