I didn’t like the word indifferent either. It was just two letters off from the word that I hate.
Joanna, the protagonist in Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay, has similarities to this same author’s protagonist in Rental House. Both protagonists are Chinese-American, academically distinguished, very capable in their careers. They are sharply perceptive and analytical, and always examining and evaluating every interaction and behaviour. Both are unusually detached from social interaction, somewhat antisocial, and as would be said nowadays ‘on the spectrum’.
This would suggest that the two novels are somewhat redundant, but this is not the case. Joan is different enough from Rental House‘s Keru to have her own take on things: Joan is single, unmarried, and a doctor in New York. Her Chinese parents are immigrants, but these immigrants headed back to Shanghai as soon as their two children were independent adults, and therefore they have a very current take on China and America. Adding a sharp point to the cultural issues, part of this novel takes place during the Covid pandemic (the ‘China virus’, as it was called by some in America).
When the novel starts, Joan’s workaholic father has just died of a stroke. She is in her office at the hospital with her colleagues Reese (‘six-two, 190-pound all-American guy’) and Madeline (‘five-seven, 139-pound robust German woman with a slight accent’) when she gets the news. By nightfall she is at JFK airport, travelling first class to Shanghai thanks to her wealthy brother Fang, a hedge-fund trader. The day after the funeral she flies back.
Neither Fang nor my mother suggested otherwise, as they both knew the job had come to define me and in China there was not much for me to do. […]
Indeed, Joan’s work is her happy place, but few people can understand that. Her return to work causes some consternation at HR, who expect doctors to take a month’s bereavement leave after the death of a parent. Her neighbour brings over more and more food, books, and furniture to tweak Joan’s life into what seems appropriate to him, much to her silent annoyance.
It might seem as though Joan is unaffected by her father’s passing, but over the course of the novel, it becomes evident that in her own distinctive way, she has been hit hard. I admired the way this was brought out by the author.
In the year afterwards, Joan’s mother comes to stay with her son Fang in Connecticut, and interacts with Joan via dryly funny phone calls that are among the most delightful parts of the novel.
She announced that she would kick off our liao tian with a slew of nice things. All children like to hear nice things and all adults are children at heart.
Joan-na, I would’ve moved in with you but you don’t have any kids. I would’ve chatted with you before but I didn’t want to waste your time. [..] Now that you have a successful career, you should thank me for being your mother and not a burden on your life. [..]
Moving forward, I’d like to be there for you, more especially since I’m here, so feel free to call my anytime, even if I don’t pick up.
Joan’s mother is concerned about her choice of career:
I hope you’re making some money at least. […] So many doctors in America go into debt, I hear. And the malpractice. What are you going to do about that?
I said I’d just gotten a raise and tried, like most doctors, to avoid malpractice altogether.
Joan is accomplished by any standards, but she is not married and has no children, a deeply upsetting situation to her mother, brother and sister-in-law.
Once I passed thirty, many things had, according to [my sister-in-law] become my surrogate child. If I bent down to admire a dog around Tami, it became my child. If I stared too long at a clock, it became my biological clock. Once I passed thirty-five, the frequency of child references doubled.
As in Rental House, there are sharp observations on cultural customs.
Broken pronunciation implied a broken mind, unless the accent was British or French, which then meant the person was posh.
On the assumption that minorities must have received affirmative action:
No success of mine had anything to do with me, my work ethic or my brain.
And on the pressures on immigrant children who are their parents’ lifeline in the new country.
I hated all of my tasks [interpreting, writing in English] of course — though with time, what I hated more was seeing my parents get bullied for no real reason except the obvious.
The novel will appeal to those with an interest in linguistics.
The name they had given me was Jiu-an, the simplest Chinese equivalent to Joan. [..] Only Asians outside of Asia chose names for themselves that took into account the convenience of others or smoothed out their foreign names to be less offensive to the ear. [..]
Each Chinese sound has four tones, and within each tone of a sound there are many characters. The strokes of the characters matter for balance, symmetry. It’s mean to be art.
Jiu (*), fourth tone, twelve strokes, means “at once” or “right away” or “moving forward. An (*), first tone, six strokes, is “peace”, or taken apart, it’s a roof under which there is a woman. [..] Put this woman in a house and you will have serenity and peace.
(* above represents Chinese characters that I can’t reproduce here)
There are many recent novels about women with offbeat social skills, such as Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine, or The Maid. This one stands out because its very intelligent protagonist focuses a laser-sharp spotlight on everyone around her, rather than the novel focusing on her oddities.
One small weak spot is the rather abrupt and ambiguous ending.
An intelligent, elegantly written novel that makes me want to read more by Weike Wang.
~ Joan is okay, by Weike Wang ~ Random House, 2022.
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