by Weike Wang
The online fitness guru talks often about core strength. The idea is that once you have a strong enough core, you can do all these ridiculously hard moves with a smile on your face.
The shrink says something similar, but she refers to it as inner strength.
Biologically, physical strength comes from mitochondria, which are organelles that generate all of our body’s energy. A unique feature of mitochondria is that they have their own DNA. Whereas the rest of the body is built on code that is half paternal and half maternal, mitochondrial DNA is entirely maternal and passed down from the mother.
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I know the tutoring is not permanent. I know I cannot do it long-term. But I like it and am not bad at it.
Maybe I can be a full-time teacher somewhere.
At a school.
Or a small college.
When I can ensure them some sort of stability, I will tell them everything, the quitting of the PhD, my next steps. I need more time to figure this out, and once I do, I will tell them everything.
Half of me says, By not telling the truth, you only hurt yourself. And the other half says, But by telling the truth now, without a plan of how to proceed, you will hurt them more. What would telling them accomplish? It will only cause strife.
Peace of mind? Encouragement? Support?
Don’t say catharsis.
Catharsis.
I don’t want to get married until I have done more for myself. But also I owe it to them to do more for myself, which is what Eric didn’t understand; he said, You shouldn’t owe them anything. We argue over this. The American brings up the individual. The Chinese brings up xiao shun. When I ask Eric if he thinks a child can ever feel entirely independent of her parents, he says, What kind of question is that?
But now I don’t really know. There is too much already shared.
Mother, Father, I think I know what it means to hurt for you.
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A strange thing happens when the best friend takes the aluminum heart to counseling. She sets it on the table and the table is no longer covered in flames. There is also less yelling.
So she takes it every week and sets it on the table.
Finally, she says, the room is just a room and she can properly see his face as she had remembered it.
When I am visiting them at their condo, she gives me her reasons:
We make a good team. We are financially very stable. The child will have a good life. Also, she has been thinking more about the beginning. The person she married is still in there.
But what about you? I ask, while the husband and baby are in the other room.
What about me?
You won’t be entirely happy.
That’s possible.
But then we hear the baby shriek in the other room and run in.
Is the baby all right? Is something the matter?
Everything is fine.
Except the husband has found another thing that makes her laugh in that paper-shredding way. It is just him standing there, touching his nose.
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In a letter to his daughter, Einstein wrote that love is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will. He posited it to be the universal force scientists have overlooked.
Even if Eric did not always understand, his devotion to me, how did I miss that? Logically I think I knew but I needed to hear someone else say it first.
The jump he once spoke about is what I keep coming back to. How he was able to do it and I was not.
To progress in life, you must always compare yourself with someone better.
Maybe not better in all aspects but better in some.
I watch him wade into the river first and he could keep going. But he stops in the middle of the current and waits for me to catch up.
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A sunny weekend. A warm breeze. For two weeks in July, there are no complaints about the weather.
I am hosting a very small dinner party. The baby has turned one, so I have strung up banners and filled a piñata and fastened, to the best of my abilities, a party hat on the dog, who is so frightened by the hat that he has hidden away in the closet, teeth chattering.
The best friend and husband are here. The math student. We watch the baby play with her toys.
Don’t say toys, the best friend whispers. Say friends. She knows. I don’t know how she knows, she just does.
So we watch her throw her friends from one corner of the room to the other, then line them up in a row by size and scold them.
Baa bee woo, baa bee woo.
This baby might very well be a genius. She is also so coy and wiggles her pinkie at the person she’s never met before, the math student. Come hither, says the genius pinkie. I wish to be pushed in my stroller throne.
He goes while the husband stands close to the best friend as if held to her by rubber bands. A few feet of space and he will wince from pain.
How can I help? What can I do? The husband asks many questions.
Finally, we send him to the store for cheddar cheese. He comes back having bought every kind of cheddar cheese at the store. I have to laugh. What are we going to do with this much cheese? Our three-cheese dip must now quadruple.
While making this dip, I pull the best friend aside. So? I say, motioning to the math student, who is still pushing the stroller but now making train sounds.
He is a very good train, she says. Probably the best I have seen. But your guess is as good as mine.
I’d rather not guess.
