On Being Okay

Sometimes, this quotidian interaction ends there. Other times, the universally neutral refrain of "I'm okay" is countered by "No, but how are you really?" — perhaps charged with hope or suspicion that under the surface, there lies something deeper, something concealed by the simple "okay." Under this rubric, "I'm okay" is a low-effort, throwaway reply that feels almost disingenuous. Especially in periods of collective crisis and mourning, like the ongoing pandemic, to ask "how are you really?" expresses a desire to press beyond platitudes in hopes of admitting to one another that no, we aren't okay, we aren't fine.

The title of Weike Wang's second novel insists that its protagonist, Joan, is indeed, "okay," and yet, as many critics have pointed out, Joan has every reason not to be.1 As Joan states plainly and abruptly on page 2 of the novel: "My father's stroke was fatal." At the center of Joan is Okay (2022) is Joan, or Jiu-an, who works at a busy hospital in New York City. She is efficient, smart, and exceptional at her job as an ICU attending physician. When her father unexpectedly passes from a stroke, Joan visits China for a mere two days to attend his funeral. In the face of his death, she focuses even more intensely on her job, picking up extra shifts and working tirelessly. Through Joan's racialization and devotion to her job, the novel conceives of minimalism as an affective repertoire in the present day, and explores the challenges and opportunities it provides for thinking about and resisting labor. This is a novel that tells us how minimalism and being okay are linked, and it is a novel that asks us for whom that can be stultifying — or maybe just amusing.

Joan's unrelenting dedication to her job and her matter-of-fact, almost indifferent response to her father's death becomes a problem that Joan's family members, her co-workers, and acquaintances feel compelled to rectify. How can Joan possibly be okay? Joan's colleagues want her to open up to them, the hospital's HR Department eventually requires her to take mandatory bereavement leave from work, Joan's sister-in-law Tami encourages her to explore the possibility of marriage and motherhood, her older brother Fang wants her to be more present, and her gregarious new neighbor Mark redecorates her apartment and organizes a housewarming party for Joan on her behalf.

Everyone around Joan demands of her to be more sociable, take more time to grieve, be more vulnerable, and demonstrate a range of emotions beyond sheer focus on her output at work. They want Joan to be more fully human by their standards. Their respective responses to Joan's 48-hour grieving period point to their underlying suspicion that Joan is not okay and therefore must be "fixed."

And maybe there is something a little off about Joan. Throughout the novel, Joan's narration is stripped down, deadpan, and measured. All her social interactions are framed as unavoidable obligations; those she interacts with on a regular basis are either colleagues at the hospital, family members, or neighbors. Joan's only true friend of choice is the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine that Joan views as a true companion at the hospital. Joan does not mince words, keeps a spare apartment with minimal furnishings and decor, keeps to herself, and focuses on her day-to-day work at the ICU. Joan is a minimalist in her own right, both in her minimalist aesthetics and her minimalist affective performance. In Joan's apartment, she limits her furnishings and decor to what she deems essential: "I had no wall decor in my living room except for a giant wall calendar about half my height, with just the grid of the dates, all lines and numbers, no pictures."2 Joan's personal taste in physical objects mirrors her minimalist approach to how she manages her emotions and navigates her social life, preferring to stick to the facts of "dates, all lines and numbers" without being burdened by the sentimentality of pictures. Joan prefers to keep things as simple as possible, foreclosing further interrogation from others. At work, Joan keeps her Chinese language abilities a secret "to avoid any confusion" and mispronounces "feng shui" on purpose during a neighbor's dinner to both anticipate and deflect his expectations of her cultural expertise.3 Through Joan's cool, detached voice, we are made to notice how others in Joan's world are unsettled by Joan's lack of emotional response, which is often interpreted as indifference.

During a tense conversation, Joan's older brother Fang asks why she "was always so indifferent" to which Joan responds in earnest: "Not my intention, just how my voice, tone, and in-person facial expressions seemed to come across."4 In moments like this, we see how others actively read Joan as unfeeling and emotionally impenetrable, even when she does not intend to come off this way. It is impossible to write about Joan's placid demeanor and deadpan attitude without addressing how Asian inscrutability circulates in the novel. Like the protagonist of Wang's debut novel Chemistry (2017), Joan is explicitly racialized as Chinese American. Joan's minimalist affective performance thus recalls both the historically produced trope of the "inscrutable Oriental" often deployed in racist, dehumanizing representations of Asians/Asian Americans and the more contemporary stereotype of Asians/Asian Americans as unfeeling, hyper-efficient machines.5

While Joan's emotional restraint bears traces of Asian inscrutability, the novel also draws attention to how Joan perceives the reactions of those around her as over-the-top and borderline absurd. When Madeline, one of Joan's well-meaning colleagues, finds out about Joan's father's passing, she "gasped, covering her mouth and, for a second, shutting her eyes. Through her fingers, she asked if that had been my last conversation with him, and the sound I made, was it, then, a sound of grief?"6 Through Joan's eyes, Madeline's reaction is theatrical in contrast to Joan's own level-headed response to the news of her father's death, which was to hang up the phone and proceed with work as usual. Joan deflates Madeline's drama with a simple, unsentimental response: "I said, No, not really, and left it at that."7 Joan does not linger on Madeline's suggestion of grief and neither attempts to calm Madeline nor hands herself over to be comforted.

