1. Sometimes I feel as though I have five jobs, and then I realize that this is, in fact, the case. The jobs are teaching at three colleges, working for a private test-prep company, and writing. The last job is the most rewarding but also the one with the most unknowns. “How long does it take you to write a story?” my non-writer friends will ask, and proceed to tell me that, if only I wrote faster, or had a team, like James Patterson, then I could produce up to six solid books in a year.
2. Since writing is not a cost-effective profession, practically speaking, my other jobs are what I do to make and save money. I don’t have an exact fiscal goal in mind, but I won’t starve for my art, and a reasonable young person should always learn how to invest. Fear of poverty and fear of regression play a role, too. I worry that, the moment I stop having money to save, an anvil will fall from the sky onto my head, sending me back to an unpleasant place. It’s impolite to discuss money, but my family’s lack of it was so often the cause of distress and conflict when I was younger that I could never become one of those people for whom money doesn’t exist. The goal is to make enough now so that I don’t have to worry later on. I appreciate what Andrew Carnegie suggested: a person should spend the first third of his life getting as much education as he can, the next third making as much money as he can, and then the last third giving it all away.
3. In terms of work, the pandemic accelerated everything. Without commuting time or in-person meetings, I could now be at my desk twelve-plus hours a day. When I had writing to do, I did it from 6 A.M. to 10 A.M., then I moved on to teaching, which literally meant moving from one Zoom room to another, muting myself for the minute in between, when I needed to sprint off to pee. If I had a poor work-life balance before, it was shocking to see how much worse I could let it get.
4. It was shocking and also pleasing. Workaholics are addicted to the solace they find in extreme fatigue; it’s like the high that a marathon runner might get in her last mile. I can be utterly depleted yet energized by that depletion. There’s a masochistic pride to overworking. How heavy a workload can I truly handle? How many plates can I keep in the air? When I get to the end of a particularly overloaded day, my voice hoarse from teaching, my mind buzzing from far too many e-mails, questions, and deadlines, I vow never to let that happen again, knowing full well that, as soon as I’ve achieved a new level of exhaustion, my id will push me to try to exceed it.
5. We all know an origin story like mine, so I will try to sum it up quickly. My father left China for work opportunities and, throughout my childhood, we moved from place to place for his job. He still works more hours than he has to, hunched over a laptop full of spreadsheets, his reading glasses about to slide off. In China, my mother was a pharmacist, but, without repeating her education, couldn’t find that kind of work in the U.S. Here, she worked temporarily in retail or in real estate or as a home health aide, all jobs that she hated, until she ultimately decided to stay home. Her unhappiness at her forced domesticity left a deep impression on me, such that each time I pass a place where my mother worked, like Christmas Tree Shops, I feel both hostility and warmth. I want to go in and buy nothing. I want to go in and buy Cow Tales, the candy she’d bring home for me after her shifts. I am my mother’s only child, and her message to me was clear: You must have a career in this country. I did not give up mine for nothing.
6. Somewhat unfortunate for my parents, then, that I fell in love with sentences. Sentences? I can hear my father asking. What’s so great about them? It’s not that careers in science, law, or finance are the only ones they know of. It’s just that these are the clearest routes to what they consider success: for their adult child to be considered important, for her to rise to the top echelons of American society, and for all that immigrant toil not to have been in vain. The Chinese American community that I grew up in and still belong to requires a certain level of ambition and status-seeking in its members, and, although some kids defected, the large majority of us did not. Collectively, our parents may have demanded too much of us, but those who reliably responded to those demands and became young professionals have, in their newfound stability and success, proved their parents right. My closest friends and relatives are not in the arts, have no idea what I do in a day and no idea why I chose to write. “Is writing even work?” some of them wonder. Or do I just sit around coffee shops, smoke, drink, and wait for inspiration to strike? How do you know what to write if no one tells you? How do you write a whole book without a deadline? I think the conclusion that most of my friends have reached is that I work and I don’t. The fact that I still teach as an adjunct and tutor when a person my age should be working toward something more substantive, or at least tenure-track, also confuses them. If you’re my father, then you are direct: “You don’t have a real job, Weike, and I can’t understand why.” These reactions irk and sadden me. They cause me to work even harder and, at times, become overly defensive. Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do? Yet, who am I to disabuse my father and the rest of this community of their safe but narrow definition of reputable work?
