I first made meet-cute level contact with Kathy Wang when, at the indie bookstore where I worked, I wrote a staff recommendation for her first book Family Trust and she emailed me her thanks. Over the years, we have weaved in and out of each other’s lives, staying in touch 21st century-style: liking each other’s Instagram stories, texting questions about the publishing industry and sending occasional emails and family pictures. A life, it turns out, is made up of these ordinary interactions.This is the ethos underlying Wang’s third book, The Satisfaction Café, a novel about an ordinary woman, Joan Liang, who inadvertently inherits an extraordinary life when she marries a wealthy older man. Once the glamorous dust settles, she sees that life, at any echelon, struggles to be satisfying. 

Wang and I spoke over Webex — after catching up on our own ordinary lives — about her experience creating Joan, our immigrant parents’ relationships with risk and safety, midlife crises, the peaks and valleys of a full life and what it means to have enough. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hyphen: I want to start with the very first paragraph of your book because it's such an arresting one. We're introduced to Joan and before the end of the paragraph we learn that she stabbed her husband. Can you tell me a little bit more about how Joan evolved for you as a character to get to the point where you could introduce her to the reader in such a bold way?

Kathy Wang: I generally write chronologically, so the way it appears in the book is the order I wrote it in. I'll write a book from start to end, and then in the revision process I'll end up inserting a chapter here or moving stuff around. But for me, the first paragraph and chapter has always been what I started with. It’s almost like that paragraph where she stabs her husband is the seed for how I developed Joan and what her character centered around. 

At the time I wrote that I said, “Okay, I'm just going to see where it goes. This is who she is, and then I'm going to put her in a situation that I think would be interesting.” I have always wanted to write about one of those old Chinese video stores I remember seeing growing up. I understood that I was going to put her in that store and then see what happened, see why she would have stabbed her husband.

Hyphen: Why were those old Chinese video stores so evocative for you growing up?

KW: It’s funny, I don’t think they were necessarily memorable to me at the time. I do remember that in those stores they usually had a section behind a curtain that had pornography. And as a kid, you’re always interested in what lies beyond the curtain. That’s probably why those stores stuck with me.

And I guess now at my age, I’m thinking more about businesses that no longer exist. Those things that only existed in a very specific time, I think, can become more vivid to you because they only live in your memory. The video store was definitely one of those settings. My parents would go there every weekend and check out videos and then watch them in the house. 

I feel sad sometimes for my kids because stores are so homogenous now. There’s Target, there’s the mall. I mean, not that I want to take them to a pornography store. But maybe some place with character. 

Hyphen: When I was reading about the video store, it reminded me that my parents would also go to one. It was part of the routine of our family's lives, and then one day they just stopped going. It was like they no longer had, or needed, that connection to home. Going back to Joan, did you always know that you were going to write a protagonist who was an Asian immigrant or a Taiwanese immigrant?

KW: I always wanted to write an Asian immigrant story, and I wanted to write it in the style of an author like Elizabeth Strout or Anne Tyler, where it's just a very ordinary life told in vivid detail. I also wanted to write an Asian protagonist who was someone that my mom or someone her age would want to read about. Sometimes I'll recommend a hip new book that has an Asian character to someone like my mom, and then she’ll read it and say, “I don't want to read this. What’s all this discussion about trauma? I just want to read a good story.”  

Hyphen: You mentioned you wanted to write a “very ordinary” story in the style of an author like Anne Tyler, and those stories typically do not engage with race directly. How did you decide how much of Joan’s race was going to impact her story?

KW: I don't know if it's true or not, but Joan is my mom's age, and sometimes I feel like race has been a bigger part of my identity than it has been for my parents. They probably faced more discrimination than I do, but they didn't really ruminate on it the way that I and maybe some of my contemporaries have. They just moved on, to put it simply, and there are all sorts of reasons for why that might have been, but the point here is that they didn’t talk about it much. And so in the book, there are a few events which may take place because of Joan’s race, but the way she thinks about those events are not necessarily centered around race.

"... sometimes I feel like race has been a bigger part of my identity than it has been for my parents. They probably faced more discrimination than I do, but they didn't really ruminate on it the way that I and maybe some of my contemporaries have."

Hyphen: That makes a lot of sense. I think having a flashback to her childhood in Taiwan gives us an understanding that Joan grew up in a fairly homogeneous environment, racially. And for her, immigration is a purely economic decision. Which is perhaps why a lot of this book has Joan thinking about the inequalities of her life as more economic.

I just loved that one of the central relationships in this book is Joan and Bill’s. From the very beginning, it is very transparent: there is a wealth gap, an age gap and a culture gap. It's not a transactional relationship, but it's a relationship that you can't romanticize. It seems like such a challenge to write a love story that is so unromantic.

KW: I think the relationship is romantic for Bill because he's someone who falls in love quite easily. He knows his money is probably what makes him an attractive candidate, but it doesn’t bother him. It's funny because my mom is divorced, and some of her gripes with my dad were economic, and so I think for someone like my mother or others of her generation, Joan’s relationship is romantic. A great marriage to them is one where the man has way more money than you and comes with a super nice house in the San Francisco Bay Area to boot. What could be more romantic?  

Of course, that doesn’t mean Joan isn’t aware of the discrepancies in their relationship. As you state, there is an age and financial and cultural gap. And sometimes those gaps are uncomfortable for Joan, but in the end she’s pretty clear-eyed. For example, there’s a scene early on in their marriage where she feels embarrassed because she doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t need one, but that’s all because of Bill, not her. They’re at this party, and she can tell that everyone knows she’s one of those “younger” wives as well. When she feels embarrassment, or maybe even some shame over her circumstances, she's also able to recognize that it’s a result of her choices and that those are feelings she has to live with. 