In another scene in their shared office, Joan describes a comedic, uncomfortable interaction between herself and Madeline. What begins as Joan eating a bagel and joking about her endearment to ECMO is interrupted: "Suddenly, she leaned over into me, and I thought she had fallen or fainted, but she was trying to give me a hug."8 While wrapped in Madeline's embrace, Joan thinks about the logistics of returning Madeline's hug, dropping her bagel as Madeline offers her emotional support: "If you ever want to talk, she said, mid-hug"9 to which Joan says nothing as her thoughts wander to the process of running codes on patients on their deathbeds. Rather than being touched by the gesture, Joan maintains her composure as she waits for the awkward embrace to end.

Those around Joan want her to be more sad or more angry; they want her to be less robotic and less opaque. Yet, she just won't give in. She won't have a breakdown and she won't graciously accept the outpour of sympathy from her colleagues. Measured against these demands of sentimentality, Joan all too easily fulfills the trope of the inscrutable and emotionless Asian/Asian American. At the same time, Joan's underperformance, realized through her minimalist expressions of emotion, opens up the potential of "affective disobedience" against the project of white sentimentality, to borrow from Xine Yao's work on affect and unfeeling.  Appeals to white feeling not only shape and uphold white supremacy, but also determine who falls within the bounds of the universal human. As Yao writes, "white feelings produce and maintain structures of domination."10 In other words, affectibility and sociality — experiencing and expressing the "right feelings" — is what renders one legible as human.

Yao theorizes that people of color draw on unfeeling as "a range of affective modes, performances, moments, patterns, and practices that fall outside of or are not legible using dominant regimes of expression."11 This range, which includes "inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability,"12 extends beyond the expression of negative feelings to the negation of feeling itself. Thinking with Yao, I suggest we might read Joan's everyday circumventions of sentimentality as acts of unfeeling that dislodge the domination of having sympathy with and eliciting sympathy from white feeling as the basis of proving one's humanity.

Joan's disregard of the obligations forced upon her to follow the social norms of expressing "proper" feelings of grief and vulnerability marks her as emotionally unintelligible to others. Out of this unintelligibility, an uneasy tension emerges between Joan's acts of emotional withholding that might hold the disruptive potential of affective disobedience and the ways in which Joan is simultaneously ensnared by the reductive stereotype of Asians/Asian Americans as unfeeling machines. What we might read as Joan's strategy of undoing white feeling through affective underperformance is inextricably bound up with the risks of adhering to the racist trope of the inscrutable Oriental.

Contemporary notions of Asian inscrutability trace back to a history of xenophobic, racist ideologies, ushered forth by 19th century yellow peril, a discourse produced and circulated to placate white feelings of fear and anxiety in response to increased Chinese immigration and dependence on Chinese labor. As scholarship in Asian American Studies has pointed out, by casting the Chinese as unassimilable and affectively impenetrable, yellow peril rhetoric justified the exclusion of Chinese migrants from U.S. citizenship on the grounds of not only racial difference, but also by imagining Asians as fundamentally alien and nonhuman.13 The maintenance of white affect is thus deeply embedded in the construction of Asians/Asian Americans as vacated of emotion and thereby alien and inhuman. The enduring trope of Asian inscrutability itself becomes a marker of racialization precisely because it registers affective performances that do not slot easily into the boundaries of white sentimentality. Relatedly, Asian inscrutability also informs the alignment of Asian/American femininity with passivity, submission, and silence.14

Out of this context, Asian/Asian Americans have come to occupy a complicated position in relation to affect that pivots on emotional lack. Sianne Ngai's work on animatedness explains how racialized subjects are imbued with effusive emotion and liveliness in the white imagination, out of which racist tropes arise. "Exaggerated emotional expressiveness," Ngai writes, comes to "function as a marker of racial or ethnic otherness in general."15 If the racialized subject has often been configured as excessively emotional and overly lively in the American racial imagination, then the inscrutability of the Asian/Asian American subject gives rise to a related but distinct problem of Asian/Asian American subjects being "not lively enough," as Vivian L. Huang points out in their study of inscrutability.

