WANTING

The rekindled friendship between a young woman who stayed in Beijing and her friend who’s just returned from America heads toward a conflagration as illuminating as it is destructive.

When Ye Lian’s childhood best friend, Luo Wenyu, returns to Beijing after 12 years in the U.S., their reunion forces each to reckon with the ways they’ve envied and disappointed each other. Lian was once obsessed with studying in America but was rejected by every school, whereas Wenyu, ironically, was sent to stay with her parents’ friends in California because of her poor performance in high school. Wenyu, the wilder of the pair, has achieved a glitzier success than Lian’s: She’s a famous YouTube influencer known as Vivian and engaged to a white Silicon Valley tech bro with whom she’s renovating a luxurious summer home in Beijing. Lian, meanwhile, a junior executive at an American college-prep company, seeks to purchase a condominium to live in with Zhetai, her prosaic and dependable boyfriend of eight years. On the brink of committing to a path in life via marriage and real estate, each becomes recklessly involved with another man. Lian and Wenyu’s stories are interwoven with that of Song Chen, Wenyu’s architect; despite his brilliance as a Ph.D. student in mathematics, Chen failed to secure the life he had wanted in America, and now his marriage is falling apart. His story at first seems like an interruption from the main plot but gradually becomes just as compelling, especially after the two storylines collide and the characters’ infidelities are exposed. This moving novel is large in scope, including the experiences of two generations in aiming at the American dream and, in the bittersweet conclusion, projecting into the future. Jia reveals the yearnings and betrayals of her flawed characters with sensitivity, and the hard-won self-understandings they come to in the end are both illuminating and satisfying.

This ambitious debut centered in contemporary Beijing delivers an engaging and insightful take on desire, envy, and betrayal.