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Weike Wang, Rental House, Riverhead Books, 2024. 224 pgs.

Reading Rental House is, for a Chinese person, a singularly curious—almost epiphanic—experience.

Years ago, slightly tipsy at a reception in central Berlin, I asked my friend Kennith what it would be like if we were to end up with Derrida-reading, tweed-wearing, poem-writing, country-house-dwelling, horse-riding, wine-tasting, business-class-travelling in-laws.

“Imagine them enjoying a convivial evening with my mildly Maoist mother and my Beijing, bikini-clad father, who is given to disparaging the United States and Japan,” I said. Kennith laughed. “What if they didn’t read Derrida at all?” he replied.

Weike Wang’s Rental House answers our questions with remarkable precision.

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Keru and Nate—the daughter of Chinese immigrants from a small town in Hunan province, now a consulting firm partner, and the son of a pious, conservative Christian couple from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, now a fruit-fly scientist—met at a dismal Halloween party during their student days at Yale. He found her challenging yet endearing. She liked that he did not object when she hurled random objects from the table into the boogie taking place across the room.

When they first began dating, she was, for a time, spared his mother’s doubts and questions:

What kind of immigrants are they, what kind of Chinese people? Are they Christians? Do they believe in God? Did they enter the country the right way? Are her parents citizens? Is Keru a citizen? Do they feel more American or Chinese? Do they speak only Chinese around you? Do they know you don’t understand Chinese? Have you asked? How is that offensive? You just explain, very politely, that we speak only English around Keru and expect Keru to speak only English with us.

He had also not yet endured her father’s endlessly repeated discourses on fossil fuels—for that, after all, was where the retired industry chemist’s English vocabulary held firm—or her mother’s favoured refrain: “Where’s the suffering? Show me the suffering”, because suffering is required—

To suffer is to strive and to set a bar so high that one never becomes complacent. To become complacent is to become lazy and to lose one’s spirit to fight, and to lose one’s spirit to fight is to die. So, to suffer is to live.

Keru and Nate are both self-made. When they later decided to marry, their two families became, in a manner of speaking, entwined. To Nate’s parents, she is “Keru like Peru”—which must mean, they assume, something spectacularly beautiful in Chinese—or “little lady” or “girlie” to his brother, which left her wondering: “first, if her brother-in-law still remembered her real name, and second, why diminutive addresses for petite women were always necessary.” To Keru’s parents, he is the son-in-law who did not merit mention in her father’s wedding speech, who will never be treated as a son, nor even addressed directly at the dinner table—in either English or the Mandarin he has painstakingly tried to learn.

The mutual, comfortable discomfort each feels towards their own parents is merely the icing on the cake. Time spent with her parents leaves Keru tense and withdrawn, yet she cannot quite disentangle herself from the strong-willed woman and dutiful daughter they raised her to be—one who must have the upper hand in life and in other matters—despite her smaller acts of protest. A leftist with egalitarian ideals, Nate could, at times, tolerate his parents’ allusions to racialised stereotypes about Asians (though he “cannot ignore it” when Keru’s mother remarks that her daughter’s skin has been darkened by the sun—tai hei). What he cannot abide is his mother sending a smiling emoji and a cheery message declaring that “all the nonsense” was over when Trump won the election.

Writing a voluminous marital saga about couples like Nate and Keru is a laborious and often underappreciated task—though capturing sharp, intelligent snapshots of such a marriage, as in holidays and getaways, is another matter. The narrative unfolds around two rented holiday homes. In the first, in Chatham on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, during the fifth year of their marriage, Keru and Nate first hosted her parents and then his. In the second, near the Catskill Mountains in New York State, in their tenth year, they entertained a rather more self-inviting assortment: a posh, Manhattan-dwelling Romanian couple, Mircea and Elena; and later Nate’s brother, accompanied by a casual date peddling quasi–pyramid scheme ideas.

The brilliance of structuring the story around rented houses lies in their paradox—they are both confined and yet infinitely porous, spaces that are thoroughly borrowed yet temporarily autonomised, designed to suggest detachment or to curate a change from the routine and mundane, yet invariably tethered to the inescapable gravity of context. And everything is about context. For Keru and Nate, central to that context is socio-emotional displacement.

Nate considered himself a “poor white”—

His parents married straight out of high school, in the same church their parents had married in, in the same town they and their parents had been born in. His mother waitressed until she got pregnant. His father managed a grocery store. When the grocery store went under, his parents moved to another town with another slightly worse store that needed to be managed.

He is a “first gen”—the first in his family to attend university—at which his mother admonished him not to let elitist ideas go to his head, nor to imagine himself any better than his trouble-maker brother, had it not been for God’s will. He maintained, at best, intermittent closeness with his family—the intermissions often coinciding with moments such as their voting for Trump—without much revisiting of the place he had left behind. Even after securing tenure, Nate still struggles to reconcile himself with the way the world treats knowledge and defines “sense” itself, working in his leaking, windowless faculty office. He told his therapist that “disaster” signifies, for him, death, mortality, and nothingness, and that he cannot confess to anyone his sense of inferiority to his wife.

