reflections on weike wang's 'joan is okay'

joan is, actually, not okay

“When I think about people, I think about space, how much space a person takes up and how much use that person provides.”

So begins Joan is Okay, Weike Wang’s satirical, heartfelt look at grief and identity; it’s my favorite novel I read this year. Protagonist Joan is 36, Chinese, a physician and transplant New Yorker who has few friends and no hobbies outside of work. She likes being useful, seeing no reason why anyone wouldn’t want to provide value to the systems in which they belong (“Cogs were essential and an experience that anyone could enjoy”). Literal-minded and logical but not entirely unaware, she thinks about everyone — her coworkers, her family members, herself — in terms of space: how much space they occupy, to what extent they’re aware of it, how much they think they deserve. When her father dies, she travels to China for the weekend to attend his funeral and flies back in time for work on Monday. Death will always be there, but any interruption to the well-oiled machine of hospital workflow be damned.

Nobody in Joan’s life thinks she ought to be content with herself. All offer prescriptions to fix what they perceive to be her ailments: her singleness, her childlessness, her net worth, her lack of social engagement. Her brother, who lives a lavish suburban existence, wants her to move to the suburbs, settle down, open her own practice, make more money — the kind he says she deserves. His wife encourages Joan to open herself up to love and that “a woman isn’t a real woman until she’s had a child.” Her doorman, believing her to be lonely and single, tells her that he ships her and her book editor neighbor, Mark, who has his own presumptions about Joan. Mark looks upon her as a project, taking it upon himself to give her a TV and books that he believes will open up her world. His attitude: Give me your tired, your tales of emotionally unavailable Asian parents, Who urged you to go to Harvard and be a doctor, Until you forsook your entire personality for their sake and knew nothing of liberty til now. Send these, the immigrant, tempest-tost to me, I bestow upon you the pinnacle of art and culture that is “Seinfeld”!

Within each character’s actions and attitudes towards Joan, we see a series of tropes and storylines that Wang chooses to subvert:

Single woman decides she’s lonely and begins a quest for love, ultimately finding it where she least expects it

Uncultured woman gets exposed to the arts and learns to think about the world differently

Asian woman suffers the loss of her distant father and, after a great period of soul-searching, reconciles herself to their difficult relationship

Physician bears witness to flaws in American healthcare, then decides to DISRUPT the system

Instead, we find that Joan is a character without artifice, one who never conceives of herself as the protagonist in her own narrative. In the aftermath of her father’s death, as she works and eventually is forced to take a leave of absence, we understand that her grief operates with a will of its own. She spends hours wandering around New York. She sits in a cab for twenty extra minutes in silence — in tears, maybe, though the book doesn’t say and we can’t be certain. She notices that her hands are similar to her father’s. She recalls a memory she has of witnessing a stranger who indulges his daughter’s wish for a Powerball ticket. She doesn’t note why the memory holds personal significance, but the recollection carries itself as poignant. We can only presume what Joan is thinking and feeling as she recalls it. As close as we feel to Joan, she is still as much a mystery to us as she is to the other people in her life.

Which is, as always, a commentary on reading and writing. How do we read books, how do we read people? When we reflect on our own lives, to what extent do we augment ourselves to further validate the belief that we’re the main characters? How do we superimpose ourselves into others’ stories, and what sort of prescriptions do we — perhaps unconsciously — make based on our own experiences?

Under this lens, Joan isn’t immune, either. When she engages with others, it’s clear that she believes that the best way to exist is to be as little of a burden as possible while also maximizing the positive impact she has on others’ lives. (This is, after all, what she would like them to do for her.) But this means that she sometimes comes across as passive and unintentionally intimidating. Conversely, the other characters in the book want to help Joan by taking up as much space in her life as they can, a supposed offering of the self that sometimes ends up being more self-serving — a performance of their good intentions — than actually helpful. Intent, effect; de facto, de jure. Somewhere in between, an ironic gap. Which, I think, exists everywhere, between everyone.

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Other things that I read for the first time this year and enjoyed: Kevin Wilson’s Now is Not the Time to Panic. Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy. Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. Abe Beame’s critique of Anderson .Paak for No Bells will forever be tattooed to the inside of my brain (it was published in 2021 but whatever). Rest in peace, Real Life Mag; Alana Mohamed’s essay on algorithmic divinity has stuck with me since its publication this past spring. So has Kyle Chayka’s piece on too-smart iPhone cameras. I appreciated Dhananjay Jagannathan’s perspective on marriage.