A Review of Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Vintage Contemporaries, 2017)

[sorayaz]

A Review of Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Vintage Contemporaries, 2017)

The narrator of Weike Wang’s Chemistry goes unnamed, but, after two back-to-back readings of this novel, I feel as if I know her. She might be someone I met in grad school, in fact.

The narrator is working on her Chemistry Ph.D. and her boyfriend, Eric, has proposed to her. The novel begins by referencing this moment and then weaves it way through the narrator’s intellectual/emotional crisis via a series of short, journal-style vignettes. These stream-of-consciousness vignettes signal immediately to me the psyche of a graduate student, where the separation between who you are in life and what you do in life become muddier and muddier. For the narrator, then, both the mundane and special moments of everyday life (a marriage proposal, for instance), are inflected with field-specific knowledge (that diamond is no longer the hardest mineral known to man, for instance). This type of slippage occurs throughout the novel, and the matter-of-fact demeanor in which it occurs I think reflects one of the truest experiences of life as a graduate student.

The narrator’s impending moment of crisis (for lack of a better term) is indicated by a haircut which is quickly followed by her breaking five beakers in lab. After a one-month hiatus, she is put on medical leave and asked to see a therapist. One of the things I appreciate most is how Wang renders her narrator’s reactions as normal in response to an academic institution’s markers of failure (the lack of perfectly reproduceable results, the lack of multiple published papers, and so on). Walking the dog seven times a day, or redoing the just-done laundry – these come to be understandable tasks when we realize the narrator is confronting the larger-than-life loss of working towards a Ph.D. degree and being unable to tell her parents, Chinese immigrants who struggled far worse, and achieved much more than her, that she might not continue. And even as the narrator’s journey through the novel is rendered somewhat normal in this way, she still relates the stories of other graduate students, the ones that didn’t make it past the moments of uncertainty they faced within the unhealthy, sometimes violent spaces that exist within academic institutions.

As such, despite the brevity of the vignettes and the hilarity of the situations the narrator finds herself in, the novel confronts some immense, difficult questions. I sat down to read this book as an international first-generation college student from Sri Lanka. I just completed my first two years of a Ph.D. program in English. I have been in the U.S. for eight years now, seeing little of my loved ones back home. Back in Sri Lanka for the summer holidays, I am currently around family and friends who didn’t get much of an education past high school, sometimes less than that. Every time I return back to the community I come from, I ask the same question of myself that the narrator of Chemistry asks a mere five pages into the novel: “What use is this work in the long run?” I knew then that I had found a friend in this book.

Through the rest of the novel, the narrator grapples with more questions and situations familiar to those of us whose communities have sacrificed so that we may achieve: How does one measure the proofs of science or theory against the wisdom of cultural beliefs and proverbs related by one’s parents? What does it mean to occupy, strive for, achieve, and rebel against the model minority stereotype? How do you face failure when your parents sacrificed so that you could succeed? What part of our parents’ sacrifices are not redeemable by our success?

One of the many things that touched me is that the narrator’s most intense feelings of inadequacy arise not from her comparisons against lab partner or boyfriend or best friend, all of whom progress smoothly in their academics and careers. Instead, it is the achievements of the narrator’s father that make her feel like she will never achieve adequately: “But such progress he’s made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon” (22). I like this so much because, graduate school often assumes that our successes are measured against our peers, rather than looking outside the institution, perhaps towards our upbringings or our experiences, to think about how we might measure success. That impostor syndrome should reach our narrator then, through her own, imperfect father, is important and truer to life than I think any of us want to admit.

At the therapist’s insistence, the narrator spends time recalling both her father and her mother. We learn about their histories and sacrifices, and that the trauma of migration impacts their persons and marriage in unhealthy ways. The exercises in recall lead the narrator to understand her parents better, with all their imperfections. The vignettes about her parents are some of the most devastating aspects of this book, but they are delivered the same as any other insignificant, hilarious detail about the dog or the best friend’s baby. We are left to struggle with the struggles of the narrator’s parents. Eventually, these recollections provide insight into the narrator’s relationship with Eric, to whom the narrator writes a letter at the close of the novel. Part of it reads: “Pure crystals are those that have perfectly repeating units. You told me this after I asked you what you found beautiful about chemistry. But what of the repeating units in life? Most often imperfect” (211). Even as these lines read as a final word to Eric, I think it also brings home the fact that this book as a whole could be a love letter to the narrator’s parents, the “most often imperfect repeating units in [her] life.” (In this way, the novel also reminds me of Shailja Patel's work, Migritude, part of which Patel says is actually a love letter to her parents, and deals with similar questions of home, migration, and sacrifice, albeit with a much less humorous but equally touching voice.)

An adage that the narrator’s lab mate tells her early in the novel, “You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally” (9) is fitting for a book that is in many ways about the chemistry of academic institutions, of social institutions, of family, of love, and of migration. It is also about the struggle to love the things that are imperfect, including oneself. And still, alongside the big questions that make up part of this novel, there is the wonderful smallness of every day life. Outside the noise of those five beakers breaking, there are other things. There is an imperfect relationship with a perfect boyfriend, a lovable dog, a best friend with a troubled marriage who welcomes her first baby into the world. And always, there are her parents. These are the people who exist outside of what the narrator does, and they bring her back to who she is, partly by reminding her that there is, in fact, a ‘who’ outside of the ‘what’ she has been doing. If there’s anything a graduate student needs to hear more than that, I’m not sure what it is.

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-novel-Weike-Wang/dp/1524731749

Comments

[eeoopark]

Oh, I love this line: “Pure crystals are those that have perfectly repeating units. You told me this after I asked you what you found beautiful about chemistry. But what of the repeating units in life? Most often imperfect." And the novel's set in Boston too! Maybe, I'll save this for when I want to be in a reflective mood.

[sorayaz]

This book is full of too many good lines!