Joan Is Okay

by Weike Wang

During residency, I had lost the weight of a forearm. I’d since gained it back, but my mother still liked to check, and to ask if I was eating enough, if I had already eaten, if I could eat any more.

At the funeral, I couldn’t talk about my father in a significant way, and once I got a few words out others just wanted me to stop.

There were times my classmates would ask me to translate some dumb English phrase into Chinese just to prove to them that I could, then after hearing me speak Chinese, just to say that I sounded foreign. I waited for the nurse to do that, but of course she didn’t, since she was a good person and a good nurse, and we were both adults. —

Catastrophizing. Thinking about disastrous possibilities based on a relatively small observation or event can lead to believing that the worst-case scenario is the one that will play out.

THERE IS NO REAL fight against death because death will always win. But death can be handled well or poorly.

The day of turkey basting and feasting was his mother’s favorite—because it was just one day, as he explained, centered around family and not like Christmas, which for the entire month of December became a part-time job.

Changing of the guards, which for most families is a gradual process but with immigrant families happens much earlier and precipitously, as the child becomes a parent.

But my brother fought wars of attrition and thrived against resistance, so if only to move the lecture along, I simply told him that he was right.

The same answer being that he was neither the best nor the worst, which is where all of us were. Moving into a shared office has taught me that some people required more encouragement, water, and sun. Some people were just like plants.

HAD MY FATHER BEEN happy raising me, been happy to be my father? And had I posed those questions to him, would he have considered them important questions or simply Western ones? Americans he found to be so outwardly happy all the time and superficially positive. To be indiscriminately happy seemed to him as much of a curse as to be indiscriminately sad.

He asked why I was always so indifferent. Not my intention, I said, just how my voice, tone, and in-person facial expressions seemed to come across.

The seminars throughout the month focused on nutrition and healthy eating, ergonomics and injury prevention, stress management versus productivity. I saw the director at the last one, in the very back; his mouth hung open as if he were watching a bad magic show. Put your workers’ productivity into a black hat and watch it disappear. Put your own productivity into a box, now saw it in half.

The system is broken. Referring mostly to bureaucracy, insurance, the skyrocketing cost of care, Big Pharma’s focus on only lucrative drugs, the cost of medical training itself plus licensing, and the exorbitant salaries of some specialties like oncology. But who could have broken our own system if not us? And the system wasn’t so much broken as it was circuitous, self-blaming, and operating under false pretenses.

I had become that daughter, the overprotective and possibly annoying kind, the daughter who believes she is also the parent to a parent who doesn’t like being the child.

Much of any culture can be linked back to eating and food, food and care, eating and language. To eat one’s feelings, to eat dust, words, to eat your own heart out, to eat someone else alive, to eat your cake and have it too, things that are adorable (puppies, babies) that are said to be good enough to eat, to have someone else eat out of the palm of your hand, to be chewed out, a dog-eat-dog world.

As a child, I hadn’t felt my situation to be lacking until I became an adult. Because a child can get used to anything, a child will find a way to grow up.

Home soil. Home plate. But what does the soil of home feel like? Because doesn’t all soil, at some point, get stuck under your nails and need to be cleaned out?

Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain. It could exile you for a little while but then demand that you return.