by Amelia Ao and Karen Chen
“Ask me what I remember about you, he said, and I asked and he said the word nothing. Nothing from my résumé had stood out. He made a hand gesture to mean flat. His thick fingers were pressed together, like a row of pink cigars.
So, I went home and rewrote myself and returned to have him slam the page down again. I did this until he could remember one thing about me, which was my name, and that was how my résumé became polished.”
Exclusive excerpt from Weike Wang’s Shadowing, found on Audible
The first time I read Chemistry, I thought Weike Wang was magical. It was a story I had never heard before and yet it felt like I had known it all my life, put into words in a way I never thought was possible. Chemistry, winner of the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, details the story of an unnamed chemistry graduate student struggling to find her way in life. Weike Wang herself studied chemistry at Harvard College before getting her doctorate and concurrent MFA at Boston University. She is currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and continues to publish in various literary sources. The interweaving of emotional complexity and steadfast drive in her writing challenges the boundaries of the Asian-American story—she shows that at their core, they are simply human stories.
Read Weike Wang’s work here
Chemistry and Her Writing
“I decided that if I was going to do this field I really had to prove myself in it, and that was Chemistry. To this day, I don’t think my family has any idea what I do, but at least they know that I independently pushed through it, I didn’t regret it, and I still don’t regret it. If you’re going to commit, you have to commit.”
I read your book Chemistry last year and I was honestly greatly impacted by it. Do you think you can tell us more about your writing process?
Thank you for reading! The writing process for Chemistry was fairly straightforward in that I just started and built that book one sentence at a time. The first book of any author is usually a culmination of a lot of things they’ve been thinking about for years—I’d been thinking about these things for a long time, so it was easy to just flesh it out. The story itself has never changed, but in the editing process, it’s always about trying to figure out what the best way to say something is. What’s the easiest, what’s the most efficient, what’s the most beautiful way—these are all things that I consider.
As a follow up to that, does your writing process differ from novels and short stories?
Books are a whole different beast from short stories. Short stories in my opinion are a lot easier to write and I’m usually able to think of an idea I want to work with pretty quickly, maybe once every two months. Chemistry as a first novel was actually fairly easy to write because I had it in my head already. But the second novel I’m working on now...the restructuring process has started and restarted. You have to hold so many threads in your head for a novel that you don’t necessarily have to for short stories. A short story is kind of like one beautiful completed action. That arc is very self-containing. Once you start reading a short story, the reader typically finishes it. There’s this page by page tension. Novels have trouble doing that. For novels you actually need a lot of filler, a lot of connective tissue. Not every reader finishes each novel, so you’re kind of always under pressure to entertain, to amuse, to keep the momentum going, so I find it challenging in that way. But it’s also very rewarding. A novel is a piece of work in a way that a short story is more like art, something that’s been manipulated into an artistic, impressionistic form. The novel is more about ideas, more about bigger pictures. I never think about themes when writing a short story but novels really lend themselves to themes and thinking about what the book is really trying to say.
However, the endings to each are similar in that I don’t really know the ending until I get to that page. Every ending I’ve ever written has been organic.
Are there certain elements that you think are essential to your writing?
“For Asian-Americans or writers of color, you’re not writing the standard white story. There’s a lot of things you have to tell the reader... this mechanistic action of explaining: my character is Asian.”
Voice has always been very important to me. I feel like if I can’t get the voice right, the story’s sort of dead. It’s not really the characters. I can probably put together a character that would be interesting to me, but if it’s not written well, then I lose interest. That’s probably my biggest priority: the craft of it, the style of it.
For Asian-Americans or writers of color, you’re not writing the standard white story. There’s a lot of things you have to tell the reader. That sometimes makes it not art, since there’s this mechanistic action of explaining to the reader: my character is Asian. A lot of those things can get in the way of voice, which is why most white authors have this privilege of focusing on just form. For writers of color, we need to worry about background, how the character is created, getting cultural information down. You obviously never want the reader to be bored, but you also need to give them this important information in a way that’s more subtle. For the writers that are or have been rising stars, it’s because they have a very discernible style.
What inspired the anonymity behind your characters’ lack of names?