7. Advice a person hears everywhere: you must work twice as much to get half as much. You must say yes many, many times before you can say no. In fact, try not to say no ever, because, the moment you do, someone else will take your place, and you won’t be given a second chance. Are white men told these things as often as Asian women and immigrants are? And are they told these things by everyone around them, especially if they happen to be girls, for fear that a child who doesn’t hear these warnings at least a few hundred times will grow up too naïve?
8. Related to the previous point is the model-minority myth, which I don’t believe is a myth. For a year post-college, I worked under a doctor who rarely treated me like the clinical-research assistant that I was, and, instead, most days, acted as if I were her bitch. The doctor, an older woman, was well versed in stereotypes. I was one of two clinical-research assistants in her lab, and she told both of us, often, in an upbeat and infomercial-like way, that she hired only Asian women who had gone to Harvard because we were the best. (She now denies having said this.) We were the best at working overtime without logging it (because, on paper, we were supposed to work only forty hours a week). The best at taking no lunch breaks (a lunch break was thirty minutes a day per head that she, as the principal investigator on a multimillion-dollar grant, couldn’t afford). The best at eating at our desks while working, at answering her phone calls and e-mails 24/7, at scheduling her travel, without ever travelling ourselves. (She maintains that human-resources policy was followed at all times.) One day, I felt chatty with my mother, and I complained, gratuitously, about this doctor. My mother didn’t see what the problem was. An employer wants you to work, she reminded me. Why would an employer pay you to do nothing? The year passed slowly and uneventfully, until the other clinical-research assistant got into a personal spat with the doctor about a letter of recommendation for med school that the doctor had agreed to write, but then began to resist writing after my colleague expressed a wish to leave her position early. (The doctor does not remember having this confrontation.) For someone like me or my colleague, working in a job like this, the hope of a good recommendation letter, and the fear of not getting one, always loomed overhead. The letter was the only real reason to take the job in the first place and to endure it. In the hierarchical world of medicine, a principal investigator has total control over the letter he or she writes (or doesn’t), so it’s an easy carrot to dangle in front of an employee. Two tumultuous months later, after the letter was finally sent in to Harvard’s pre-med committee and my colleague had left, she was replaced by an Indian woman, not from Harvard, and, although the erratic doctor didn’t deserve any of us, I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman. Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself. It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
9. I recognize that the problem is cyclical, though. A model-minority label is already a kind of erasure, because it discounts individuality. The rare times I met my father’s superiors, they were full of praise for his work ethic and his reliability, and I could see that my father was proud of their validation. But I doubt they knew very much about him, about his gardening interests or home-improvement projects or his profound love of oatmeal. In the time leading up to the letter dispute between the doctor and my colleague, something about the latter’s life style had been made known. My colleague was involved with another woman (a revelation that the doctor may not have registered) and, because the relationship wasn’t going well, my colleague was visibly distraught about it at work. She and the woman would eventually break up, and their breakup fuelled my colleague’s request to leave the position early. The doctor wasn’t happy about this, of course, so the saga around the letter began. It makes sense that my colleague’s abrupt notice had upset the doctor, but I couldn’t help but also wonder about the other possibility. Had my colleague been too open about herself and did the doctor now know more about her clinical-research assistant than she wanted to? The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people.
10. The first time I found myself truly overworked was when I chose to do a fiction M.F.A. at Boston University concurrently with a doctorate in epidemiology at Harvard. The reasons for the dual degree were practical. First, I still cared quite a bit about what my parents thought of me, and they wouldn’t let me bow out of the doctorate. Second, as opposed to the M.F.A., the doctorate paid a small stipend. Because completing two programs at two different schools simultaneously was technically not allowed, I told no one, and no one checked. During the year and a half of overlap, I was stretched and pounded thin. For the doctorate, I was taking a full course load, researching, and studying for my qualifying exams. For the M.F.A., I was also taking a full course load, teaching, and trying to finish a novel for my thesis, which would be the last work I’d receive feedback on from the professors I admired most. So, the 6-A.M.-to-10-A.M. writing ritual began. Then writing on Saturdays, with Sundays dedicated to other work. To supplement my grad-school stipend, I started tutoring for a private test-prep company, a job that required me to be up to date on five different standardized exams. Lots of things could have gone wrong. My doctoral adviser could have been a pill, instead of the exact opposite. I could have failed my qualifying exams and been kicked out of the program. My fiction thesis could have been middling, the feedback being that I had no real gift for writing. I could have had a mental breakdown, or, during one of my precarious bike rides between Longwood and B.U., been hit by the 47 bus and never made it to workshop. By sheer luck, none of those things happened, and I was able to work unimpeded. “Does working so much fulfill you?” a skeptical writer friend asked; I’d opened up to him a bit about my other lives, then regretted it. I wasn’t trying to show off. I was just trying to explain why I’d been tired for an entire month. He seemed annoyed by how much I worked and, after expressing concern for my general health, suggested that, because I wasn’t giving the M.F.A. my full attention, I wasn’t taking my writing seriously. I was taking my writing seriously, but I also needed to make rent. He, on the other hand, was fine financially, and would continue to be fine, even if he never made money from his writing. I brushed off his judgment and, for a while longer, we continued to be good friends. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove. Had I mentioned this to my friend, he would have rolled his eyes.
