Near the beginning of Weike Wang’s first novel, Chemistry, an unnamed PhD student in the throes of personal and professional crisis confesses to a friend that her chemistry work is starting to defeat her. For all her rigorous technique, her experiments have not yielded results. The friend is unconvinced by her pessimism: Isn’t there some sort of manual to consult?

The implicit comparison—to life—is perhaps a little too obvious: no manual, no guaranteed results. Inside the lab, only the worst student would keep running the same experiment while hoping for a different outcome, and yet outside the lab, this inefficient method is the norm.  

I was called back to this scene in Chemistry while reading Rental House, Wang’s third novel. Rental House follows a woman named Keru, who runs her life with methodological rigor; the controlled experiment she’s conducting is how to build a new family out of two disjointed halves brought together through her marriage to her husband, Nate. The unstable parts she’s working with include her own uncompromising parents, her mildly xenophobic in-laws, a try-hard husband, and a wayward brother-in-law. 

The laboratory where this experiment takes place is a rental house on Cape Cod. Keru and Nate have escaped New York City to spend a couple of weeks hosting each set of parents back-to-back. The rental house is intended as a gift to them all, a relaxing family vacation. But family vacations never unfold as intended.

Keru’s parents are up first. They are Chinese immigrant parents whose rendering verges on caricature: cold, demanding, unimpressed, as skeptical of the dishwashing machine as they are of their son-in-law, who studies fruit flies for a living. They have instilled in their daughter a rigid sense of duty: “To assimilate, work nonstop, make money, and provide,” as Keru articulates her handed-down purpose in life. Keru has satisfied them by going to Yale, where she met Nate, and by becoming a management consultant—she’s the one paying for the rental house—and now, despite her conviction that the American dream is nothing but a con, she feels an obligation to be grateful to her parents for their many sacrifices on her behalf. This makes her resentful, but no less grateful.

Tensions stay at a simmer, partly due to Nate’s blithe lack of comprehension of Chinese. Then Keru’s parents leave and his arrive. They seem to be the opposite of Keru’s in nearly every way: white, working-class boomers from Appalachia who are cheerily proud of their son, the first in their family to attend college. But they, too, begin to grate on Keru. The personal warmth that Nate’s mother exhibits toward Keru doesn’t disguise her political affiliations, xenophobic insinuations, or disingenuous claim to race-blindness. Throughout the visit, Keru ruminates on her mother-in-law’s numerous offenses, her anger pitted against a responsibility to keep the peace. Keru starts to feel as though every conversation she has with them contains a double meaning: a pleasant overtone and a hostile subtext. “Inside Keru’s mind,” Wang writes, “lived a large Mobius strip that looped at high speeds.” 

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Nate, an attentive and dutiful husband, makes the right protests against his parents at the right times. But eventually Keru has had enough. In an ice-cold fit of pique, she throws a burning log into the center of their shared house. The image is clear: The rental house—Keru’s rental house, as well as her chosen family—is on fire. 

The second half of the novel takes place five years later, in another rental house. This one Keru has also paid for, but it’s just her and Nate this time. They need a true vacation, though a few unexpected visitors threaten to upend their peace—but Keru, now approaching 40, is more compromising, less prickly. She’s committed to keeping both sides of the extended family together, not by holding her tongue but through the force of financial stability. With her lucrative income, she’s paid off her husband’s student debt, sends her mother-in-law a monthly retirement allowance, and offers a loan to Nate’s unemployed brother. She puts into action the pragmatic lesson that her parents passed down to her: Money solves problems. “Keru truly believed they had to come out of this more functional. If functionality required more of her, then so be it,” Wang writes, in semi-ironic affirmation of the striving immigrant ethic. 

Keru’s purposefulness in Rental House is a notable change from the paralyzed indecision that characterizes the protagonists of Wang’s two previous novels. Chemistry portrays a young woman with an analytical disposition so pronounced that she drafts a pros-and-cons list to calculate her answer to a marriage proposal. There are no cons, but still she delays her answer—until her boyfriend makes the decision for her. Joan Is Okay, Wang’s second novel, follows a physician in her 30s whose brain is so “lopsided” in its investment in scientific dispassion that she fails to register her own grief after her father’s death. Her boss finally puts her on mandatory bereavement leave.

Keru’s less stifling personality allows Rental House more air to explore its central theme, the same as in all of Wang’s books—family. Like so much of Asian American immigrant fiction, Wang’s novels are interested in how a second-generation child living in the shadow of family history can feel as though the trajectory of her life is entirely predetermined. Unlike Nate, who has ascended above his family in class status and gained enough distance to be critical of them, Keru cannot stand apart from hers. 

Keru, like every protagonist in Wang’s fiction, is obsessively self-conscious about identity. Does identity describe who you are, or how other people perceive you? Is identity ever a personal choice, or is it always prescribed? In Wang’s novels, female Chinese American identity is a site of conflict. Keru refuses to accept the ways in which the perceptions of other people function to circumscribe her place in the world, but her family’s history is still inseparable from how she is perceived. Every glance in her direction, every word spoken, is measured against how she would be looked at or spoken to if she wasn’t Chinese. These microscopic observations of how constant racialization creates a persistent itch in the background of everyday experience is one of the qualities that make Wang’s fiction distinct, and also somewhat maddening. Is such unforgiving self-awareness a tool of resistance, or is it a trap? 

