Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
About the author
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. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Barnard College.
Review
Deesha Philyaw
Sunday 23 January, 2022
New York Times
Is Joan, or Jiu-an, a Chinese American attending physician in a Manhattan I.C.U., OK? Some don’t think so. Her co-workers can’t seem to connect with her. Human Resources thinks she works too many shifts, while the hospital director delights in the fact that Joan is “a gunner and a new breed of doctor, brilliant and potent, but with no interests outside work and sleep.” When her father dies at the start of the novel, she travels to Shanghai for only 48 hours.
Joan’s older brother, Fang, a hedge fund portfolio manager, thinks she needs to give up the Upper West Side for the safety of the suburbs and start a private practice in Greenwich, Conn., where he lives on a 10-acre compound with his wife, Tami, and their sons. Tami thinks 36-year-old Joan needs to get married and start a family because “a woman isn’t a real woman until she’s had a child.”
Meanwhile, Joan’s apartment is so sparsely furnished that her neighbour Mark asks if she’s been robbed. Mark is a white guy and a habitual overstepper who insists on telling Joan how to feel about the racism and discrimination (as Joan calls them, “the r-word” and “d-word”) he believes she’s being subjected to at work.
In the hands of Weike Wang — whose 2017 debut, Chemistry, won the PEN/Hemingway Award — Joan’s dry wit is downright hilarious, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes as a coping mechanism. Although she keeps it under wraps, Joan is angry. When the status-conscious Fang muses that it would be cool if she someday became a senator’s wife, Joan thinks to herself: “The famed M.R.S. degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labelled RAGE.”
Wang doesn’t mute Joan’s rage but leaves it always bubbling under the surface. It’s there when Mark assumes she doesn’t know what “woke” means (“I missed my unit,” she thinks, “where every patient, however woke, was asleep”). It’s there in her sly comebacks to the hospital director’s low-key racism and attempts to dehumanise her.
So Joan probably isn’t OK. She has a complicated relationship with her aloof mother, who’s visiting Connecticut and, to Joan’s chagrin, suddenly wants to bond over late-night phone calls. Joan remembers her father as “a typical workaholic” who wasn’t around much. Like him, Joan can’t see why the rest of us resist and resent being cogs in the wheel of our professions: “Cogs were essential and an experience that anyone could enjoy.”
As a child, Joan was sent to a school counsellor because she “answered questions strangely” and did not smile. In adult Joan, Wang has given us a character so unusual and unapologetically herself that you can’t help wanting to hang out with her, knowing full well that she wants nothing more than to be left alone. Joan’s preference for machines is well documented — the lifesaving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, is a personal favourite. “No coincidence to me ECMO sounded similar to Elmo,” she tells a co-worker. “I saw myself as its friend, as friend of ECMO, Tickle Me ECMO.”
Wang writes Joan’s awkwardness and the tension it spawns so well, even the reader cringes. When a white couple in her building invite Joan over for dinner, she intentionally mispronounces “feng shui” as she expects them to say it, in order to “make them feel more at ease.” The husband corrects Joan immediately, defines “feng shui” for her and explains that he studied Mandarin for a semester and “knew a handful of characters and could write his name in Chinese with a traditional calligraphy brush.” Joan says: “Fantastic. But what’s a handful? Was that like 10? Or five? Neither will get you very far.” Dinner lasts less than an hour, and Joan isn’t invited back. When Tami takes Joan to shop at Tiffany’s, Joan wonders aloud, “Who’s Tiffany?” The first time Mark comes over, Joan tells him she doesn’t know how guest visits are supposed to go: Does he ask the questions or does she?
As Mark gradually weasels his way into Joan’s life, she begins to take notice of her idiosyncrasies from his perspective. Joan hasn’t read the books he thinks are important, but she pretends she has. And she fails to check any of the boxes for what, according to Mark, makes “a true New Yorker,” like having an opinion about the Yankees. When it becomes clear Joan has never heard of “Seinfeld,” “Mark fell into what resembled a catatonic state of shock. Then he looked down, for a long time, at my doormat…I touched my neck and felt the flush of anxiety, felt my new cultured neighbour was about to tell me that I perceived the world all wrong.”
Having grown up in Oakland, Calif., with poor immigrant parents, Joan views professional success as a great equaliser. “The joy of having been standardised,” she says, “was that you didn’t need to think beyond a certain area. Like a death handled well, a box had been put around you, and within it you could feel safe.”
Death and boxes feature prominently in Joan’s story, as she grapples with mortality and navigates both the safety and constraints of self-confinement. She’s mourning (in her very Joan way) her father’s death. But how does one handle death well, and should that even be the goal? Through funny, weird and touching moments, Wang depicts Joan’s and her mother’s grief as messy, nonlinear and palpable.
Eventually, Joan is forced to reconsider her obsession with productivity as she takes a hard look at her relationships to family, and society. “Was it harder to be a woman? Or an immigrant? Or a Chinese person outside of China?” she asks herself. “And why did being a good any of the above require you to edit yourself down so you could become someone else?”
Joan’s reckoning is exacerbated by the looming Covid pandemic, which impacts her personally as well as professionally. Wang details the news coming out of Wuhan and elsewhere matter-of-factly — increasing case counts and deaths, border and business closings — sparking a sense of dread in readers who know all too well what’s coming. Joan deadpans: “Some government officials also believed that it was important to keep the American people informed and reminded of where the virus really came from. So, the China virus, the Chinese virus, the kung flu.” Online she starts to see “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.”
In taut prose, Wang masterfully balances the many terrors of this pandemic alongside Joan’s intimate, interior struggles. Reading the hospital scenes set in the spring of 2020, revisiting the devastating toll this virus has taken and continues to take, this reader was not OK.
Throughout the novel, Joan’s wry humour is sometimes punctuated by moments of unexpected tenderness. “If I could hold success in my hand,” she says, “it would be a beating heart.” Regarding her parents and other first- and second-wave Chinese immigrants, Joan notes “how immigration is often described: a death, a rebirth. … To piece back together life.”
Like Joan herself, Wang’s narrative is at once laser-focused and multilayered. She raises provocative questions about motherhood, daughterhood, belonging and the many definitions of “home.” What do we owe our parents? Our children? And are any of us OK?