Keru’s own themes of displacement centre on her identity as the daughter of Chinese immigrants—caught perpetually between obedience to expectations and acts of rebellion, searching for a place within the hierarchies of both Americanness and Chineseness. She navigates in and out of her Chineseness according to her audience, her membership in that identity being in constant flux, granted and withdrawn with volatile ease. With her parents, she is the answerable party, bound to the responsibilities of family traditions and inheritance within an uncompromisingly Chinese structure.

You can’t keep renting forever, Keru. You should learn how to pay off a mortgage and be a real adult. Then, kids? When are you going to have those? Your mother plans to be a grandmother and having kids is the socially responsible thing to do, even if the process depletes you…

…is their rendition even on holiday. With Mircea, she is—goes without saying—China: the people, the scenery. Yet with the Shanghai mother who responded only in English when Keru tried to befriend her in Mandarin in the lift, she is Chinese American—distinct from Chinese Chinese. Her displacement extends further: as a Yale graduate, regarded with wariness by some; as the wife of an “American kid”; as a consulting firm partner who has quelled her husband’s remarks on their income disparity; as the one who dictated the naming of their dog; and as the woman who, in the end, hurled flaming, splintered wood from a bonfire into the rental house with a hatchet. How could this petite, coloured woman possibly outshine our home boy?

Wang demonstrates her mastery in the temporal and spatial symbolism she weaves through interactions marked by this socio-emotional displacement. Both parts of the book conclude with Keru’s seemingly impulsive acts: in the first house, she endured almost the entirety of both parents’ visits, only to fling burning objects at her husband and in-laws after a conversation about the racial coexistence of “the whites and those people” and the virtues of seedless watermelon; in the second, she maintained a near-detached stance towards her guests, only to reorient herself so as to keep her husband and brother-in-law united in agreeing that a bleak future should be avoided—so long as she continues to “helm the ship”.

These actions signify nothing less than the exercise of individual agency to dismantle the context of displacement and to recompose one’s own ground—as a home. Wang remarked on social media that her favourite line in the book is, “Home is not a given, and for many a hard, sometimes impossible, place to find.” She nonetheless endows her character with the impossible courage to persist in that quest. If home is a form of trying normalcy, its fulfilment is as much relational as it is contingent upon the agility to decompose and recompose the self—its subversion inevitable once individuals cease to try. Home thus exists in a believing autonomy, the will to knock down and rebuild. This is what sustains hope.

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For a long time, I kept a measured distance from earlier diasporic Chinese writings—officially because one can only read so much in life, and I wished to devote myself to books that offered radically new subjects and contexts; but truly because I assumed these writings, to varying degrees, were obliged to answer to certain expectations of an international, largely Western readership. Such expectations can be a cage. Set your story in the Cultural Revolution! Write about comradeship and romance! Tell us of your grandmother’s bound lotus feet! What about the rural life!

But Wang’s writing proves bold yet endearingly familiar. Rental House is an anatomy of race, class, and gender in our globalised, capitalist world—far more than a mere “immigrant Chinese woman, her family, and the white husband” story. It extends well beyond the dispersion of a people from a constructed homeland, yet a sense of knowing familiarity hums steadily in the background. At various points in the book, I found myself struck by the thought that Keru could be the very image of the diasporic Chinese woman that many of us are—and all there ever is to write about—and her mother, ours.

This fondness for Weike Wang herself has even prompted me to feel defensive when her name is casually, yet repeatedly, pronounced as “why-key”. Seeing Keru encounter the same issue—“Keru like Peru”—in Rental House was thus a timely corrective to my assumptions. The two characters are ke 可 and ru 如, their tones in Mandarin markedly different from those of the country Peru, yet she has always introduced herself in a way that is easy for non-Chinese tongues to pronounce. Both ke 可 and ru 如 suggest agreeableness, soft amicability, flexible acceptance—or accepting flexibility. What if Weike were also “why-key” for the sake of acceptability? Or as a negotiated dissimilation, avoiding being called “May” or “Lily” instead? What if Weike herself did not mind in the least? What if “why-key” is simply her own reality of her name—and even her preferred one? What if all realities are, simply, realities?

It would be a mistake, then, to read Rental House solely as another diasporic portrait, wrapped in light-hearted jests about how Chinese immigrants find their footing on American soil. To me, it is also a potent reminder that there is no hierarchy in writing Chineseness, nor is it a matter of black and white. As Keru says to Nate, “The moon is actually a banana. To see a full moon is to see this banana end on.”

How to cite: Xie, Peixuan. “It’s My House, and I Live Here: Weike Wang’s Rental House.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Aug. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/08/12/rental.

Peixuan Xie‘s research focuses on peace and conflict and she occasionally writes about other things. [Read all entries by Peixuan Xie.]

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