Inter-culture marriages and the conflicts therein are solid fodder for novels, and many authors have explored their literary potential: Celeste Ng, Laila Lalami, Chimamanda Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi just for starters. In Rental House, Weike Wang has her own wry, funny, thoughtful take on the subject.
Keru is Chinese-American, with immigrant parents, and is married to Nate, from an Appalachian family. They met as awkward students at Yale, and have gone on to success along two different career paths: Nate is a college professor, while Keru is a highly-paid consultant. They live in New York City, which they can afford only because of Keru’s salary.
The novel is framed over two vacations five years apart. The year after the pandemic, Keru and Nate rent a house in Cape Cod for a whole month, with the plan that each set of parents will visit for a week. The author sets the stage for these visits in the first few chapters, and it is excellently done.
Keru’s parents cared about cleanliness and personal safety to an obsessive-compulsive degree, and since the start of the pandemic, had yet to go outside without double masks, gloves and Mace. [..] To avoid spending a night in a motel, her parents drove [from Minnesota] to Chatham in shifts, stopping only at state-run rest stops, eating ramen noodles cooked in the car.
Nate’s parents have a different approach:
His parents did not travel light, but instead of coolers of Chinese food, they brought firewood for bonfires, foldable Adirondack chairs to place around those bonfires, liters of Diet Coke and ginger ale, their own coffeemaker, ground beans, and whole milk, for fear that New England stores would not carry their brands.
Nate grew up in a bluecollar world.
His parents married straight out of high school, in the same church their parents had married in, in the same town they and they parents had been born in, at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His mother waitressed until she got pregnant. His father managed a grocery store.
while
Keru’s father worked in energy as an industry chemist.
Obviously, Keru and Nate have complicated relationships with their own and each other’s parents, and the novel explores these very effectively. After Nate’s mother sends a happy-face emoji to a group chat when Trump is elected in 2016, Nate refuses to come home for Thanksgiving.
Keru thought this immediately: after crying and venting to her husband, Nate’s mother would hang her son’s Thanksgiving cancellation over politics on his new Asian wife, who might be far more sensitive to these things, and perhaps in retaliation for some immigrant woes she and her family had experienced, sought to infiltrate the stronghold of American values by taking their Nate.
There is always an undertone of racism, very delicately drawn. Nate’s mother says that Nate has to compete with ‘certain groups who are better at science and math’, and therefore he has to be ‘even better’.
Nate’s face was twitching but not forming words. Keru sensed that he was trapped in his own Mobius strip: Is it my place to speak or can my wife handle this tricky issue herself? Was the issue actually about race, or did it only appear to be?
“I hope anyone with a job knows what they’re doing in that job,” Keru said. “I hope people are not just failing upward or asking for more than they deserve.”
It’s not all about the in-laws, though — Nate and Keru’s own relationship develops and changes over the course of the novel as well. There are passive-aggressive spats about money, age, decisions about having children, Nate’s sense of inadequacy about his moderate income, and Keru’s sense of duty that pushes her to pay an allowance to Nate’s mother.
The second half of the novel is set five years later, on a different vacation in the Catskills. Nate has just turned forty, Keru is working in Chicago, and she has rented a massive house in a gated community, much to Nate’s dismay. On this trip, they meet an Eastern European couple with a child (“We’re from Brooklyn. Park Slope. Zip code 11217.”), thus allowing the author to explore Nate and Keru’s childlessness-by-choice. Nate’s good-for-nothing brother Ethan turns up with his girlfriend. This section, I thought, was less successful, with a rather abrupt ending.
Keru is an unusual protagonist: very organized and capable, but one who seems tensely suppressed with occasional outbursts of an oddly calm rage. Nate seemed more hapless, less driven and more laissez-faire, in contrast. Their relationship is described via the daily events that make up their lives.
Weike Wang’s dry and perceptive take on her characters is thoroughly enjoyable.
While [Nate]’s mother was not a deeply religious woman and loathed going to church on Easter, so did not, she deployed ‘by God’s will’ whenever she needed to wrestle control of a conversation and end it.
This author has original thoughts on most topics, entertainingly framed. Her take on learning a second language as an adult will have many of us nodding in accord.
Nate knew enough Chinese to follow the conversation but not enough to contribute. Since most of his brain was already dedicated to listening and translating, no cells remained for the construction of original thought.
On Asian tourists:
..direct-from-Asia tourists, possibly Korea, by the way they were double-masked, wore wide-brim canvas hats, long sleeves, long pants, and still carried an umbrella (the women) or had a towel draped over their shoulders (men). No one in that group would risk catching the virus or being darkened by the freewheeling American sun.
On Keru’s dating experiences in college, before she met Nate:
Shang asked what she was interested in. She said undecided, but definitely neither medicine nor finance. He suggested consulting, a decent way to make bank while you figured out your path. [..] Solid advice, until Shang added that more girls went into consulting since it was by and large easier than finance.
This is not a heartwarming, affectionate portrayal of a happy interracial couple; rather, Wang’s writing is an intelligent, acutely observed, and perceptive portrayal of a couple working through realistic problems.
~ Rental House, by Weike Wang ~ Penguin Random House, 2024
I only skim-read this review because I intend to read the book too, but got the gist of your review as positive, so very happy this book is on my list!