Sunday morning breakfast of French press coffee and a spinach and kale pastry and finished an excellent read, Joan is Okay by Weike Wang.

This novel features Joan, as doctor who feels most at home when she’s at work. Her father in Shanghai died after a stroke, her mother returns to the US after 18 years, and is stranded there due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Joan is a bit of a detached, isolated person. But she’s good with that. She’s okay, she really is. It seems to bother other people, like her brother and boss, more than it bothers her. 

Joan’s struggles with being the other in America are very relatable. At one point she wonders, “What was wrong with being too Chinese? Yet it always seemed that something was.”