Joan is Okay

In Joan Is Okay, Weike Wang examines the life of Joan, a New York intensive care unit doctor, as she navigates the COVID-19 pandemic alongside fraught family dynamics. When her father dies in China, Joan travels to Shanghai for only forty-eight hours, illustrating that she is “a gunner and a new breed of doctor, brilliant and potent, but with no interests outside work and sleep.” Fiercely guarding her independence, Joan grapples with familial expectations, professional challenges in a male-dominated field, and the mounting pressures of racial tension and anti-Asian hate as the pandemic escalates, along with the name calling, “So, the China virus, the Chinese virus, the kung flu.” The pandemic also brings “clips of Asian people being attacked in the street and on the subways. Being kicked, pushed and spat on for wearing masks and being accused of having brought nothing else into the country except disease.”

What distinguishes Wang’s novel within pandemic fiction is its restrained, minimalist yet also humorous prose, constructing a narrative where silences carry as much weight as words. Wang resists the melodrama often associated with pandemic narratives, instead presenting a subdued yet piercing exploration of identity and autonomy shaped by cultural and gendered expectations. The novel’s dry humor and introspective tone allow it to grapple with profound themes—grief, duty, and belonging—without veering into sentimentality or overt didacticism.

Structurally, the novel alternates between Joan’s clinical work, fragmented family exchanges, and her solitary reflections. This layering mirrors Joan’s compartmentalized and introspective inner life, inviting readers to piece together her identity from what remains unspoken as much as from what is revealed. Joan Is Okay combines pandemic literature with the immigrant experience, the quiet heroism of caregiving, and the personal cost of striving to meet unattainable expectations in a time of unprecedented crisis.