Chemistry

This was brilliant. As the protagonist opened up, the book opens up. The metaphors of science are great -- I loved all the scientific facts just as facts, really. The voice is so strong. I hope her next book is just as good.

4.5 The writing is delightful. The main character's voice is so distinctive and though she is going thru angst, there is humor and sweet moments. Never named, she is a grad student in chemistry, along with her boyfriend Eric. He is having great success in the field, she is not, and while she has a

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pure love for the science, she is feeling immense pressure from her parents, her faculty advisor and her prestigious Boston university. When she quits, she has to re-examine her identity and face some things about herself that she has left un-examined. Eric has proposed to her, but even that seems like something she cannot commit to right now. Her own parents flawed marriage, her cultural Chinese background and family dynamics, her own successes that don't measure up against the superstars in her program all send her into a spiral of depression and uncertainty, but she emerges with some help from "the best friend", who has troubles of her own, "the shrink" who is a mandated requirement when she drops out of her PhD program, and her own willingness to be vulnerable provide resolution in unexpected ways. This is peppered with science-y facts that have metaphorical meaning in her situation and her relationship with students she tutors gives her a connection with humanity. The fact that it was filed as a "romance" at my library gave me more upbeat expectations that weren't disappointed.

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***December 1 2018: this book is on sale for $2.99**


This book is about identity and discovery. It is about relationships. It is simple, broken down by elements, the mundane and notable. It is told through chemistry with all characters unnamed but one.

I wasn't sure at first. I don't usually connect

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to this writing style. It is sparse, but it fits this book so well one I got into it I can't imagine it another way.

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A delightful stream of consciousness meditation on being all things. Why do we understand when proportions or conditions change in chemistry that it will change the nature of the compound, but when things change for a human being, through love, or marriage, or child birth, or moving from China to

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America we expect the being to continue to do all the things they did before without essential change? It makes no sense. Everything changes when anything changes. Everything can't be sustained - incompatible goals can't be made compatible.

There is a great deal here too about one's relationship to their Asian parents. (There is a fascinating aside about Asian cooks on competitive cooking shows and what it tells you about having Asian parents that is so real and right - its kind of perfect.) What do children owe their parents just by virtue of being their child. Even if they are terrible parents. How does that vary for Americans and Chinese people? How is that relationship negotiated when you are both American and Chinese?

The book is fascinating, and also very funny, smart, and insightful. The best debut I have read in a long time.

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Quick read

Chemistry was great for me. I'm a fourth year PhD student in chemical engineering, recently engaged, and constantly wondering what's next. Although I know I'm in the right place, every PhD student faces the difficult choice of continuing or leaving. I loved the main character's voice and

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journey because I felt it was so relatable. The way she refers to everybody in her life without a name is accurate, as many people do not know "the best friend" or "the student." Overall, I think it was a great book about self-discovery and the fact that it centered around topics I can easily relate to was exciting for me.

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This is a very charming, very true story.

In Weike Wang's novel Chemistry, the nameless female narrator refers to herself as a "an excellent sheep" because she is good at following scientific protocol in the laboratory but can't seem to finish her PhD dissertation, which requires her to contribute original thinking to her field. The

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pressure leads her to a nervous breakdown, but also to reevaluating her relationships with her Chinese immigrant "tiger parents" and her more successful American boyfriend. Finally she learns about going after what she wants, rather than what others want for her. A short but intense, insightful, and sometimes even humorous read.

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The unnamed narrator of this story is having a difficult time finding the right chemistry. She can not find it with her boyfriend who repeatedly proposes to her, her parents who push her into a career similar to their own, nor completing the final phases of her Phd. She's stuck and can not move

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forward. The author relates the young ladies difficulties with humor and an easiness that is quiet likable and when chemistry does exist it's quite nice. I found the tidbits of science scattered throughout the story quiet interesting. Yet, the story seems to fall flat and the conclusion is befuddling.

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I can see people not enjoying this b/c of the writing style (I myself had trouble getting into it); however I think it ends up working quite well for the story. I found the main character incredibly relatable.

