10 S UNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2022IS JOAN,or Jiu-an, a Chinese American at-
tending physician in a Manhattan I.C.U.,
OK? Some don’t think so. Her co-workers
can’t seem to connect with her. Human Re-
sources 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 be-
cause “a woman isn’t a real woman until
she’s had a child.”
Meanwhile, Joan’s apartment is so
sparsely furnished that her neighbor 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 uninten-
tionally, sometimes as a coping mecha-
nism. 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. de-
gree, because in practice, a female brain is
worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum,
and I have sometimes imagined one of
mine labeled RAGE.”
Wang doesn’t mute Joan’s rage, but
leaves it always bubbling under the sur-
face. 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
dehumanize 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 remem-
bers her father as “a typical workaholic”
who wasn’t around much. Like him, Joan
can’t see why the rest of us resist and re-
sent being cogs in the wheel of our profes-
sions: “Cogs were essential and an experi-
ence that anyone could enjoy.”
As a child, Joan was sent to a school
counselor because she “answered ques-
tions strangely” and did not smile. In adult
Joan, Wang has given us a character so un-
usual 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 prefer-
ence for machines is well documented —
the lifesaving extracorporeal membrane
oxygenation, or ECMO, is a personal favor-
ite. “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 in-
tentionally mispronounces “feng shui” as
she expects them to say it, in order to
“make them feel more at ease.” The hus-
band 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 tradi-
tional calligraphy brush.” Joan says: “Fan-tastic. 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 WEASELShis 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
neighbor was about to tell me that I per-
ceived the world all wrong.”
Having grown up in Oakland, Calif., with
poor immigrant parents, Joan views pro-
fessional success as a great equalizer. “The
joy of having been standardized,” she says,
“was that you didn’t need to think beyond a
certain area. Like a death handled well, abox 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 con-
straints of self-confinement. She’s mourn-
ing (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 Wu-
han and elsewhere matter-of-factly — in-
creasing 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 peo-
ple informed and reminded of where the vi-
rus 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 wear-
ing masks and being accused of having
brought nothing else into the country ex-
cept disease.”
In taut prose, Wang masterfully bal-
ances the many terrors of this pandemic
alongside Joan’s intimate, interior strug-
gles. 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 humor
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 moth-
erhood, daughterhood, belonging and the
many definitions of “home.” What do we
owe our parents? Our children? And are
any of us OK? 0Work-Life Imbalance
In this novel, a Chinese American doctor prefers the company of machines to humans.
By DEESHA PHILYAW
JOAN IS OKAY
By Weike Wang
212 pp. Random House. $27.
XINMEI LIUWang writes Joan’s awkwardness
and the tension it spawns so well,
even the reader cringes.DEESHA PHILYAWis the author of “The Secret
Lives of Church Ladies.”