By Anna Nguyen
Reviewer’s note: I wrote this review based on my interview with Weike Wang for my podcast, “Critical Literary Consumption.” Much of our conversation was focused on work and how her thoughts intersect with broader discussions of the model minority myth, craft theory, and bureaucratic institutions like the university and hospital. While I do allude to these topics here, I focus especially on what writing about the pandemic might mean now as we face the global shift to “return to normal.”
The “problem with the plot,” as Alexandra Alter examines in a New York Times article, is yet another moralizing question imposed on the author about how they can separate their fictive imagination from everyday life. Such a question is an iteration of other questions that probe the assumed values of the novel: how political is the novel; how biographical is the novel; how much is the novel a reflection of the current sociopolitical life we experience; how much is escapist fantasy and how much is not. Is it the novelist’s responsibility to include the turbulent and nebulous aspects of the pandemic? In Alter’s feature, she cites authors who wrestle with including the emotional and psychological tolls of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. One of the many authors Alter interviewed is Weike Wang, whose recent novel Joan Is Okay takes on the task of incorporating Covid into the latter half of the novel. At the start, we follow Joan’s humorous observations as a Chinese American woman trying to grieve and make sense of judgments passed off as care by others after her father’s sudden death. Wang carefully meditates on the values and mores of a culture that thrives on ambitious work ethic and the seeming contradiction of mental health checks on the hospice workers. Within this institutional narrative, another story emerges. Wang pieces together a background story that provides readers with insights on Joan’s attitude towards work and life, all of which are portrayed through her relationships with her father, her mother, who returns to America to visit her children, her brother, and her well-meaning co-workers and neighbors.
When I interviewed Wang for my podcast, I noted a tonal shift in the narrative, specifically when Joan, an ICU doctor in New York City, begins analyzing the origins of Covid toward the end of the novel. Joan’s narration suddenly sounds bleaker as she valiantly attempts to understand just what is happening globally and in her hospital unit. Wang explains that she began writing a draft of Joan Is Okay in 2018, a year after the release of Chemistry, and submitted a draft without any mentions of Covid in 2020. The tonal shift, she said, happened when she decided to revise her novel as she attempted to write in Covid without trivializing it and without it engulfing the entire story. The balancing act, the inclusion of the virus, and Wang’s humane depiction of how it overwhelmed Joan’s hospital made sense for Joan’s story, especially as the pandemic has inherent connections to work life and Asian and Asian American communities in the United States. Such sentiments, however provisional they were at the time in the novel, reveal that a pandemic plot is not really about the pandemic, nor should it be used as a novelty device. Rather, it becomes another backdrop that reminds us of the persisting and ongoing inequalities and bad assumptions structuring working life. Read in this way, Joan Is Okay is a formidable novel that deals with work, its sociality, and how Covid may or may not change such environments.
The first mention of Wuhan and the virus, which Joan initially calls pneumonia, is located on page 122 and dated December 2019. Joan tells us, “I didn’t know whether I should be paying attention or not. I’d never been to Wuhan and was no virologist. My mother hadn’t texted me about it, nor my brother. The local news touched on it briefly and went straight into weather and traffic delays. The international news spent a minute longer on China and then moved to turmoil in the Middle East.” Despite the media’s lack of attention, Joan is fascinated by viruses and Wang uses scientific language to describe them ontologically: “Only carriers of genetic code, only genes bound by membrane. Not being alive means that viruses are ungovernable by evolutionary laws like survival of the fittest or reproductive strength. So, without this basic constraint and purpose, how have they persisted through millennia, invading cell after cell? Plagues, the outcomes are always bad for animals, for humans, but viruses themselves are neither good nor bad. They have no moral compass or desire to live, and so the only reason I had for their existence was random chance.” Wang’s own scientific background had been introduced in Chemistry, where her use of the language of science isn’t so much about explaining what we know from science but what she was taught about science. In Chemistry, the narrator remembers conflicting views from a high school physics teacher, who opined that the scientific method leads to truth, and a university professor explaining that “science is not a panacea; activities such as human interactions are difficult to answer with this method.” This sentiment is echoed in Joan’s careful analysis of viruses. Though alive, viruses aren’t bound by human characteristics as much as they are part of the natural world in which humans want to wrangle with and control.
Immediately after Wang references the end of December, a time break tells us that the new year has arrived. This scene provides fascinating insight on Wang’s nuanced take on grief, nations, and work. On January 17, a woman from HR comes into the office to interview Joan. The woman asks for confirmation where her parents and brother live. It becomes clear that the woman is reprimanding Joan for flying out to China to attend her father’s funeral, only to return the following work day. The concerned administrator encourages Joan to take a bereavement leave as part of the hospital’s concern for the well-being of their personnel, yet Joan is worried about the implications of a previous visit to China. We see that the woman is puzzled by Joan’s references to bats, to the fish markets, and Wuhan. At one point, the woman is explaining grief and death to Joan, who reminds the administrator that she was talking about bereavement and not an infection. Wang shows just how clueless the woman is about the virus while Joan is too aware of the long-standing tension between China and the U.S. As Covid cases increase in the U.S., Joan tells us that her mother, who desperately longs to return to China and is frustrated by the travel ban, believes “that if there was ever a chance to ostracize China, America would take it.”
The ending pages deal much with the current state of Covid: media discourses, the early travel restrictions, hospitals banning visitations, and reports on violent attacks targeting Asians and Asian Americans. Without explicitly comparing the chaos surrounding how the U.S. has handled Covid, Joan shares that in March the number of daily cases in China fell below a hundred and Xi Jinping symbolically visited Wuhan to declare the fight against the virus a success. Poignantly, Joan elaborates, “but to continue being victorious, China would close its borders to other nations just as other nations had first done to her.”
Wang circles back to the topic of a parent passing in the end, which feels like both a satisfying conclusion and one that troubles Wang’s future writing projects. In the article by Alter and in my interview, Wang says she’s unsure how to avoid writing about the looming impacts of the ongoing pandemic and elaborates on the assumed spontaneity of a dinner party. Can she write without envisioning discussions about vaccination status? she asks. These restrictions now seem unfathomable to ignore. In my interview, Wang mentions she last saw her family in China in 2019 and until she can see friends, and travel to see family, with the same ease she felt in 2019, she hesitates to omit Covid completely from her writing.
Early in the pandemic, topically relevant reading lists almost always included titles like Severance by Ling Ma and The Plague by Albert Camus. The reason was quite simple. People marveled that these books captured a dystopia that mirrored the present. These books are artifacts now, their relevance only contemporary because of our constant recitations of these specific but distant stories. But for writers like Wang, the framing of “how do fiction writers write now” is superseded by a similar question about power; that is, “who can afford to ignore the pandemic now?” It obscures the reality that the pandemic has already become another recurring layer of geopolitical erasures and bureaucratic failures. Now some two years into the pandemic, Wang’s sparse description of the early beginnings of the Covid discourse is a startling reminder that life before the pandemic remains no more certain than it is now.
Joan is Okay is available at Barnes and Noble, The Last Bookstore, Penguin Random House, Powell’s City of Books, and Yu and Me Books.
Anna Nguyen is a Ph.D. student and instructor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. Her research focuses on the rhetoric, composition, and literary studies of science, literature on food, citations, and social theory. She is especially interested in theoretical creative non-fiction, where social theory, thinking about food, and first-person narrative blend without enforcing academic conventions. She hosts a podcast, Critical Literary Consumption.