11. In my first novel, “Chemistry,” the narrator confesses to not wanting to marry until she has accomplished something. I somewhat shared that view when I wrote those lines, but now that I am married I’ve changed my mind. Without my husband, I wouldn’t be able to work to the extent that I do. He has a full-time job, but only one, and in the same field that he’s worked in for sixteen years. He’s a considerate person, neat and organized, and is not as afraid of domesticity as I am. During the week, he prepares our meals, takes care of the laundry and the dishes, and runs miscellaneous errands, like dropping off mail at the post office. Sometimes at 7 A.M., while I’m writing, a hot cup of coffee will surreptitiously appear in front of me, on a wooden coaster between my desktop and my keyboard. Then at 5 P.M., if I’m still in a meeting, a drink will appear in the very same place.
12. Domestic work has never interested me, I think, because I watched my mother do so much of it begrudgingly. For the period that she worked as a home health aide, I went with her, since, if she was at this job, then no one was at home watching me. I sat in kitchens as she cleaned and made mushy food for her older clients, who dozed off upright in their beds. I understand that cooking can be relaxing, can be a way to show someone, like your husband or your mother, that you care, but I have yet to find my footing with it. The one domestic task that I will force myself to do is clean. On weekend mornings, I will pick up the vacuum or duster and work my way around the apartment, until I stop seeing dust in the air. I don’t like stray tissues or empty wrappers on tables. I don’t like clutter. The social importance of cleanliness is not lost on me. Wherever we lived when I was a child, however small the space, my parents kept it tidy, in case someone, like the landlord, dropped by unexpectedly. My parents kept themselves tidy as well. They wore plain and simple clothing and woke up early to shower before work with unscented soap. You can’t be a poor family of color and live in filth. You can’t show up to work dirty or raise kids who don’t wash their faces before school.
13. Certain professions are defined by how much work they require, and the workload of medicine is well known. For my second novel, “Joan Is Okay,” a story about an Asian American doctor who works a lot, I interviewed my Asian American doctor friends. I asked them why they’d gone into this field. One said, “Because I consider myself a serious person, and a serious person does serious work.” Another, an M.D. physician-scientist, said something similar, but went on to call medicine “busy work,” meaning that it took time away from the real work, which, in her opinion, was research. But to both medicine and research, she, like the others, has committed nights and weekends. I saw the same behavior in college and grad school, especially among the most ambitious and those vying for establishment-level jobs. The tacit competition was who can work the longest, the hardest, and, in exchange, be the most self-righteous about it. Was there ever such a thing as a day off? No, and the more you showed up when you weren’t supposed to, the more respect you could earn. To overwork is both to self-aggrandize and to catastrophize. The former: no work is more important than your own, and no one can do what you do, not even another doctor. The latter: if you were not allowed to work, then what? A lack of structured demands on your time would induce anxiety, because, if you aren’t actively contributing to something, then why do you even exist?
14. The trick to balancing five jobs is to never, ever procrastinate. What you can do right now, you have to do now. When a new request files in, you address it immediately, like a burst pipe. Question from a student? Reply within five minutes. Question from your boss? Reply within two minutes. Grading papers? Start the moment they’re turned in. Other miscellaneous stuff? Squeeze it in whenever you can, but finish it by the end of the day. I’ve taken only a dozen or so yoga classes in my lifetime and, though I like the general process of stretching and flow, I feel a debilitating stress at the end of class, when I am expected to lie there for ten minutes, breathing, and thinking about nothing. I think about how many e-mails I could have sent in that time.
