CHEMISTRY by Weike Wang

3 Stars

Life choices. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

1. How academia screwed you over.
Well, you want to relive your postgraduate years? Or even better, the wasted years before you said, "Screw it!" and bailed. Revel in the masochistic torture.

2. How your family baggage drags you down.
The good, the bad, and the ugly. Family, there's nothing like it.

A year into our dating, Eric says he wants to understand me and not just from a distance or through what he calls my ten-inch thick bulletproof glass.
Behind this glass, he says, he found more glass.

3. How as a female there is a constant battle between self and couplehood, a sacrifice of self.
The choices of a relationship or no relationship. That moment when you realize that you're both not on the same track anymore and veering further off course from each other. Love and caring has nothing to do with the impending failure--you're drifting.

All three together? The triumvirate of relationship silver bullets. You're going down.

I don't know if this is interesting to others or not. Anyone who's been through the grad student process is going to feel empathy, the science focus is how it's framed, but the underlying strains aren't different. You know, the circle jerk of academia.

I guess the unique viewpoint is more the Chinese American lens. The stereotypes and the cultural differences, especially the familial obligations and deference of self for the whole, which is in many ways antithetical to the American ideal that is sold as the gold standard.

Then, there's the issue of being female and trying to determine yourself as a separate entity from your significant other. The struggle to be a Person and not just part of a couple. I like the discussion about it between two friends; their different lives and choices.

Please just stop and let me catch up. How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up? 

This isn't a happy story. Then again, a lot of life isn't. Definitely worth reading if ANY of the three points above interest you.

Parting thought:

The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in a liquid state, half in a gaseous state, both of which are probably poisonous.