This is a short novel told in the present tense by a narrator who tells us a great deal about herself even though we never learn her name. She is a Chinese-American Ph.D. student in chemistry, with a boyfriend a year ahead of her named Eric. Eric wants them to get married, but she doesn’t really

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know how to love, and in any event she thinks marriages are doomed to fail, based on her limited knowledge of her own family. Her parents are cold, judgmental, and emotionally abusive (although she still feels very tied to them and their expectations for her). She never saw them affectionate with each other either; rather, it seemed like there was only hate between them, punctuated by violent rages. While they pushed her intellectually, she got no modeling or support whatsoever for handling any uncertainty or for experiencing a loving relationship. To say she is not in touch with her emotions is an understatement. She deals with any uncomfortable feelings or thoughts by lashing out in anger or retreating into science.

The narrator has a nervous breakdown and drops out of school. (Her mother says, “Don’t call me again. Don’t even think about coming home. You are nothing to me without that degree.” ) She acknowledges feeling fear and guilt about the reaction of her parents: “I can’t stand it when they are mad at me. I can’t sleep, and once I can’t sleep, I can’t do much of anything else.”

Eric doesn’t understand the power her parents have over her, but as the narrator maintains in frustration, he could never understand what it means to have parents whose ties to you are so warped. You need whatever they give you, even if it is cruel and unhealthy. Eric observed that she protects herself with a metaphorical barrier of ten-inch-thick bulletproof glass, and behind this glass, he noted, there is more glass. He also felt like she carried a ball of barbed wire close to her chest that she sometimes threw at other people. After her breakdown, when she became increasingly self-destructive, he insisted she go see a therapist. In spite of everything, Eric is patient and supportive, and wants to help her. It only makes her upset. Why is he so nice? Why is his family so nice? Why is he like he is and she cannot be like that? She doesn’t want her heart locked up, but there it is.

Then Eric accepts a job at Oberlin, and the narrator stays back in Boston, where she struggles to regenerate herself and to let her heart out of its sealed container. But is it too late? There is a possibility that the wall she is built around her emotions is like the Great Wall of China, which is so durable it has lasted since as early as the 7th century BCE, and so large it can be seen from the moon.

Evaluation: This book is well-written, with a number of metaphorical themes suggested by the title cleverly reflected by the plot. But the main character is so cooly analytical and unemotional that it was hard for me to warm up to her or even to feel her pain. I wasn’t especially taken by the way it ended either. But I must say this book has gotten rave reviews by others.

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I'm so glad I tried this on audio! I had a physical copy a few months ago and the flow of the language wasn't working for me, but I decided to try it as a audiobook and loved it. The narrator's distinct voice and relatable struggles as she navigates her work, love, and parental relationships makes

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this novel stand out in a crowd of similar concepts. Definitely worth the read!

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Delightful---and so full of humorous details as well as some scientific education along the way. The life of this Chinese-American chemistry student and what happens to her in her pursuit for an answer to what she really should be doing with her life is given a view from all directions---her "best

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friend," her shrink, Erik, her parents, and on and on---but she needs to answer it for herself.

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Fascinating-- not at all what I expected, but good.

From the publisher:
Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She's tormented by her failed

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research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can't make a life before finding success on her own.

Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she's confronted with a question she won't find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry--one in which the reactions can't be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.

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In Weike Wang's debut novel, the unnamed narrator recounts events that were set off by her abandonment of her chemistry doctorate. Working at an unnamed prominent university in Boston, the narrator buckles under pressure and retreats. As she thinks back over her childhood, raised by parents unhappy

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with each other, and as an immigrant to the US who always felt like an outsider, she is a woman who is not quite at home anywhere. Her difficulties extend to her boyfriend, an fairly uncomplicated white guy who loves her, even as he plans to go on with his life, accepting a faculty position in another state.

This is a hard book to describe. it's a slender book, told in brief segments of memory and experience, all from the narrator's perspective. The book deals with everything from the pressures of competing and performing at an elite university, to the experiences of someone who immigrated to the US as a child, to how childhood is experienced by someone whose parents are unhappily married. And the book is charming; the narrator's viewpoint is a unique and fascinating one and her relationship with her dog and how she relates to her best friend's baby lend a lightness to what might otherwise be heavy-going. She's a mess, but it's easy to see why the people around her are drawn to her.

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Amazing and hilarious book, and this coming from a current chem graduate student. 5 stars.

