Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang
Joan is okay. At least as far as she is concerned. She’s in her thirties, with a successful career as an ICU doctor at a busy New York City hospital. She has fulfilled the American Dream that her parents left China for, though they returned to their homeland once their children – Joan and her brother Fang – had grown and settled. Joan’s life is solitary but focused, simple and secure. However, following the death of her father, her mother returns to the US for an extended visit and a series of unexpected events challenges Joan’s way of life. Her workplace expects her to be, at turns, more and less ambitious; more and less delicate. Her brother expects her to place family above all else and her sister-in-law thinks she should have children in order to experience true fulfilment and happiness.
Towards the end of the novel a terrible pandemic makes its way from Wuhan to New York. As Joan is a Chinese-American doctor working in an ICU in New York City, the reader spends this final section wondering if Joan really will be okay.
About four to six months after COVID-19 took off, nonfiction books about the pandemic were being published (and purchased) in droves. Fiction, however, has taken its time in dealing with the coronavirus. I can count on one hand the novels I have read in the past two years that feature our current global pandemic. Maybe because we are living it, we need fiction to escape from it. Maybe because the trauma of our collective experiences is too raw. Maybe because lockdown feels like a fundamentally undramatic event. I predict that Weike Wang’s novel will be on the vanguard of a wave of fiction featuring COVID-19. If you are wary of reading Joan Is Okay because of the pandemic, please note that it very much takes a supporting rather than starring role in this brilliant and often funny narrative.
