Weike Wang

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome Harvard alum WEIKE WANG and National Book Award–winning author HA JIN for a discussion of Wang's debut novel, Chemistry—a coming-of-age story about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track.

About Chemistry

Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She's tormented by her failed research—and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can't make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she's confronted with a question she won't find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry—one in which the reactions can't be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.

Praise

“Weike Wang’s voice is indelible—hypnotic, mesmerizing, and strange in the best possible way. In Chemistry she creates a fully realized portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis, illuminating a corner of the human experience that’s woefully underexplored. By the last page I was devastated, transported, and craving more.” —Emily Gould, author of Friendship

“How do we learn to love if we haven’t been taught? That question seems to be the nucleus of Chemistry. Wang challenges the conventions of the marriage plot: the story begins with a proposal, falls into an alienating existential crisis, and ends in the morally ambiguous territory of self-actualization. The force of the novel is the narrator’s perfectly-executed voice, unflinching and painfully self-aware as she deconstructs her life—disastrously, bravely—to see if there is anything at the bottom she can hold on to.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

“Chemistry casts a rare spell, some alchemic mixture all its own. Though her ingredients are familiar—being young, uncertain, and estranged—Weike Wang gives them to us anew; her wry, off-beat vision demands that we look again, as if for the very first time.” —Casey Schwartz, author of In the Mind Fields