51 pages • 1 hour read
Joan Is Okay
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Themes
The Difficulties of Immigration
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s depiction of anti-Asian discrimination and hate crimes.
The challenges surrounding being an immigrant form this novel’s most overt, and in many ways most significant, theme. These challenges are also a key focal point in Wang’s previous novel, Chemistry, and as such, it forms an intertextual connection between the two books. While Wang examines many aspects of life for both first- and second-generation Chinese Americans, she is particularly interested in how immigration shapes families and identity. While Joan is Okay pays particular attention to the experiences of first-generation members as they pertain to work and career, in considering the experiences of the second generation, the novel focuses on how these individuals relate to their families and forge a sense of self. Depictions of anti-Asian racism and prejudice, as well as Joan’s internal reactions to this type of harm, also run throughout the novel, especially toward the end as the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies.
Wang’s representation of the difficulties faced by first-generation Chinese Americans focuses primarily on how immigration affects work and career. Joan’s father is intelligent, business-oriented, and driven, yet as an immigrant, he struggles to find a foothold in the United States. Joan recalls the limitations he faced: “The only business routes available to him were to open a Chinese restaurant or a convenience store” (40). In reflecting on these limitations, Joan notes that he had greater interest in a more lucrative career in the construction industry, but was not able to succeed in that field until he returned to China. Observing his parents, Fang grows up with an acute awareness of how difficult it is to start over, and his philosophy of immigration and success is rooted in his parents’ experience: He believes that the first generation struggles in order to put the second generation through school, and that the second generation’s task is to begin building wealth that will put the third generation on an even footing with their affluent, American-born peers.
For Joan and Fang, the difficulties of immigration shape not only their careers but also their identity and familial relationships. Joan perceives Fang as “more Chinese” than she is, and there is a definite sense that Fang continues to embrace his Chinese identity. For Joan, identification is more complex. She loathes being seen as “different” and is irritated that her American peers and classmates expect her to perform a certain level of “Chinese-ness.” Some expect her to be “more Chinese” than she is and are disappointed when they find out how disconnected she is from her family’s background. She does not want to be seen as “too Chinese,” yet she does wonder to herself why the implications of that would have to be so complex: “What was wrong with being too Chinese?” (7). Still, she resents the way that many assume, for example, that she was born in China (she was not) because she looks Chinese and wishes that she could be perceived as something other than a Chinese American.
Both Joan and Fang choose educational and career paths that are in some way a reaction to their parents’ experiences as first-generation immigrants. Fang is happy to capitalize on his status as a “minority” in the United States and has no qualms about using his parents’ immigration difficulties in college entrance essays and his race to obtain scholarships. Joan balks at Fang’s tactics. She wants to be awarded scholarships and a place at university based on merit, not race (or gender). Once they are out of school, Fang picks the most lucrative career choice he can, viewing his job as a hedge fund manager solely as a way to accumulate wealth. Joan, who still wants to be seen through the lenses of expertise and ability, chooses medicine because she enjoys hard work. While Fang fully embraces his role as a second-generation immigrant (that is, as a wealth-builder for the third generation), Joan seeks to erase her identity as a second-generation immigrant and define herself based only on her career.
Immigration also creates difficulty in Joan’s family. Her parents adopt a Chinese parenting model in which the way to show love to one’s children is not through affection, but through driving them toward success. Joan knows that her mother and father are proud of her, but growing up in the United States, she also realizes that her parents view parenting quite differently from the parents of her schoolmates. Joan also struggles with the role that duty plays in her Chinese American family. She knows that she is expected to be a dutiful daughter and sister, but she is also independent and values self-determination: She does not want to follow Fang’s life plan for her (move to the suburbs, open a private practice), yet she avoids open defiance, trying her best to avoid conflict with Fang and her mother while also not giving in to their demands.
As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to spread, Joan bears witness to an increasing number of instances of anti-Asian discrimination and even hate crimes directed toward people of Asian descent. The evidence evokes great anxiety for her: “Videos had started being circulated online, most I couldn’t even watch through. Clips of Asian people being attacked on the street and on the subways” (195). These acts of violence are distressing to Joan, but there is a way in which they do not surprise Fang. Fang is hyper-aware of the long history of discrimination against Chinese people in the United States, and at one point, he explains that history to Joan. Her experiences of prejudice had been milder and limited to being seen as a stereotype or treated as an “other” by her classmates. Joan recalls that “there were some times when my classmates would ask me to translate some dumb English phrase into Chinese just to prove that I could, then after hearing me speak Chinese, just to say that I sounded foreign” (45). It is this kind of racism that drives her to seek judgment based on merit rather than on race. In the way that Wang depicts both subtle, person-to-person moments of prejudice and race-based violence, the author illustrates the wide range of anti-Asian discrimination that people like Joan and Fang are subject to in the United States.
