By almost any account, Joan is doing just fine. She’s a well-respected physician in the intensive care unit at one of Manhattan’s most respected hospitals. She's beyond dedicated to her work; when her father dies suddenly, she takes only a weekend off to fly to China and back for his funeral.

Yet Joan always seems out of step with those around her. Her colleagues can’t relate to her workaholic ways, and her brother Fang, a hedge fund manager living in Greenwich with his family, doesn’t understand why she wouldn’t move to the suburbs to start her own practice (and a family). Even her overly friendly new neighbor finds Joan’s apartment to be odd --- nearly bare of furniture and without any books or even a television.

"Weike Wang treats her protagonist with both humor and respect. She never puts a label on Joan’s personality, nor does she make her an object of fun or show how the romantic interest of a neighbor or colleague transforms her."

Joan hardly speaks to her mother, not because they don’t get along but because Joan is not the type to just call for a chat. When her mother comes to the United States for what becomes an unexpectedly extended stay, Joan is eventually compelled to address her family history: her origins as a child of immigrants, her relationship with Fang, and her latent feelings of abandonment when her parents moved back to China as soon as she and her brother were successfully launched into elite colleges and high-powered careers. This reckoning is accelerated by the HR department at the hospital, which insists that Joan take an extended bereavement leave, leaving her with weeks away from her patients and alone with her thoughts.

Joan’s story, taking place during the last few months of 2019 and the first few months of 2020, coincides with the outbreak of COVID-19. So she is also contending with her mother’s fears about being unable to return to China, a rise in anti-Asian sentiment in the US, and mounting concerns about what this pandemic will mean for healthcare professionals, especially those who work in ICUs. (Of course, those who are reading Joan’s story in 2022 with the benefit of hindsight understands fully why she and her colleagues should be apprehensive.)

When asked why she likes ICU medicine, Joan responds, “I said I liked the purity of it, the total sense of control. Machines can tell you things that the people attached to them can’t.” Her belief in her own abilities is never shaken, but as COVID cases rise, by necessity she might come to appreciate the humanistic side of her work as well.

Weike Wang treats her protagonist with both humor and respect. She never puts a label on Joan’s personality, nor does she make her an object of fun or show how the romantic interest of a neighbor or colleague transforms her. Instead, Joan should be met on her own terms, and readers will need to do a significant amount of reading between the lines to fully understand and appreciate this complex, fascinating character and her motivations.

Joan’s time away from her all-consuming professional responsibilities gives her --- and, by extension, readers of JOAN IS OKAY --- an opportunity to raise important questions about origins, belonging and home.