Hyphen: Like, you get what you deserve?

KW: Yes, you get what you deserve, though Joan also never fully thinks she deserves her privileges either. I think some people, when they marry someone much wealthier and older, can quickly feel entitled to their new lives. Of course they deserve it, otherwise they wouldn’t be here. They’ve got something special about them! Whereas I think someone like Joan never fully thinks they deserve it. They can never get rid of that voice in their head saying, “I'm here because I married someone wealthy and way older than me.” And though I don’t think Joan regrets her choices, you still see her later in the book telling her own daughter to have a real career. She recognizes that her own choices were limiting. She judges her own life.  

Hyphen: That’s so interesting compared to the idealism that Bill gets to have.

KW: Very idealistic. I don’t know many Asians of that generation that were very idealistic, and if they were, they didn’t always seem to fare very well. If I think about it, a lot of my mom’s cautionary stories were about idealists: “This guy dropped out of engineering to follow his dreams. And now look how unhappy he is!” 

Hyphen: Toward the end of the book when Joan’s son Jamie is thinking about her, he describes her as so practical and yet at the same time impulsive. At the heart of it, a person who immigrates, there has to be some kind of, if not optimism, some momentum that shoots them out of a place where they technically belong.

With Joan’s decision to immigrate, she seizes an opportunity to take her brother’s place after he’s unable to go abroad. It’s a tale of one woman’s ambition and what that looks like over a lifetime. 

KW: It’s interesting that you bring up impulsivity. I’ve noticed that when some non-Asian readers read this book, they describe Joan as passive. That this is a book where things just happened to her. And that's so interesting to me, because knowing that generation, she's actually not that passive. She does take action. She tries.

I turned 40 last year, and I was in my late 30s when I wrote this. At the time I was just so much more aware that you truly only have one time around on this earth, and why not try for something more? And so I wanted to write a character that does just that. Because I think so many of us, myself included, don't try for whatever reason — because we're scared, or we’re comfortable or we don’t want to lose a bunch of money, which are all valid reasons.

Hyphen: Trying is also how you feel alive or vital. It’s not actually satisfying to get everything that you want as soon as possible. 

KW: No. I mean even when you publish a book — and that generally does take a lot of work and time — it's satisfying only for a little while, to be honest. So you keep writing. 

Hyphen: Going back to that word, “satisfaction,” why did you name your novel The Satisfaction Café? 

I always wanted that title. It was my title almost the entire time I was working on it. I think because satisfaction is just such an interesting word. Another definition might be that it’s a reasonable amount of happiness, right? By the way, that was an alternate title choice. My publisher wanted to change the title at one point, so we were going back and forth. 

When we were all discussing the title, I don't remember who said this, but someone said, “You're going to get eviscerated on Goodreads because people are going to say, ‘The cafe doesn't appear until the end of the book.’” And that’s a valid point! But to me, the Satisfaction Café isn’t just a place but a general concept. It's this idea of a place where you can find enough happiness for you to keep going. 

Hyphen: When I think of satisfaction, I feel a great weight lifting off of me. If I think about joy or ecstasy, I don't feel that. The idea of enough, I mean that's actually humongous in a world where you’re taught to get more and keep striving. 

As you mentioned, in the book the Satisfaction Café does not come along for a while, but the book also doesn't end with the Satisfaction Café, which is what I think might be more of what is expected in novels today that typically end on an upswing where you’re better off than when you began. But you keep going after the upswing. I wanted to know why you decided to give us the whole span of this person's life.

KW:  I always wanted to do a full life. For me, the café is not the point of the book. The point of the book is Joan’s entire life.

Hyphen: Going back to those comments about passivity, I think what people are responding to is not that Joan is passive in her own life — because she makes such active choices. She's so much more active than a lot of Bill’s family members, for example. But what might be misconstrued as passivity is how she accepts the limitations of life and her station in it.

It reminds me of that “inspirational” and apparently false fact that bumblebees are too heavy to be able to fly, but they just don’t know it, and that’s why they can. And that's an active story, where you're so active, you defy the laws of gravity. So when people comment on Joan’s passivity, it's like they're asking for fiction that breaks rather than adheres to the laws of how the world works. They want fiction that defies gravity for them.

KW: You're really changing how I feel about that statement because now I feel that I finally get what those people were saying when they called Joan passive. That makes so much sense. I think there are many times in her story where Joan is presented with a series of choices, like whether she should leave her husband, or have a child or start a business. And sometimes she makes the more predictable choice and at other times she doesn’t. But she doesn’t get to have everything. She knows she may not have always made the right choice. And, you’re right, in that I think that is real. I can't imagine that character having behaved differently. It would be a totally different book, right? Then it's not called The Satisfaction Café. It's called, “I had a midlife crisis, and now I'm happier than ever.”

Hyphen: Also, if it had ended with the Satisfaction Café’s success instead of continuing, it would be a totally different book. The thing is that life continues. You have this huge peak, and then it goes back to a plateau or gets worse. You can defy gravity in one moment and create this revolutionary café concept, and then gravity reasserts itself. At every point if you just continue the story, it will always rebalance to neutral. Satisfaction is the best you can get, basically.

KW: I think that's totally correct. That’s what's real. And what’s more, that’s the best case. I still struggle with that now, asking, “Is that all that life is?” And I know there are going to be times when I have to be less passive and maybe actually do something — try a little harder or make a difficult choice — but then I also have to accept that even if I’m ecstatic with the outcome, I’m never going to be able to keep that high.

Hyphen: This is actually a hopeful book because you gave us an entire life, so we can actually say that Joan lived a satisfactory life.

KW: Yes, I don't think she regrets her life.