Chemistry

by Weike Wang

only to realize that everyone else had won it as well, at some point, in addition to awards I have never won.

Outside of sky there is sky, outside of people there are people. It is the idea of infinity and also that there will always be someone better than you.

To progress in life, you must always compare yourself with someone better and never with someone worse.

How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up?

We don’t go anywhere anymore. Didn’t we used to do more? What do you want to do? he asks. What do you want to do? I ask.

You play everything correctly, the pedaling precise, but you play like a robot, without pain or sorrow, without happiness or joy.

In college, I had a Chinese roommate who called her parents every Sunday. In college, I had a Chinese roommate who cried for two hours every Sunday.

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

A joke: What do you do with a sick chemist? Helium. Or curium. Or barium.

I am the girl who followed you and I know what happens to those girls. They are never happy and then they carry that unhappiness everywhere.

tell her the usual things like follow your dreams, and then remind her that sometimes these dreams must be let go to make way for more realistic ambitions like money to pay the bills.

Chinese so often seen as utilitarian.

I am fascinated by these public displays of affection because it feels like watching a crime.

the common first names, yet the emphasis on being an individual.

When I get into the best college in America, he is cutting radishes for dinner. I have just found out ten minutes ago. I am elated. He puts down the knife to shake my hand and then goes back to cutting radishes.

What the shrink says about hobbies: You should find some. Do you have any? You should find some.

What my father says about hobbies: Growing a seasonal vegetable garden is essential.

I don’t know what I want. Isn’t that why I’m here?

The only difference between a poison and a cure is dosage. Drink too much water and you will die. Inhale water and you will die as well.

I think I know what resentment sounds like. It sounds like my mother clicking the car door handle while counting to three.

Deer arrows are engineered to not go cleanly through, but to penetrate a few inches and lodge. Initially the deer does not feel excessive pain. Then the razor-sharp edges slice through the surrounding tissue as the deer runs. This causes hemorrhaging and the deer eventually bleeds out.

He left and I let him. He said he would try not to call.

To be fearless means what? I ask the shrink. Does it mean to be without fear or to have courage that is equal to or greater than fear?

Was it because I didn’t like it or I wasn’t good enough to do it? Does it matter? she says. It wasn’t your thing. Accept that and move on.

There is another reason doing fun things causes me a tremendous amount of stress.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Why do you defend her? the shrink asks. She doesn’t deserve this kind of loyalty. Because mothers have parents too? Because they have lives beyond their own children? Because I still want her to be happy. Many times, she lifted up my chin and said, You must be better than the man you marry. You must succeed beyond him.

happiness = reality – expectations If reality > expectations, then you are happy. If reality < expectations, then you are not.

No one should lead a life of low expectations. Emotions such as disappointment are also important to experience.

Why does she deserve this kind of loyalty? She doesn’t. But she does because she is my mother.

We are our own worst propagators of those clichés. We are constantly throwing each other under the bus.

If she has cried, she has not done so in front of me. She has done so in the shower where it is hard to tell.

I go into a CVS and see the air freshener brand Air Wick and leave without buying anything.

To progress in life, I still feel as if I must colonize the moon. The shrink sighs. Why the moon? That’s just setting yourself up for failure. I mean, yes, you should at least try, but don’t kill yourself over it. There are other things out there.

I have brief windows of clarity when I see that happiness is not just achievement but made up of many other things.

But it is the Chinese way to not explain any of that, to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon.

My mother says: It is important to your father that you have a jia. My father says: It is important to your mother that you have a jia.

I don’t want to get married until I have done more for myself.

I watch him wade into the river first and he could keep going. But he stops in the middle of the current and waits for me to catch up.

Now it is known that the heart can renew itself. But the process is very slow. In an average person, the rate is 1 percent each year.

After the second time he asked, Eric said, I could not have been with you for so long had I not also considered you my equal. But what was so great about being an equal, I thought, when in the end, all marriages are doomed?

It might be that all marriages lie between these two extremes.

Eric, I have hurt for you too.

Eric, I am writing you a short note. I am asking: Would you ever consider coming back and visiting for a little while, just as a friend?

How do I create the sort of family I want without rejecting the family I have?’

I finished the book and, after wiping myself off the floor, turned back to an early passage when the narrator asks her dog, “What do you want from me? You must want something.” It doesn’t.’