Weike Wang


Weike Wang is a Chinese-American author. She is the author of the novel Chemistry, which won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award.
Her fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Redivider.

Life

Wang was born in Nanjing, China, but she and her family moved when she was 5 years old. She lived in Australia, Canada, and the United States before high school, arriving in the United States with her family at the age of 11. Wang once described a community she grew up in as "a very rural town, and everyone was white. I was the only Asian person in my school."
After high school, Wang attended Harvard University, where she studied chemistry for her undergraduate degree and public health for her doctorate. While she was pre-med as an undergrad, she began reconsidering going to medical school. While finishing her doctorate, she also attended Boston University, where she received her MFA.

Career

In 2017, Wang was selected by author Sherman Alexie to be part of the National Book Foundation's annual 5 under 35 list. In its citation, the National Book Award called Wang "a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family." In 2018, she received a Whiting Award for Fiction, one of 10 awarded each year to emerging writers.
Her 2018 short story "Omakase" was selected for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2019 anthology by editors Anthony Doerr and Heidi Pitlor and in the 2019 O. Henry Prize Anthology by prize jurors Lynn Freed, Elizabeth Strout, and Lara Vapnyar.

Writing Style

Critics have often noted that Wang rarely names her main characters in her major works. The Chinese American protagonist of Chemistry remains nameless throughout the novel, as do her parents and everyone except for the heroine's boyfriend Eric. Wang continued her trend of nameless characters in her short story Omakase, which was published in The New Yorker in 2018. "I am terrible at naming characters," Wang told The New Yorker in 2018, adding that she also considers context and her characters lives' when she decides to leave them nameless.