4.5. Loved the narrator's voice, can't wait for more from the author. I feel like I need to send this to several of my science-friends. Was super unprepared for the ending, it seemed abrupt, but I can see how that might have been the point.

The unnamed protagonist of this short novel is a graduate student in chemistry who is struggling with, or perhaps avoiding, a number of problems: her growing dissatisfaction with life in the lab, intense pressure to succeed from her demanding Chinese-American parents, the difficult legacy of those

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parents' dysfunctional marriage, and a deep-seated terror of saying yes to any of her fiancé's many marriage proposals.

This is all told not so much as a story, but as a slightly disjointed internal monologue, a technique that works really well because the character's internal voice is readable and interesting, with some appealing touches of dry humor. I was particularly pleased by it because it's really very rare that a literary author even tries, much less succeeds, at getting inside the head of a science-y kind of person. Ian McEwan does it superbly, but I'm hard-pressed to think of another example... except for this. The narrator here is a strange person, a messed-up person, and a person with a very different background from me, but her internal voice somehow felt instantly recognizable to former-physics major me. It felt very right.

The structure of the novel did throw me just a little at first, only because it uses present tense consistently whether the narrator is thinking about events in her present or things that happened far in the past. This was a bit confusing for a while, or at least it took some getting used to, but eventually I almost stopped even noticing it. And an interesting thought occurred to me about this narrative mechanism about fifty pages in, when the protagonist is contemplating the degree to which she thinks in Chinese vs in English. I don't speak any form of Chinese, but I have been told that it lacks a grammatical marking for past tense, instead relying on context to pin down when a particular event happened (or happens, or is happening). Which is exactly what the prose here is doing in English. And I rather like that thought. It makes something that at first looks like a simple stylistic quirk feel instead like an expression of character.

Anyway, I enjoyed this one. My only regret is picking it up when I was kind of busy and had to keep putting it down, because it feels like it would work best if read almost straight through, something that should not be too difficult if you've got a couple of hours to spare.

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Didn't like this book at all. Whiny main character. No plot, very little dialog. Told in the first person by someone who seemed to understand very little about herself, her culture, the world around her, or other people. Supposedly she grew or learned something as the book progressed (or so a

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reviewer said). I didn't see it. Two things I liked about the book -- the blobs of amusing or interesting science it had in it and that it was short. It had the usual modern literary ending of no resolution. The curtain just drops. Maybe the author's computer broke down.

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"You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally."

"The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in liquid state and half gaseous, both of which are probably poisonous."

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Our unnamed narrator is deep into her PhD chemistry program, at a Boston university and now is weighing a marriage proposal from her live-in boyfriend, a fellow scientist. It seems like her life as been guided by outside forces, her entire life, especially by her domineering Chinese-immigrant parents. She is slowly being suffocated by these crushing expectations. To everyone's horror, she decides to chuck it all and go her own way...
This is a well-crafted debut, with clean, sharp prose and whip-smart observations. It is also filled with scientific and historic anecdotes, that I also enjoyed, including this gem, calling out to The Radium Girls:

“Chemistry, while powerful, is sometimes unpredictable. In 1902, radium's glow is mistaken for spontaneous energy and Marie (Curie) is celebrated. But then, in 1928, the lip-pointing girls, the going straight to your bones.”

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Reminiscent of Jenny Offill's Department of Speculation, in a great way. I loved the quiet but wry voice that leaves a lot unsaid, letting you unravel the mysteries of a relationship even as you get to know one of its voices really well. Wang has a great help on her narrative voice, and it comes

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off the page so clearly that when you look up, it seems strange to find yourself in the same old room as before.

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How completely heartbreaking this was! The backdrop is of an enormously successful graduate student that experiences the setbacks that life tends to dole out especially to people in their 20s. She suddenly has to find a way to power through losing most of what passed for stability in her life, and

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tutoring undergrads becomes de facto therapy. I truly hope she writes prolifically in the future, because this was a major achievement for a debut novel. Like my number 1 non-fiction pick for 2018 ("Educated: A Memoir" by Tara Westover), this is instantly in my all-time favorites list as well.

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Crossroads

Weike Wang’s anonymous character in her debut novel finds herself at a crossroads, three crossroads, if you’re counting.