15. Oddly enough, I’m envious of those who can procrastinate. On weekends, when I tutor, I sometimes find my husband on the couch, with no laptop open, no electric guitar in hand, just on the couch, petting our dog. Wrong of me to, but I might ask, “Hey, what are you doing right now?” He smiles at me and says, teasingly, that he’s thinking about doing work. Even when I try to procrastinate, I can’t. Immigrants, by definition, arrive in a new country with nothing, no capital—economic, social, or cultural—and what’s ingrained in these people and their children is a sense that they’re already behind, so there’s no time to waste. In my STEM classes, I met a lot of people like me—type A, utilitarian, very good at information management and getting tasks done. In writing classes, there are fewer of these students and, in general, fewer people of color and immigrants. The kind of person I frequently run into is one who relies more on talent than on work. These students never bother to start a project early or to revise; they spend more time arguing with the teacher or critiquing other people’s sentences than writing their own. The moment has to be right for them to finish something of true brilliance—otherwise, why risk draining the tank? Before I started taking writing classes, I’d never met anyone like that. I didn’t really understand how working harder at something could destroy it instead of improve it. But, somehow, the spark of writing was delicate, and either you had it or you didn’t. There was no point in overextending yourself to find out. Here I think back to my skeptical writer friend who thought I wasn’t taking my writing seriously because I was working too much and not letting my mind go fallow—not letting it fill with big ideas, per his diagnosis. Like many of the writers in my M.F.A. program, he was talented, well-read, and knowledgeable, far more so than, say, someone like me, who had come to writing late. But, while I admired his work, when he got it done, I did not respect his approach. I did not respect his laziness.
16. The only time I can’t bring myself to work is in the evenings. From around 6 P.M. to bedtime, my brain shuts down. In college, I was forced to work at night because the classes that I took had weekly problem sets and, at night, often late at night, was the only time when classmates could gather and check answers. Now I use this time to read, watch television, or study Chinese. Language study is relaxing for me because it is methodical and something I can commit to doing every day. Despite the fact that Chinese is my first language and mother tongue, I speak, read, and write it with half the confidence that I have in English. I find it terrifying, actually, how fast my generation of Chinese Americans and the next are forgetting Chinese. There was a fear among our parents that, if we didn’t grow up in an English-speaking household, then we wouldn’t assimilate well into the workforce. Not so surprising—the loss of language enables the loss of identity. And, at least when I was growing up, it was never good to seem too Chinese. Perhaps we absorbed the negative stereotypes levied against us and became, ourselves, apologetic for them. Sorry that we’re Chinese, sorry that you have to deal with us, sorry that we’re here. When I was younger, assimilation seemed incredibly desirable. Of course you want to blend in, because you want to be liked and have cool friends. What is Chinese American identity if not at some point suffering from the acute embarrassment of being Chinese American? I hate that I used to be embarrassed by myself, but I would be lying if I said that that embarrassment doesn’t come surging back. On the subway from Canal Street, I hear snippets of loud Chinese from an old woman shouting into her phone and pushing a large trolley of plastic bags. I recoil instinctively and loathe myself for it. The old woman turns to the closest Asian person and asks what the next stop is. The girl holds up her hand to say she doesn’t speak Chinese or points forcefully to the subway sign and responds in English. Poor form to assume that anyone who looks Chinese can speak the language, but I also have friends who are fluent in Chinese but refuse to speak it. Chinese, for them, is the language of Sunday Chinese school, public shaming, cultural wars, and an unrefined past. It’s as if to become adults in America, they had to renounce the language. I’m thankful that my parents couldn’t speak English well enough to keep it going at home and, without any siblings, I was forced to speak Chinese with them, their friends, and other relatives. When I left for college, I went from speaking Chinese daily, continuously, to maybe twenty minutes a week. For a few years, I let the muscle go, and then I decided that I couldn’t just do that, because I had obligations to myself, to my family, and to my heritage. So, for an hour each day, I work through HSK textbooks, listen to Chinese podcasts, and review flashcards. To memorize characters, I write them over and over again with a gel pen on small white writing pads, during my Amtrak commutes to work. Each week, I converse with a tutor about random topics, like electric cars or modern architecture. I pay a tutor because I wish to speak Chinese to someone who’s not related to me. The idealist in me hopes that I can master the language enough to explain to my family what it is that I do and why, with the same depth with which I can express these concepts in English, and on the page. Impossible, as some thoughts and ideas are untranslatable, but I’m bound to try.
17. I don’t foresee taking the next few years lightly or allowing myself to rest. I’m fortunate to be able to do the work that I do, to the level that I can do it, and with the autonomy that I have. When one project ends, I think, Now I have some time to breathe and to travel somewhere and to do nothing. That time of doing nothing has yet to arrive, and why should it? Most of my career is still ahead of me, and, if I’m not putting in the work to achieve it, then who will?