Work and Identity
Although closely related to the theme of The Difficulties of Immigration, the novel’s treatment of the relationship between work and identity merits its own conversation because it is central to how Joan sees herself and speaks to the novel’s title. There are ways in which Joan bristles against the expectations placed on her by her family, and she certainly does not want to be seen primarily as a Chinese American. Nonetheless, she has internalized many of the values of her parents, as evidenced by the central role that work and career play in her identity evidence. Joan is also fiercely independent, and part of what makes her “okay” is that, while she does embody some traditionally Chinese American values, she also lives life on her terms. Joan comes to self-identify based largely on her career in a way that feels, to her, self-determined.
Joan’s parents, when they moved to the United States, had no financial safety net, and they raised her with the understanding that life does not offer such guarantees to immigrants and their children. Hard work is therefore key to survival and, by extension, to identity. Joan learns to push herself and to excel to the best of her abilities accordingly. In this way, Joan’s success in the demanding medical field is a manifestation of the values that her parents instilled in her. Her father, proud of Joan, begins to call her “doctor daughter” when she starts practicing medicine. As Joan was primed to derive a large part of her sense of self through her career, her adult success at the hospital is not surprising.
Although motivated in part by a specific set of cultural values that highlight the importance of work, Joan is also driven by her desire to succeed in a meritocracy. She abhors the idea that her success is reducible to minority status based on race or gender and bristles against comments that imply that status offers her some kind of advantages: “Had your daughter really gotten into Harvard? Because Harvard is even easier on minorities and on women too” (80). Joan is a Chinese American woman. She is also highly intelligent and hardworking, and those are the traits for which she would like to be known and on which she builds her sense of self. Additionally, Joan places a high value on work itself. Fang’s career goals are tied to wealth accumulation, but Joan’s are focused squarely on doing her job to the best of her ability, day in and day out. Joan relishes complete exertion and the subsequent exhaustion: She “had to feel totally spent after work, else I would feel like I hadn’t actually worked” (35). Here, too, she embraces the values taught to her by her parents, but on her terms.
The novel’s title suggests the bigger question of whether allowing work to define identity to such an extent is problematic. Many people around Joan believe that she works too hard. She takes as many shifts as possible and struggles to fill her free hours. While her direct supervisor appreciates this energy for her work, Joan’s family, colleagues, and even the HR department wonder: Is Joan okay? Yet when Joan’s life is examined through the framework of her wants, ambitions, and expectations, she does emerge “okay.” Joan wants to build a life in which she can excel in a meritocracy, do her job to the best of her ability, and make her own decisions. She draws on both the lessons of her Chinese parents and on her vision of her life as she prefers it; given her motivations and preferences, she is largely successful in her efforts to craft an identity that suits her.
Gender, Societal Expectations, and Interpersonal Relationships
Joan is hesitant to self-identify based on her race and her parents’ immigration status, but she also struggles with societal expectations for women in the United States. She is particularly uninterested in the expectation that women focus primarily on the roles of wife and mother and, as an introverted and solitary individual, she also resents the way that society seems to have been set up with extraverts in mind.
There is not much about the way that Joan has organized her life that embodies traditional gender roles in America. Joan lives alone, works long hours, and although she maintains close ties with her family, she is not as interested as they would like in her nieces and nephews. These decisions do have costs in the form of familial and social pressure and judgment. Fang repeatedly pushes Joan to consider marrying a wealthy man, and it is understood that everyone in her family would approve if she were to renounce her independence and have children. Of Tami in particular, Joan notes: “That I didn’t like kids was her suspicion, and that I’d remained childless not by choice, but from some horrible mental or biological glitch” (166). Even in facing these costs, though, Joan never develops an interest in starting her own family and even wonders why her sister-in-law Tami would have sacrificed her career to become a stay-at-home mother. While Joan does ultimately realize that for Tami, renouncing the demanding career that was chosen for her by her parents was a form of both rebellion and self-determination, Joan knows herself well enough to see that she and Tami have different goals and want different lives. Although much of Joan’s identity is rooted in work and career, a part of her sense of self is also derived from her continued commitment to independence and to bucking traditional gender norms as they pertain to motherhood and family.
Joan also struggles with societal expectations as they pertain to interpersonal relationships and social connectivity. She had been a solitary and reclusive child, and although she was always commended for her academic performance at school, teachers and counselors also commented on the difficulty that Joan seemed to encounter in forming interpersonal relationships with her peers. Even as an adult, Joan receives this kind of feedback and continues to struggle in her interactions with people. She wishes that her doorman would leave her alone, and she is never fully comfortable in her burgeoning friendship with her neighbor Mark. Yet there is a way in which Joan’s introversion is, for Joan herself, not a problem. She enjoys her life and does not feel the need to fill it with human interactions beyond what is required of her at work. She maintains positive working relationships with her colleagues and her patients, and although she is solitary, Joan is not lonely. Although her lack of friendships causes a few people in her life to wonder if she is “okay,” the reality is that Joan is okay.
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