The first concerns her pursuit of a Ph.D in Chemistry. All her life, at the beckoning of her driven and goal focused Chinese parents, both immigrants, she has been

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educated and pushed rather blatantly into a life in the sciences. Her mother was a pharmacist back in China. She had supported her husband in his pursuit of a Ph.D. When they emigrated to the U.S., the mother was left without her independence, and her relationship with her husband became strained. She made his success possible, and he seems unable to acknowledge this. However, they agree wholeheartedly on a shared objective for their daughter, the narrator: a Ph.D in Chemistry. The daughter follows their wishes, though unhappy, it seems, with every step of the journey, from child to adult. She reaches a crossroads when she realizes she doesn't possess the essential element of success: she’s not an original thinker, she’s simply an extremely accomplished technician, not enough to make the jump to Ph.D status. She decides in frustration to abandon her quest four years into her doctoral program. But she can’t being herself to tell her parents.

Also, she has a boyfriend, also a chemistry Ph.D student. Unlike her, he is driven by his own confidence and desire to obtain his degree, which he does. They share a very quirky relationship and readers can see that they really care for each other. On the verge of achieving his degree, he asks her to marry him, the opening of the novel, yet another crossroads in her life. Her response is to put off answering, to push it into the distance so often that he finally departs without her to pursue his dream of teaching in a small college. They leave the door open.

These two relationships and her academic endeavor place stressful demands on her. Please her parents. Fulfill a commitment to her parents. Make a commitment to her boyfriend. She eventually takes up tutoring, which brings her satisfaction. She commiserates with her friend, who is a doctor. She enters therapy. And she and her boyfriend get a dog. It’s with the dog that she has a most interesting and rewarding relationship, because the dog places no demands on her. She’s not forced to make any decisions by the dog, and she’s able to slow down life to wax philosophical on what she herself might want for herself.

In little more than two hundred pages, in short sentences and slim paragraphs, with scientific principles interspersed impelling thoughts about her life, her parents’ lives, her relationship with the boyfriend, her contrasting of her upbringing (difficult) with the boyfriend’s (idyllic), she tries to wrangle her indecisiveness into a decision, and reaches something resembling one in the end.

For many who have been where the author finds herself, this novel will ring with much truth. For everybody else, they’ll find lots of insight, perhaps into their friends with loads of ability but little direction, as well a delightful and charming humor.

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I loved school. Right up until I hit grad school. Then I couldn't wait to get out. Originally I wanted a PhD. Then I didn't. I still love learning things purely for learning's sake but I don't think I'd want to ever go back to school again and deal with the angst and the politics and all the other

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nonsense that has nothing to do with learning. It was not a happy place to be for me. And it is not a happy place to be for Weike Wang's unnamed narrator in the novel Chemistry. Then again, nowhere in her life seems particularly happy.

The narrator of this novel is standing still, afraid to choose a path. She is a PhD student in Chemistry but her project is stalled and she isn't certain she wants to continue. Her boyfriend has proposed but she's put him off, not answering him, thinking always of her own parents' unhappy marriage. She is floundering under the weight of so many expectations--from her parents, from her advisor, from her boyfriend. The only one in her life who doesn't add to her stress and pressure is her dog. Finally quitting school four years into her PhD to tutor others, she can't bring herself to tell her traditional Chinese immigrant parents and let them down. Unable to commit one way or another to her boyfriend, she keeps things open, staying behind when he moves from Boston to a school in Ohio for a job. But stasis is not living and while the narrator needs time and space to find her own path and learn to embrace uncertainty, she will examine herself, her choices, and her wants with the help of a therapist and her doctor friend.

Told entirely in the first person, the reader still feels somewhat at a remove from the main character. She is quite introspective, jumping from her present to scenes from her parents' lives to her own childhood. She can be dryly witty and the science facts sprinkled throughout the text as asides are appropriate and interesting additions to her thoughts. The writing is spare and choppy and composed in small chunks, like flash pieces knitted together into a whole. The insight into life as a second generation Chinese-American woman is interesting but overall, the main character and her life felt stultifying. The novel as a whole is very slow moving despite its slight length. I wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did.

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Slim first novel. Nice enough, but nothing special.