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It was once believed that heart cells could not regenerate, that once they died they could not be replaced. Now it is known that the heart can renew itself. But the process is very slow. In an average person, the rate is 1 percent each year.
Eric’s new lab has a web page and this web page has pictures. One picture is of Eric with his arm around another woman and it has got me refreshing the page nonstop.
Who is this woman and where did she come from and what is her age, height, weight, family history, and pet preference? Where are the words that go along with this picture? I need a thousand or so. Let me google her. But at this moment, Google chooses to be slow and shitty and unhelpful.
She is another faculty member, I discover. Also in chemistry. She has a list of publications so long that when I scroll to the bottom, there is a button that says next.
Next is overrated, I say to the dog.
Here is me not clicking next. Here is me closing out of the web page. Here is me reopening the web page, clicking next, and then telling the dog, Not a word to anybody, not even to your squirrel friends.
Another bet: If tomorrow the world comes to an end, I will e-mail Eric about this woman. If not, then I will forget about it.
The Big Crunch is what they call the end of the universe, should it collapse back on itself again. Currently, this is just speculation, but billions of years down the line, we will know for sure. If humans are still around for the Big Crunch, they will surely panic. They will run to the supermarkets and buy out all the water.
I spend a whole session talking to the shrink about the Big Crunch and then I mention how I am worried that the dog has too many girlfriends. He has at least five girlfriends in the neighborhood, all pugs.
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What kind of flowers do you like? asks the math student.
Not roses or large arrangements. Nothing too cluttered or perfect looking.
Soon, I get a delivery of potted grass.
Um, says the delivery boy.
It is magnificent, I reply.
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At the park, I flick the petals of every flower I see.
You might be a child, Eric said, whenever he saw me do that. Then the peck to the forehead, the spot where my fingers are now rubbing.
When the math student and I kiss, there is no teeth clanking. It is well executed.
He tells me the potted grass was a surprise birthday present.
But
you are three months ahead of schedule.
He says, had he given it to me on my actual birthday, it would not have been a surprise.
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The world has not come to an end. So I guess I will forget about her, the woman in the picture. What were the chances that she would be both good-looking and brilliant? Why couldn’t it have been just one or the other? She might be too tall for him though. They are at eye level. He cannot rest his chin on top of her head.
But perhaps women like her don’t need chins resting on their heads.
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Chinese is actually quite musical. When I told Eric that, it surprised him.
The four great Chinese novels are Water Margin, Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.
When I first heard these titles, I cringed. In translation, much of the cadence was lost. Journey to the West is Xi You Ji, three syllables, very punchy. This novel is my favorite. It is an adventure novel about a band of misfit companions traveling across China fighting evil. The hero is the Monkey King. He is a half-god, half-monkey being who pulls from his ear a baton that can grow into any size and smite enemies. But he is not a perfect hero. Most of the time, he is a rebel. Hence why his closest companion is a monk who is pure of heart.
My mother: If you are going to read a Chinese novel, let it be that one.
I think it is because this novel is the most fun, the characters larger than life. But now I wonder. Maybe it is also to remind me that such a hero exists in our culture. A Monkey King instead of a sheep.
About the novel, I had told Eric, The monk reminds me a lot of you. Except that he was always chanting prayers and you are always humming tunes.
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Where is home for you? the shrink asks.
I’m not sure. Does it matter? I like being in between places for the time being.
For my mother, I know exactly where she would consider home. Home is where her mother is.
My father, I had always assumed, does not deal in these abstract matters.
But then why does this memory come back to me?
I am a child who is prone to motion sickness and never likes riding in cars.
My father’s remedy for motion sickness is to look at green things in the distance. Look at that hill, he says, or that batch of trees. To this day, I have not heard anyone else say that. I have heard of looking at stationary objects in the distance, but never the green.
Then I visit the place where he grew up. I do not realize it then—I am too young—but I realize it now. In the distance, on all sides, was green.
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A day of doing nothing, except playing fetch with the dog. The next day, I tell the shrink, If you ever smell the dog’s fur you will know what the sun smells like. Like toasted corn chips.
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There is a pretty good proposal in Stepmom. The man ties a string to the woman’s finger and then slides a ring down that string. He says he had let the string break once but he would not let it break again.