While the tension between Joan's deployment of unfeeling as critique and unfeeling as a perpetuation of stereotypes of Asians/Asian Americans is not easily resolved in the novel, this complex dynamic draws attention to the impossibility of a clear-cut course of resistance and survival for a racialized and gendered subject like Joan. Yet, Joan's refusal to be fully known and easily read might make good on Huang's suggestion that "Asian American inscrutability is not only ever a reiteration of the status quo, of quiet passing, of model minority respectability."16

            With Yao's theorization of disaffection and Huang's reorientation to inscrutability in mind, rather than reading Joan as a wayward, socially awkward workaholic who is devoid of feeling, we might think of Joan as a character who draws on unfeeling and leverages affective minimalism as a mode of self-preservation, decluttering the burden of white sentimentality from her life.

Take, for example, the introduction of talkative, charismatic Mark, who moves into the apartment across the hall from Joan. Initially appearing as a potential love interest, Mark takes an immediate liking to Joan, inserting himself into both her life and her physical space. Mark begins offering unsolicited advice and fills Joan's bare apartment with furniture and other gifts. When moving a hand-me-down reading chair into Joan's apartment, he discovers that her living space contained "just had an old futon I'd bought years ago and in one corner my robot vacuum, in another the books that he had given me that had gone unread."17 Joan leads a lifestyle that requires only the bare minimum in material goods; like a true minimalist, all her personal possessions could easily fit in a suitcase. Mark is shocked by how Joan lives, asking "Did you get robbed?" to which Joan replies "not that I knew of," with her signature deadpan delivery.18 Mark's inquiry reveals his astonishment that anyone would freely choose to live minimally in the way that Joan does, which is later paralleled by his disbelief at Joan's lack of rage. Throughout the novel, Mark attempts to intervene in both Joan's minimalist aesthetics and her minimalist affective performance by not only physically filling up her apartment with clutter and introducing various distractions — installing a television, bringing in a reading chair, suggesting sitcoms that Joan should watch, dropping off books, and throwing a surprise housewarming without Joan's permission — but also through his urging of Joan to more explicitly express her emotions.

Once Joan goes on mandatory bereavement leave, Mark insists on finding out more. Joan does not open up to Mark. Instead, "to simplify matters," she lies about being put on mandatory leave as a consequence for failing to complete a wellness training, purposely omitting her father's death.19 The lie sets Mark off on an interrogation of the circumstances surrounding Joan's leave, asking if Joan has ever faced any "strife" or discrimination in her work environment:  "You're a woman of color in a male-dominated field and you haven't experienced any strife?"20 Mark presses on, critiquing the very notion of mandating an Asian doctor to complete this training: "Don't Asians have to outscore their white counterparts across the board? Don't they have to outscore other Asians and sometimes themselves?"21 When Joan appears rather unmoved by Mark's passionate spiel, he asks her how this makes her feel, then tells Joan how exactly she should feel: cheated and enraged that she is always faced with the racist threat of being written off as "robotic."

In this scene, Wang plays up Joan's emotional flatness in contrast to Mark's impassioned advocacy on her behalf to show just how exhausting it is to be subjected to white sympathy and to be obliged to appeal to white sympathy. Mark is so deeply invested in recovering Joan's personhood while Joan replies minimally, refusing to confirm Mark's suspicions that she is being oppressed along the axes of race and gender. The contrast of Joan and Mark's respective emotional investments in this exchange is ironic, over-the-top, and funny. Mark's unabashed confidence in his own cultural sensitivity leads him to assume that Joan must feel injured somehow. Mark's sympathy towards Joan is the basis upon which he imposes his own diagnosis of Joan's emotional distance. For Joan, it is a difficult and impossible position; to respond with rage is to fulfill Mark's demand of emotional performance expected of her. At the same time, to withhold emotion would confirm the underlying suspicion that she is an inscrutable, robotic, docile, and passive Asian American subject after all. This scene, in all its absurdity, lays out the contradictory logic of a white affective regime that demands both more and less emotion from Asian/Asian American subjects all in the same breath.

Yet, Joan, through her steady nonchalance, refuses to be rescued by Mark, resisting Mark's attempts to recuperate her as a racially injured subject by simply not sharing in his rage. Joan is perfectly, stubbornly okay. In short, Joan practices a form of affective minimalism precisely by underperforming the level of emotion that Mark expects from her. Just as Joan is minimally invested in material objects — choosing to use a fold-out chair and table that she stores in a closet rather than a proper dining table set, for example — she also dodges the burden of emotional attachments. The novel asks us to consider why minimalism is aspirational and desirable when taken up by others, yet for Joan, who is racialized and gendered as an Asian American woman in a highly professionalized field, the same hallmarks of minimalism become a problem that marks her as unsociable and unlikeable.

