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When Lian was young, she romanticized what the future might hold—the places she might live and the excitement of interesting jobs and experiences. While things didn’t go as planned, on paper Lian is still living a good life in Beijing: She’s an English tutor for a college prep company that specializes in “sending the children of wealthy Chinese executives to American universities,” and she has a sweet and hardworking boyfriend named Zhetai with whom she is about to buy a nice condo. But at the heart of things, Lian is unfulfilled. She navigates life with a what-if attitude: What if she’d gotten into an American university? What if she’d gotten to live in the states? What if she didn’t follow all the rules?…
In the midst of her questioning, Lian sees an already-viral video of her childhood best friend getting proposed to by her white millionaire boyfriend in a helicopter over San Francisco Bay. It’s the icing on the proverbial cake. Wenyu, now a popular influencer based in San Francisco who goes by Vivian for her “Viv Like Vivian,” seems to have it all.
Compared to the kid Lian knew back in China, Wenyu is now nearly unrecognizable. She has bouncy golden hair and big surgically enhanced eyes. Her influencer lifestyle has given her worldwide fame and impressive wealth. It’s easy for Lian to compare her life to Wenyu’s as she watches her old friend’s videos with a growing sense of jealousy and disdain.
In Wanting (Tin House, 400 pages, $18.99), debut author Claire Jia poses questions around a new kind of want. Physical and romantic desire, yes, but something more than that. There is a questioning here: What kind of relationships matter most? And what if life doesn’t need to be so boring, as we can often make it? How and when can we break the rules, and what are those societal and personal consequences?
When the women are reunited at Wenyu and Thomas’ engagement party in Beijing, Lian is surprised that Wenyu wants to get together, and is even more surprised to learn that things aren’t what they appear to be on the surface.
In the weeks leading up to Wenyu’s big wedding, the two young ladies quickly rekindle their relationship. The friends feel like they’re teenagers again, and start acting as such while they each begin to question the lives they’re about to settle into.
What if Lian and Zhetai settle down together? What if Wenyu and Thomas build a custom mansion in Beijing? What if…neither woman wants the life in front of her?
The characters in Wanting are Gen Z kids, the product of privilege, high familial and societal expectations, and hard work. They’re status-focused, media-obsessed and starting to get bogged down by the realities of adulthood. No one seems to question the cookie-cutter trajectory more than Wenyu, who soon brings out the same questioning in Lian.
While the youthful dialogue in Wanting is well captured, it might be too energetic for more mature readers. Outside of the dialogue, Jia manages to pull out and offer her narrator a more developed voice to navigate the story. In the same vein as the dialogue, many of the pop-culture references were either lost upon or cringed at by this reader. (Ed Sheeran songs in a novel? No thanks) And yet something in the story rang true and inspired me.
There’s a point in which one of Lian’s tutoring clients shares an anecdote about how he started acting out because he was bored. Wenyu, too, is shifting out of her expected role because she’s bored. Boredom, Lian realizes, is the enemy of happiness. So Lian starts to rebel and something in her is reawakened. What if she doesn’t continue along the same trajectory most of her friends are on? How can she balance letting her family down versus letting herself down? Wanting asks many questions, examining ways in which the right kind of friendships can help us feel invigorated and alive, even if that means bending some rules.
GO: Claire Jia at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com. 7 pm Monday, Aug. 11. Free.