It’s an easy answer. Names carry a lot of identity with them. I always felt a lot of friction with my own name: being told I should adopt a more American name, people asking how to pronounce it. It’s so exhausting to think about names, in a way that white writers never have to think about. A white writer can name her character Mary and that’s fine, but if I name my character Mary, does she have a Chinese name? What do her parents call her? That’s why I don’t go into the name aspect as much. When I was writing Chemistry I don’t think I was ready to address that, and the main character is also such a rigid person in that she mostly thinks about people in terms of relationships. So it makes sense that she would say, this is my best friend, my dog, my father. In a short story, names are just so clunky. Thinking about why someone’s named the way they are would ruin the magic of the short story, so I just don’t think it’s necessary there. I am adjusting to the ideas of names a little more—in my second novel, everyone is named.
It’s one of those things where certain writers don’t need to think about names, because of course they’re just white characters who have a name. It’s natural for them. I just find there’s a huge contradiction between my naming a character something and getting into the weeds of that.
As a follow up question, what inspired the distance the narrator leaves between character and reader (e.g. in Chemistry calling characters “the best friend” instead of “my best friend”)?
Most of my characters are always going to be outsiders looking in—they have a lot of interiority but no one really knows it. There’s that built-in distance. In The Trip, there’s a couple who have a great distance. She’s feeling a gap. Same with Omakase and the current novel I’m working on: it’s a person who has trouble connecting with other people. That’s an emotional core I’m fascinated by...I think it could be a cultural thing or my own personal interest in finding this loner character who tries creating a social circle but has difficulties. It’s about exploring this idea of being antisocial but trying to socialize. I think those are the kind of characters I gravitate towards—I push characters away from them and put them together to create tension, contrast, and foils, so the story can build momentum.
In several of your works, you write about the role of race in relationships—what motivated you to explore this topic?
My husband is white, so this is something I’m interested in exploring. I think it’s a good usage of what growing up in America was like for me: you’re always pushing against this invisible fence. Those are just the rules you didn’t really understand. After I married my husband, I realized there’s a huge gap with family, with him, and you start to see huge differences in upbringing, thought process, perception, and mindset, which I was interested in exploring. The white man-Asian woman couple is now ubiquitous but rarely appears in writing in a significant way. I’m not interested in lecturing the reader about race, but rather presenting these scenes in a comedic, empathetic, and real way. But of course, if you’re not the dominant race, race becomes the dominant topic—you’re never just writing a story about two people.
How do you think about your writing within the larger context of Asian-American literature, and how do you balance representation with just writing a good story?
“Representation is important but you can’t only be interested in good representation: it’s about creating characters that are allowed to be flawed but are also full humans.”
It’s hard, but I try my best! You have to do it in a way that’s not just “good representation,” which isn’t art. Characters don’t have to be glamorous or envious—they’re real people with flaws, virtues, and compassion. I try to think through all the problems these characters would face and try to gain empathy from the reader. Representation is important, but you can’t only be interested in good representation: it’s about creating characters that are allowed to flaw but are also full humans. It’s a difficult thing, because how do you want to represent them? How do you want to subvert that representation? How can you be self-aware of the representation issue? To do this well, you probably need to know the stereotypes out there already and be able to lean into them or point a finger and laugh at it, and you also need to be able to restructure it. But at the end of the day, regardless of where my writing is within the spectrum or context of Asian-American literature, I just want to write a good story.
Arts and Sciences — Her Journey
“You have to have something to say. You have to have this independent drive. If you don’t have something to say in any field, it becomes harder to innovate in it. I ended up going into the arts because there was something I really wanted to say in art.”
How much of your writing comes from your personal experiences?
I think some of my writing comes from experiences. There’s always the nugget of an idea in an interesting scene or interaction. For Chemistry, the seed of the whole idea was my experience with the Harvard chemistry department—I couldn't not write about that. In The Trip, for example, I had just come back from China, but none of those things in the story ever actually happened. I was just interested in that framework of a trip to China. That’s what I usually take, and then for everything else, the fiction sort of fills it in. Fiction, and even nonfiction, is always exaggerated. Even when I try to write realistically, I always find that I make something up, and that’s the great thing about fiction: it allows room for fabrication. So sure, a lot of things are inspired from people I know, places, events, but for the other stuff you’d have to kind of connect the dots. What is true in all of my writing is the emotional core. You have to get the emotional core right and it’s usually taken from something you’ve experienced: loneliness, loss, things you are bound to feel as you grow up.
I know you studied chemistry yourself in college. How did you find yourself in the transition from being a chemistry major to doing what you do now?
My twenties were mostly just bouncing around different science fields. I was never going to go into chemistry grad school but I had been pre-med and then public health. The transition sort of just happened. After a while, you can’t really force what you like or don’t like. There’s an endpoint of forcing yourself to be something. Doing something for a career that you don’t actually care that much about is really hard. Writing was one of the few things I realized that I cared enough about that I would do it over and over again. I was willing to revise and revise and care about my craft in a way I didn’t care enough about research or medicine.