When proposing to my mother, my father wraps a blade of grass around her finger. They are visiting his family in the countryside. She rides with him on his bike, hands around his waist. The bike hits a bump and they both fall into the dirt. She arrives at his home filthy but not unhappy. Dirt washes off, she says, and he realizes then that she is not as delicate as she looks. Still a student, he is too poor to afford a ring, but, while wrapping the grass around her finger, he says that in the future he will make her one himself.
My father goes on to become a specialist in metal alloys. The year before I leave for college, he makes her a ring out of iron, tungsten, molybdenum, chromium, and titanium. He calibrates the proportions himself and then melts down the elements and then molds the ring in his laboratory, to the exact size of her finger. A size three finger.
I watch my mother take the ring out of the plastic bag and hold it up to the light.
Of the alloy, my father says that it is strong. He says that it will bend before it will break.
My mother, who is never at a loss for words, is at a loss for words.
For a long time, scientists did not know why the nucleus of an atom held together. Theoretically, it should not. It is made up of all positive charges that should repel, but somehow, it persists.
I do not think she would have ever stepped out of that car. I think by the count of three, she would have stopped.
Eventually, she says to him, Whatever happens, no divorce.
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On my actual birthday, I receive a handful of cards. Most from faraway friends. Two from the best friend. But there is one that catches me off guard. I look down and immediately know the handwriting. All lowercase. The ns that look like rs, the rs that look like ss.
I had frequently said of his handwriting, Not even Alan Turing could decipher it.
He jokes, You are now very old in dog years.
He says, Ohio is very flat.
I notice tiny dots in places where nothing is written. I wonder if these are where he put down his pen and then lifted it back up, thinking of something else to say.
After the second time he asked, Eric said, I could not have been with you for so long had I not also considered you my equal. But what was so great about being an equal, I thought, when in the end, all marriages are doomed?
I now ask the best friend, Tell me again why you’re staying with him?
A very good team. Financially stable. The nose touching.
Yes, the nose touching.
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Two marriages:
Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.
Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.
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It might be that all marriages lie between these two extremes.
When the wave-particle duality is first proposed, there is a shift in scientific thinking. Before then, everything is thought to be known. Afterward, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle develops. Schrödinger and his cat.
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Eric, I have hurt for you too.
A few years ago, my mother went back to China to visit her mother. They sent over a box of sweets that were my childhood favorites. I ate my way through the box and then stopped at the last piece. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. Too precious, I thought. I left it on the counter and watched it slowly grow mold. Even when you said, This needs to go, I refused. I put the piece into a plastic container and then in the back of the fridge. On the day that you left, I took the piece out and ate it. Then I got sick for eleven days.
Pure crystals are those that have perfectly repeating units. You told me this after I asked you what you found beautiful about chemistry. But what of the repeating units in life? Most often imperfect.
Eric, I am writing you a short note. I am asking: Would you ever consider coming back and visiting for a little while, just as a friend?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my incredible BU writing teachers Leslie, Xuefei, and Sigrid for guiding me through my MFA year and beyond. Thanks to
my exceptionally hardworking writing cohort Jamie, Caroline, Jeff, Michael M, Zoe, Jillian, Michelle, Katie, and Leigh for helping me revise this manuscript to the best that it could be. Thanks to Jamie, Caroline, Jeff, Michael M, and Catherine for their continual support over phone, e-mail, and the occasional night out. Thanks to Michael C for being my first and last reader. Thanks to Linda and Yuying for their extraordinary years of friendship. Thanks to Joy for believing in this work and me. Thanks to Jennifer for her insights, edits, and words of encouragement. Thanks to everyone at Knopf for making this novel possible. Thanks to my earliest writing teacher and mentor, Amy, for encouraging me to write in the first place. Thanks especially to my parents.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WEIKE WANG is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines including Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares. She currently lives in New York City, and Chemistry is her first novel.
An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide
Chemistry by Weike Wang
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about Chemistry, the stunning debut novel from Weike Wang.
Discussion Questions
1. Eric is the only character in Chemistry who has a name; the other characters are referred to simply as “the best friend,” “the lab mate,” “the math student,” and “the shrink.” Even the narrator herself is never named. Why do you think Wang made this choice?
2. Compare and contrast the narrator’s upbringing with Eric’s upbringing. How do the similarities and differences between their childhoods affect their relationship?