You’re a mere five pages into Weike Wang’s masterful novel Rental House when she does this to you, as her married couple main characters, one a first-gen Chinese immigrant, the other a striving son of Appalachia, contest a name for their sheepdog puppy, possibly considering Mantou (steamed bun):
“Nate brought up the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items…. There was no fruit or vegetable Keru enjoyed enough to dedicate to their dog. She would also not be giving their dog a human name like Stacy. The other possibility was Huajuan, or a fancy-shaped, swirled steam bun. Nate said the word a few times, believing that he was saying the word right, but Keru said that he was saying the word wrong, and though Nate couldn’t hear where he’d gone wrong, and she couldn’t explain it either, he agreed that Mantou was fine.”
Pin that passage as an exemplar of the old saw about writing the painfully specific to twang the emotional tuning fork of the universal. Which of us doesn’t have a translation problem trying to communicate from our country of one? Wang dissects modern marriage in Rental House — the angst of discovering how much space is enough before absence seems fonder, how easy it is to relish and at the same time chafe at one’s own privilege, how to adult around one’s parents, wondering whether opting to be childless is a selfish or world-improving act. Wang’s unsparing third-person omniscient narrator, in an interlude between the two sections of the book (each takes place at a different vacation home), acidly dissects the world as follows: “There is a tendency to take two halves of something and assign them equal weight. Marriage is fifty-fifty, but who said that? Who believes this to be true?”