Chemistry

Coming from an adult perspective, I think it's silly that we expect 16 year olds to have any idea what they might want to do for the rest of their lives. I think of myself as being pretty smart, but it turned out what I was sure I wanted to do at 16 was incredibly wrong for me. And the protagonist (never named) of Weike Wang's Chemistry is in kind of a similar boat. Pursuing a Ph.D. in, of course, chemistry at a prestigious New England university, she has a bit of a meltdown as her experiment fails to produce results. Although she does love the field, she begins to question her choices about everything in life as she takes time off of her program.

There's not a lot of “plot” in this book, really. The protagonist is trying to decide what to do about her long-term relationship with a fellow chemist who has proposed to her but she's not sure she wants to marry, trying to figure out how to support herself without her graduate student stipend, being there for her best friend through pregnancy and early motherhood and marriage crises, and figuring out when and how and if to tell her Chinese immigrant parents that she's not in school anymore. It is this last matter that most preoccupies her, and much of the book is made up of her recollections of her childhood, of her parents' relationships with each other and with her, of the pressure she feels to succeed in the ways that they value in order to validate their sacrifices.

Stories like these illustrate the power of “own voices”: an Asian-American woman telling the story of an Asian-American woman. A lot of non-Asians look to them as a so-called “model minority”, hard workers somehow naturally gifted at math and science. Of course the reality behind that is more complicated, and Wang pulls back the curtain on what might seem like a neat little family of a scientist, a housewife, and their scientist daughter to show the internal workings that are just as messy as anyone's home life.

That being said, evaluating Chemistry on its novelistic merits reveals a book that is good but not great, and quite obviously a debut, though a promising one. Our nameless narrator is at times rather formless, and mostly reacts to the events around her rather than being proactive. She's very unsure of herself after breaking out a track that she found herself in more than chose, and while that's understandable, it makes her hard to really get enough of a feel for to connect with much. But Wang's writing is sure and emotionally true, and I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, especially to 20somethings that are wondering if they're on the right track.

I really enjoyed this. It was a little different than I expected, and although that has actually been a bit of a pattern for the past few books I've read, this one ended up quite enjoyable despite that.

The narrator is definitely coded at first as highly autistic, and while I would still classify them as such, throughout the novel you actually come to understand that it's actually a lot of trauma and coping that set them in their ways. Despite this, an unsung quality of the narrator is that she is incredibly witty and clever despite her also very awkward outlook on some things–the inability to view life's problems as anything but parallels to chemistry is also in and of itself used as a comedic device by her, which highlights how aware she is of herself.

I was hoping for the book to be a bit more of a soul searching adventure on finding oneself after being lost and wrapped up in work for the better part of one's youthful years, and while it was some of that it wasn't quite what I hoped. Although it was broken into two distinct parts, it didn't really explore the stumblings of the narrator to pick herself back up with much depth in the back half. There was a ton of introspection and a ton of explanation of how her friends and family viewed her and their expectations of her but I think Weike's writing style just didn't explore the narrator's adversity of this and how she was going to overcome it, perhaps because it was written in a way that glided over her life quickly. I appreciated her writing style, but if there was one thing I would have liked to see explored, it would have been to see the weeks, months, and maybe even years after part two began with more depth of her actions and how she picked herself up through them. Surprisingly, it felt like there was more of her friend's that was explored–though I also think that was no coincidence!

This book did not touch me profoundly like I think I was hoping it would, as I felt like I was going through similar things to the narrator when I first heard of this book. However, I still greatly enjoyed it and am really looking forward to reading more from Weike. She has a great spirit that shows itself in this book, and her writing style is easy and fun to pick up and explore. I really enjoyed this book despite the few expectations that weren't quite met, and may very well read this again after this period in my life, on reflection.

The narrator (unnamed) tells a sad tale of her Chinese parents' obsession with education and achievement for her, their only child, and her inability to complete a Ph.D. in chemistry that leads her to push away an ideal suitor and to scramble to discover what she really wants in life. The narrator turns to chemistry, to science, to the complexities of the Chinese language, to try to understand her difficult relationships with her parents and with her boyfriend. Chemistry is a brilliant, wandering, serendipitous collection of random reflections on the nature of the universe side-by-side with introspections about the nature of the heart.