Joan's seemingly detached exterior doesn't just pose a problem for Mark and her white co-workers. It also becomes a touchy subject for Joan's older brother Fang and his wife Tami, both successful, upper-middle class Asian Americans who have started a family in Greenwich. At thirty-six years old, Joan seems to have it all: a Harvard degree, a steady career in medicine, and financial stability. However, to Fang and Tami, these conventional markers of immigrant success and assimilation are not enough. As Tami pleads with Joan, "I want you to have it all, I really do, and thinking ahead of our collective futures, your brother and I also don't want you to be alone. So, with your career now set, is it not time to shift your goals?"22 Or, as Fang states tersely to Joan, "you're difficult."23 To them, Joan is stubbornly unsociable, so much so that it poses a problem to their aspirations of assimilation. Joan skips Fang and Tami's parties, makes excuses to avoid going on family trips, and resists their attempts to convince her to start a private practice in Greenwich to be closer as a family.

In an interview with Kirkus Reviews, Weike Wang explains how the model minority myth formed one of the central premises of her novel: "Of course, Joan has feelings. She is not this machine that just goes to work. [ . . . ] She has an emotional landscape. But to her co-workers, she's a complete mystery who does everything right. I wanted to play with that a little bit." Wang pushes the model minority myth to its extremes: just "how model minority can [Joan] get?"24

In doing so, Wang calls to mind Summer Kim Lee's formulation of Asian American asociality that critiques the burden of relatability and compulsory sociability that minority subjects are tasked with in our contemporary moment. Within Lee's framework, the burden of relatability and compulsory sociability that minority subjects must bear compounds upon the burden of representation: "one must not only be legible and transparent but also accessibly and accommodatingly so."25 Joan, as the daughter of  Asian American immigrants, is self-sufficient, over-achieving, well-educated, and economically independent, but seemingly lacking in social savvy and relatability. Even as a child, teachers pointed out Joan's lack of a discernible personality as "concerning" and emphasized her "trouble connecting with peers" in spite of her perfect academic performance. This asociality is precisely what Fang and Tami try to manage and improve about Joan, encouraging her to climb social ladders, network more, and partake and build on family traditions.

If Joan is a paradigmatic Asian American subject who is "racially figured as a problem for and of sociality, as [an] assimilated yet socially isolated, unrelatable subject,"26 Wang does not choose to focus on redeeming Joan as likable and personable by setting her on a journey of transformation. The novel is instead full of false starts — we are led to believe that every catastrophic event or appeal from various characters will change or "fix" Joan and set her on a path towards normative sociality, whether it's the death of her father, her colleague's concerns, Mark's unsolicited goodwill, or Fang and Tami's suggestions. Against these expectations, all attempts to make Joan more expressive and less machine-like and less minimalist, whether in the amount of stuff she has or how much she emotes, are ultimately futile.

How are we supposed to make sense of Joan's, and Wang's, commitment to an unwavering state of being "okay"? If we are disappointed by an Asian American novel that isn't filled with nostalgic musings, diasporic yearning, or the melancholy of racial trauma, then we are not unlike everyone in Joan's life who desire and expect more emotion from her. While the novel might resemble a conventional immigrant narrative in some respects, its lean emotional investments and minimalist tendencies culminate in a rather anticlimactic ending in which Joan simply returns to work and stops speaking to Mark. The novel mirrors Joan's deadpan delivery — it holds us at arm's length. Even as Joan's friendship with Mark sours, we are not privy to a dramatic confrontation. When Mark asks if Joan is okay and if things between them are okay, we instead witness Joan's choice to ignore Mark, conscientiously deciding to save her energy and preserve her sense of peace: "I chose to not text him back or [ . . . ] call and lay into him until he could finally see where I was coming from. Why try to explain yourself to someone who had no capacity to listen?"27 Joan's refusal to expend emotional energy in confronting Mark demonstrates that being okay is to strategically linger in the space of minimalist affective performance; being okay becomes a form of protection.

By the novel's end, the Covid-19 pandemic catches up to Joan. It is spring 2020 and Joan returns to work from her bereavement leave as New York City quickly becomes the epicenter of the pandemic. Joan falls into a routine: "By 6:00 am each day, I left for work. On the walk there, I made eye contact with no one, looked ahead and blankly. I kept my jaw clenched and closed my ears to passing dialogue, any shouts directed at me of possible hate."28 What is so striking about Joan's precise narration of her routine is how she describes the work of affective minimalism. To make oneself go blank and to close oneself off emotionally becomes a safeguard against the threat of anti-Asian violence when it feels like there is nothing else that can be done.29 In a time of crisis, it takes everything just to be okay. Rather than offering an account of spectacular forms of racial injury or forms of resistance that redress this harm, Weike Wang asks us to linger on the quiet survival of being okay.

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Annabelle Tseng is a PhD candidate in English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the entanglement of technology, race, and gender in 20th/21st century Asian Anglophone literature. Twitter: @aytseng

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