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Wanting by Claire Jia (Courtesy of Claire Jia) <\/p>\nWhen Lian was young, she romanticized what the future might hold\u2014the places she might live and the excitement of interesting jobs and experiences. While things didn\u2019t go as planned, on paper Lian is still living a good life in Beijing: She\u2019s an English tutor for a college prep company that specializes in \u201csending the children of wealthy Chinese executives to American universities,\u201d 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\u2019d gotten into an American university? What if she\u2019d gotten to live in the states? What if she didn\u2019t follow all the rules?\u2026<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the icing on the proverbial cake. Wenyu, now a popular influencer based in San Francisco who goes by Vivian for her \u201cViv Like Vivian,\u201d seems to have it all.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s easy for Lian to compare her life to Wenyu\u2019s as she watches her old friend\u2019s videos with a growing sense of jealousy and disdain.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n
When the women are reunited at Wenyu and Thomas\u2019 engagement party in Beijing, Lian is surprised that Wenyu wants to get together, and is even more surprised to learn that things aren\u2019t what they appear to be on the surface.<\/p>\n
In the weeks leading up to Wenyu\u2019s big wedding, the two young ladies quickly rekindle their relationship. The friends feel like they\u2019re teenagers again, and start acting as such while they each begin to question the lives they\u2019re about to settle into.<\/p>\n
What if Lian and Zhetai settle down together? What if Wenyu and Thomas build a custom mansion in Beijing? What if\u2026neither woman wants the life in front of her?<\/p>\n
Wanting by Claire Jia (Courtesy of Claire Jia) <\/p>\n
The characters in Wanting are Gen Z kids, the product of privilege, high familial and societal expectations, and hard work. They\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a point in which one of Lian\u2019s 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\u2019s bored. Boredom, Lian realizes, is the enemy of happiness. So Lian starts to rebel and something in her is reawakened. What if she doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n