Joan Is Okay

Joan goes to Connecticut to visit her mother. Her brother lives on a 10-acre compound in a 6,000-square-foot home with an impressive staff. Joan has not informed Fang of her visit, because she knows that he would take the rest of the day off of work, show her around his town, and aggressively try to convince her to open up a private practice in the suburbs, which he argues are much safer and would be a better place for Joan to live. She briefly visits with her mother and then leaves before Fang or his wife Tami get home. In the cab on the way to the station, Joan is upset about the death of her father. Although her response to grief is silence rather than crying, it is the first time that she expresses any emotion about his passing.

Fang invites Joan to his family’s annual harvest bash. Although she does not want to attend, Fang calls her after she receives the invitation, asks her about it, and then without waiting for a reply tells her that he’ll put her down for two and that she should bring a friend. Later, Joan runs into Mark, who has a bag of books that he thinks she should read. Joan has not read a work of fiction since her undergraduate days but pretends to recognize some of the titles. Mark is aghast when she reveals that she does not have a television and is stunned into silence when he finds out that she is unfamiliar with the show Seinfeld.

Reese asks if Joan will work for him on Thanksgiving, and she agrees, although she almost rescinds her offer when he reveals that he has never missed a family Thanksgiving. Missing holidays is part of being a physician in a hospital, and Joan feels a sense of great pride over how much family time she has missed over the years. The director calls Joan into his office. He commends her on her ability to work so hard in the weeks following her father’s death and asks what she thinks her future at the hospital will be and whether she will stay on long term. He then offers her a considerable raise, and Joan is shocked but pleased.

Joan grew up in a household where Chinese was spoken primarily, so she arrived in kindergarten speaking only basic English. Although her parents both made an effort to learn the language over the years, they relied heavily on their children for administrative tasks, answering the phone, and communication that required complex grammar or vocabulary.

Joan calls her brother to tell him that she does not plan to attend his party, and he is upset. Later, she also speaks with her mother, who wishes for the freedom to drive and resents the “nanny” that Fang and Tami have hired to make sure that she is comfortable in their home. The woman follows her around making sure that she has switched off lights, the oven, and other appliances after she is finished using them. At work, Joan attends a seminar instructing hospital employees on how to avoid gender bias. She later observes an elderly male MD in an act of rudeness toward a barista who accidentally dropped his cup of coffee. She thinks to herself that the man probably skips HR seminars on how not to be rude and offensive.

Joan reflects on the differences she has with her brother. Joan went to Harvard and Fang to Yale. They’d been poor as children, so Fang helped her to obtain financial aid, albeit against the wishes of their parents, who would have considered it welfare and forbidden it. Their parents had not even allowed them to eat the free lunch at school that, because of their low income, the children were entitled to. In college, Joan had appreciated the schoolwork itself, but Fang saw higher education as a direct path to wealth. He was promoted early in his career and already had an Audi and a prestigious job when Joan was still in school. She found ostentatious wealth distasteful, and she recalls being irritated when Fang took her to a fine dining restaurant rather than to something simple and Asian as she had requested. Fang thinks that Joan wasted her time at Harvard because she did not make important connections and that she is wasting her career by not going into private practice to make more money.

Fang and Tami invite Joan to their Christmas party. She does not want to attend and tries to figure out how to let her brother know that she will not be there without upsetting him. She is only on the schedule for a short block of days in December, so Joan advertises her willingness to pick up additional shifts; she is soon busy for the entire month except for two Sundays. Her mother calls her and tells her that she is alone in the house because Tami likes shopping, suggesting Joan might like to go shopping with Tami sometime. Joan reflects that she dislikes shopping and does not quite understand what it means to be a woman. So many “womanly” pursuits, like having children and shopping, are distasteful to her.

Reese returns from his meeting with the director. He is visibly upset, and once he calms down, he tells Joan about the meeting. The director not only mentioned Joan’s recent raise but also praised her work ethic and busy schedule of shifts. Reese explained that he never shirked work and that it was only on holidays that he took time off. Reese no longer works nights because he has the seniority not to and because he doesn’t function well at night or without sleep. He feels as though it is unfair that he is being held to an impossible standard, and he is additionally upset because he needs his income in order to pay off his considerable medical school debt.

Joan accidentally tells the doorman, who still pays her too much attention for her liking, that she does not have very much furniture. Shortly after this admission, Mark shows up with a suede, chartreuse reading chair that he claims to no longer need. Joan loves it, and for the first time, she invites Mark in. She has never had a guest and does not understand how such visits are supposed to work. Mark laughs and confesses that he has never met anyone like Joan. He is struck by how little furniture she has and asks her if she was robbed recently. The two laugh and enjoy their visit.

As a child, Joan’s school counselors had worried because although she was highly intelligent, she struggled socially, and they worried that she was not connecting with other students. Her father was incensed at this characterization and insisted that Joan was fine. In college, a counselor delicately tried to ask Joan, without using the word Asian, if she had ever seen a counselor who looked more like her. Joan recalls feeling calmer in medical school, because medicine was a meritocracy, and the people in the seats next to her were like her, fellow doctors-in-training. She did not want to be known as anything other than what she was working toward or the field she was working in.

Joan reads one of the books that Mark gave her, The Old Man and the Sea. She finds that she actually does enjoy it, and she appreciates its emphasis on endurance. The Chinese word chuàng, which has a similar meaning, is something that she and her father often said to each other. When Joan visits her mother again, her mother asks why Joan and her brother are not closer and expresses her frustration with Tami for having given up her career after immigrating to the United States as a graduate student and working so hard for her education. Although Joan tells her mother that this judgment is unfair, Joan also dislikes her sister-in-law a little bit. Joan thinks that there was something mercenary to Tami’s pursuit of her brother, though Tami and Fang are well-matched and share key core values.