Keru is comfortable in her professional life and uncomfortable in the social roles prescribed to her. She is aware that her relationship with Nate conforms exactly to the yuppie trope of an Asian woman’s assimilation into middle-class America by marriage to a white man. She feels her whole life might possibly be a stereotype. She’s the product of tough-love Chinese parents, with a career that is straightforwardly lucrative. Her whole personality has been built around pragmatic achievement. Even her tantrums are controlled. 

Wang’s own biography hits some of these same notes. She was born in Nanjing, China, and later moved with her parents to the United States, where her father worked in Detroit’s auto industry. She is an only child, and she grew up at a distance from her extended family. Wang has described her childhood as “distressingly lonely.” She studied chemistry at Harvard, then went on to earn a PhD in public health while simultaneously getting an MFA from Boston University. If she weren’t a novelist, she’s said, she’d probably be a biostatistician. 

Wang’s fiction is at its most incisive when it captures how a certain type of analytical mind would approach the squishy territory of racial identity in this country. She is a keen observer of social signifiers: Her fiction pays meticulous attention to the relationships between parent and child, husband and wife, local and outsider. And her protagonists, being exacting, detail-oriented people, see every leaf on every tree in order to comprehend the forest. Take, for instance, the scene in which Keru is irked by Nate’s suggestion that she not mention to his family that her parents were part of China’s Communist Party. Why should she acquiesce to their ignorant worldview for the sake of maintaining agreeable conversation? Her own mother is not so defensive: Don’t talk politics, she advises her daughter. “Who cares what they believe in?” But Keru does not comply—letting things go is convenient for everyone but her.

Don’t overthink things is the refrain that Keru hears. To her mind, though, the source of the trouble is never too much thinking, but everyone else’s lack of attention—to the dynamics of race and class, to subtext, to the meanings of words. Keru becomes enraged when Nate’s mom complains that her son is at an unfair disadvantage against Asian academics who work harder than they ought to; she is impatient when a neighbor implies that her interracial marriage is an unnecessary hardship. Keru finds refuge in tallying and reviewing such incidents, which she interprets as facts that add up to the irrefutable reality of racism in America. 

Wang’s skill at dramatizing subtle interactions extends to her short fiction. Certain conversations in Rental House made me think of her short story “Omakase,” published in The New Yorker in 2018, which takes place over a single dinner date between a Chinese American woman and her white boyfriend. The boyfriend is attentive and kind, but he doesn’t notice the same racially coded slights that the woman does, and it begins to drive her mad. She doesn’t want to ruin their dinner with nitpicking; nor can she help but point out reality as she sees it. “She didn’t want to be one of those women who noted every teeny tiny thing and racialized it,” Wang writes. In an interview with The New Yorker, Wang said of the story: “Not having to think about one’s race is, I believe, a privilege. This woman is more preoccupied with race than the man is, because race has permeated more aspects of her life. She is reminded by friends and family that, while she can do whatever she wants, she also cannot forget that she is Chinese.” 

Like the woman in “Omakase,” Keru would rather not think about being Chinese. You get the sense that she would like nothing more than to be perceived as who she is on paper: a successful, high-earning member of the upper middle class. But she does not wish for her Chinese identity to be erased either, subsumed under her husband’s whiteness. She’s desperate not to be a stereotype, and also acutely aware that certain intrinsic qualities of hers make her into one. Wang’s characters are strangely slippery in this regard, resisting their conformity to stereotypes even as they’re deliberately written to be that way. But Wang’s point, I think, is that her characters can never just be. They are either slotting themselves neatly into others’ preconceived ideas of who they are, or self-consciously defying those expectations. The result, then, is an existence defined by ambivalence, where the tensions between expectation and resistance produces a person whose actions end up feeling, to them, like reactions. A person whose agency gets stamped out into what appears like indecision, like the protagonist in Joan Is Okay, or who simmers violently on the inside, like Keru.

Isn’t Keru’s constant vigilance to small insults and deflections exhausting? Yes, it is. A great feeling of fatigue permeates this novel, one that Wang’s signature wry humor can’t fully alleviate. I don’t blame Keru for feeling tired—I would be, too, if I were a Self-Aware Asian Woman and my life was constrained to cohabiting with a Pretty Good White Husband and maintaining relationships with my Strict Immigrant Parents and Trumper In-Laws.

The way not to be a stereotype, of course, is to be a person—a single, unique individual—and yet this is where Rental House doesn’t quite succeed. Wang constructs her characters so rigidly in reaction to the perceptions of others that they never fully feel like they stand on their own; instead, they are assemblages of identity and privilege. It’s satisfying to read such close and carefully observed satire, but it can also make the interactions between Keru, Nate, and the members of their respective families feel like a joyless set of calculations. Real people can surprise you, and somehow these characters never do.