Review | The Chinese immigrant’s collision with America and the meaning of home in Weike Wang’s savage novel of bereavement, Joan is Okay
- The Joan of the title is a New York doctor who devotes herself to her work even after her father, a returned US immigrant, dies in China
- The ambiguity Chinese emigrants feel about both the American dream and the homeland is one of the themes Wang explores in bracing and sardonic prose
Joan is Okay By Weike Wang, pub. Random House
It may even be intentional. The title design on the first page of Weike Wang’s second novel, Joan is Okay, drops a tiny magnetic “is” within the embrace of a large “O” so a reader’s scanning eye might easily catch and see instead a question: Is Joan Okay – which is also the novel’s investigation into its protagonist, Joan (Jiu-an), a competent, Harvard-educated daughter of Chinese immigrants who returned home.
Joan is a woman who buries herself in her work as a New York intensive care doctor, even after the death of her father in China.
The novel features Joan’s colleagues, her friendly new neighbour Mark, her building’s doorman and her brother Fang and his family, who live in opulence in Greenwich, Connecticut, and incessantly urge her to abandon her life and defect to theirs, mailing her lavishly produced invitations for bashes at their 10-acre abode.
Then Joan’s hospital insists she take long overdue wellness leave, Covid-19 strikes and, with flights to China cancelled, her mother is stuck at Fang’s house.