SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There's a scene that might resonate this week - a woman sits around a campfire with her husband, Nate, and her in-laws at a rental house on Cape Cod. It's several days into their togetherness when all of a sudden - or maybe it's been building for a long time - the woman picks up a hatchet, she digs it into a flaming log and throws both into the rental house.
WEIKE WANG: (Reading) Someone screamed - it wasn't Keru. When the smoke cleared, three people stood in the kitchen, scrutinizing the wet piece of burnt wood and the black streaks it had left. One by one, they turned their wax heads to Keru. Why were they looking at her like that? Why the confusion, the fear? She, for one, had neither. Her head was perfectly clear. At least now they could get back to that seedless watermelon and the task of coexistence. A fire alarm flashed and blared somewhere. The large security deposit she paid was gone. A one-star review awaited her upon checkout. Blame me, she thought. I'm the bad one. In the meantime, she sat back down by the fire and beckoned for her chosen family to come out and join her.
SIMON: "Rental House" is the new novel from Weike Wang. She joins us now from our studios in New York. Thank you so much for being with us.
WANG: Thank you.
SIMON: Why does Keru throw that burning log into the house?
WANG: So this is - the scene that I read for Keru happens in the middle of the book, this climax moment. And she had just spent a month at a Cape Cod vacation home. First couple of weeks were with her parents and second couple of weeks with her in-laws. Over that period of time, the tensions in the family have boiled, and they've had, you know, to be together in this cramped space with their big sheepdog for an extensive period of time, spending quality time together. And I think it's a frustration that a lot of people can relate to how we want to be with our families, but then, in those moments of disagreement in conversations, it can be incredibly challenging.
SIMON: Yeah. I don't want to overlook the meet-cute that Keru and Nate have at a Halloween party.
WANG: Right. It is the first - one of the first parties she attends in college. She shows up poorly dressed, and they meet. She starts interrogating him. What do you want to do with your life? Things like that. He's kind of fascinated by her. She's sort of like a light bulb. For him, he's the first in his family to go to college. He comes from a rural working-class family, and he and Keru meet at Yale. So it's this kind of huge intergenerational jump in class for both of them because she comes from a immigrant family. So they are actually very similar in that they're kind of both black sheeps of their family, but they're also incredibly different.
SIMON: And Keru's family lived in China...
WANG: Yes.
SIMON: ...Under the Cultural Revolution. How does that stay with them?
WANG: Well, that was during a formative period for the parents, and they emigrated, in my mind, probably in the '80s, to the States where they had Keru. And I think it's the sense of immigration and then assimilation and the sense of we don't want turbulence. We really want safety. We really want security. And so that's kind of what's staying with them. Keru and her family don't really talk about the past. They want all of that to be just packaged up. And she's always curious about that.
SIMON: Why does Keru's father have such contempt for dishwashers?
WANG: (Laughter) I think that touches on his sense of - part of this book is the sense of pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, doing things on your own, being very proactive. And for some reason, he feels like using the dishwasher is a sign of too much comfort.
SIMON: You've given interviews in which you've said, I think one of the hallmarks of fiction is making your character suffer.
WANG: Yeah, a little bit (laughter).
SIMON: Well, help us understand. I'm sure you say that with love.
WANG: I...
SIMON: Actually, I'm not sure that's true, but go ahead.
WANG: Say that with love. Another way to say this that I would say in class is you have to put obstacles in front of your characters. You have to be able to kind of push them through uncomfortable situations, right? I think about Jane Austen's "Emma," in which Emma starts handsome, clever, rich, and the entire story is about how she is humbled. That idea of pushing characters through some sort of suffering, some sort of trial by fire, is innate to any writing. And it's also fun for, I think, readers to read dysfunction. It's not your dysfunction. It's someone else's dysfunction, and that can be entertaining.
SIMON: It didn't occur to me until a couple of days after I finished your book. But this stays with me now. Are even the words rental house meant to remind us that so many of our problems, irritations and anxieties are something that we take on in our lives and then grow out of them?
WANG: Yeah. There's a sense of temporariness for the rental house. I think that's also why I picked choosing the lens of vacation, that there's this, like, controlled period of time that I can look at this family and look at the intensity of their issues. And then those issues either stay with them, and they do. There are certain issues that don't leave them, but then they come in waves. There's a peak, and there's a trough, and that I think is family life, that I think is marriage, dealing with problems that come again and come back and recede, but then push forward.
SIMON: Let me dare to suggest something to you on this holiday weekend. And I say this from a family that is absolutely mixed myself. My parents were a mixed marriage. Our family is from all over the world - China and France. This is America.
WANG: Right.
SIMON: We're all different. In fact, I'd say the differences are part of why we love each other.
WANG: I agree with that. And it's one of these things that in a family like this where there are differences, there are differences in opinion and values, when you're in a family, you also can't disengage. You have to be around these people. And it's not just family. It's friends, it's your neighbors, it's your community. We love our differences. We hate our differences. There's a sense of embracing and, I think, mutual respect and sort of the word I wrote coexistence. It can be bumpy sometimes, but it can also be beautiful. And also, for me, you know, this kind of creates a lot of creativity in terms of new ideas.
SIMON: Weike Wang, her new novel "Rental House." Thank you so much for being with us.
WANG: Thank you.
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