When do you think that switch happened?
I was in STEM most of my life. When I went to college, I declared chemistry and worked in a clinical research lab. I discovered during that time that I did not like clinical work, so I applied to Harvard Public School of Health to study cancer epidemiology.
Near the end of my grad program, I decided to do a one year MFA at BU. If that MFA hadn’t accepted me, or if Chemistry hadn’t panned out, I think I would’ve just done biostatistics. The thing is that you don’t want to go into writing unless you can guarantee that you can excel in it. If you’re going to do this system that’s truthfully not built for Asians, you do have to excel in it, whereas you can be mediocre at science and be fine. I did the MFA concurrently with my PhD, and my thesis was Chemistry. My professor liked it, I got an agent, I got a publisher. It was a great deal of finding the right program for me, finding support, and really trying to excel in that area. Managing the MFA and PhD concurrently was really hard. Writing is so much sunk time and is unbelievably inefficient, but it’s also practice. You really have to discipline yourself and your time, but the things you make time for are the things you want to do.
What would you say to those who are kind of confused about what they want to do, or are in between divergent paths?
I would say not to go into something like the arts just because STEM is scary (even though it is). Choose the arts if you feel like it's a natural fit, if you can’t see yourself doing anything else. Otherwise, truthfully, STEM is a great field. It’s easier to find a job, it’s easier for your family to understand—the ease of some of those things is undeniable. My general advice would be, don’t give up on something because it’s hard, but always do something you care about. You have to have something to say. You have to have this independent drive. If you don’t have something to say in any field, it becomes harder to innovate in it. I ended up going into the arts because there was something I really wanted to say in art.
I’m really glad I studied chemistry at Harvard. I also took a lot of English classes, a lot of workshop classes, so don’t feel like you have to isolate yourself in one field. If I went back, I think I would still do chemistry.
I feel like Chemistry displays the interconnect between the arts and the sciences so well. Do you think there’s more to explore in this area, as both an artist and a scientist?
“I don’t think those are competing ideas; it’s almost like being bilingual. There’s this fascinating dual language: one in science and math, one in...creativity and beauty, symmetry and form.”
There are many scientists who try to incorporate art into their work, but it is hard. The knowledge aspect of science is quite beautiful, but the technical aspect of achieving that aspect is sort of different from art, right? That intersection does interest me a lot. I think most of my protagonists are never going to be full artists or purely in the arts—they’re going to have more of an empirical brain. That’s sort of where I see the intersection: creating characters who are able to think empirically but also artistically, creatively but also logically. I don’t think those are competing ideas; it’s almost like being bilingual. There’s this fascinating dual language: one in science and math, one in thinking about creativity and beauty, symmetry and form. To continue connecting art and science, I hope to create works that reflect my training in both: writing art with a scientific lens or writing a story with the restraint or discipline that scientists would apply to their own papers.
What are you currently working on, and what are some of your future goals?
I’m currently working on my second novel, where the protagonist is an Asian-American doctor in her thirties dealing with friction with her brother in the year before the start of the pandemic. Her father has just died, so she’s trying to figure out some of the moving parts in her life. I wanted to write about an Asian-American doctor because she’s part of the model minority but she’s also something else. I don’t want to take the stereotype down; instead, I want to explore it more.
As for my goals, I hope I’m still writing in ten or twenty years. Writing is one of those things where some people just run out of steam, but I hope I never regret doing it.
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Before hearing Weike Wang talk about the conception of Chemistry, I hadn’t known that you could study STEM in college, pursue STEM after college, and write a novel at the same time—I was under the impression that almost all published writers needed to have studied English in college, or at the very least, the humanities. But she’s right: most importantly, you have to have something to say, and then you have to put in the work to say it. Learning about Weike Wang’s story, her writing process, her passion for her work, and her fascination with characters who are both outsiders and insiders, brilliant and plain, so close and so distant, these wholly real voices, has made that clear. Her writing is a living inspiration for many, one whose specific brand of loneliness I’m sure many readers will strongly resonate with. I hope that Weike Wang’s writing can continue to inspire artists of all types to pursue their craft if only for the desire to say something to the world. The voices of scientists, artists, thinkers; the flawed, the loners, the people we never remember: these are the voices that we need to hear.
To read more from Weike Wang, visit her website here.