Family Is Not The Work Of Family

A meandering book review of Rental House by Weike Wang, involving Internet Discourse

A quick overview of what I’m going to say:

• I’ve been stuck editing my novel due to character motivations, and it doesn’t help that I’ve been stressed out with some ‘attestation in triplicate’ type of work. I think I’ve figured it out, though.

• I’ve been reading this book called Rental House by Weike Wang, which is about an Asian wife, Caucasian husband, and their respective families visiting them on vacation. I imagined this would be a comedy of errors like the long weekend when we had both sets of parents over, while our kid was teething and our plumbing was getting fixed. I’m extremely concerned because IT IS NOT.

• There has been online discourse about people getting divorced over not doing the dishes.

• I also come across a lot of discourse about women being reluctant to have children because of how much work they are.

Let’s talk about all these things.

I was stuck on editing my novel

So I’d been excited about the progress I was making. Until I got completely stuck at two ends.

The chapters I’ve been putting out daily, I got stuck with trying to rewrite this chapter. No matter which way I write it, it’s BORING. I’m wrestling with doing away with it, because boring to write equates to boring to read. I will yet break out of it and get back to it.

But more problematically, the whole second half of my novel feels dull. It’s super exciting to read, and there are lots and lots of touching moments. But - it feels like things just happen and there’s no reason to care, and we don’t know where it’s going. I haven’t watched The Passion Of The Christ, but I recall a distinctive review in The Times of India that complained the movie shows someone saying, “whip him ten times,” and then actually shows all ten whiplashes. The second half of my book does feel that way, and I’m struggling with how to give it the pizzazz of the second half of Dune 2 or the intensity of The Dark Knight.

I stared at the manuscript long enough to figure out what’s wrong - there’s no inner story in the second half. No emotional journey. The first half is all “Overthrow the British”, and our characters follow through on the plans and conduct high-profile assassinations. Once that is done, though, the inner motivations meander.

One part of it is plain survival. But that can’t be the inner motivation - our novel ends with the main characters facing Sazaa-e-Kalapani for 50 years, or hiding. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel like a “We lost” plot, because these things move the needle and set the stage for the next generation of revolutionaries.

It struck me, maybe it should be about Leadership. The main character is Savarkar of course, so this ought to be about the Making Of A Leader. How he is forged by fire.

Once I thought of the second half in these terms, things made a lot more sense. He’s trying to lead and is faced with big consequences, and has no one to help him figure out what to do, because all his mentors are in prison or afraid of going to prison. His followers are facing personal losses like never before, and everyone’s deserting him to survive. Even the most trusted ones are being tortured into becoming approvers.

In the face of all this, how does Savarkar learn to lead, and how does he learn to let go? How does he manage all this while he’s battling life-threatening lung infections and facing 50 years in prison? Those are the questions I realize I need to answer.

The good news is this doesn’t affect anything I’ve written very much, I just need to add more internal monologue. Hat-tip to Sarah for helping me figure this out.

Rental House by Weike Wang

I was looking for recent releases in my local library, and this was one of the non-murdery books that appealed to me.

Here’s the inner jacket blurb (why do they not put this in the back anymore? Why is the back full of random praise?)

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?

With her “wry, wise, and simply spectacular” style (People) and “hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron” (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.

Now I’m Indian, and my husband is Caucasian, so I imagined this book would be interesting to me. We’ve had family vacations like what was described - both sets of families hanging out, with a teething toddler, broken plumbing, and our friendly neighborhood plumber weaving in and out. Peak sitcom vibes. That’s sort of what I expected.

This book is nothing like it.

Keru is a consultant, Nate is a professor; they live in NYC. Keru’s parents are from rural Minnesota, and China before that; Nate’s parents are from North Carolina. Keru feels like Nate’s parents are racist. Nate feels unwelcome when Keru’s parents come over. They’ve decided to not have children. They don’t seem to have too many friends. They know their parents will clash and hence don’t have them over at the same time.

Nothing much happens as far as the plot is concerned. They have kinda awkward situations. The book is well-written. It doesn’t have chapters, but it’s barely 200 pages in a small binding. It moves fast.

When I try to empathize with the situations painted in this book, the one thing that contrasts hard between this book and my life is — in this book, no one seems to like each other very much.

They don’t have a lot of motivation to do things either. Neither pair of in-laws cares too much about getting on with their son/daughter-in-law. They don’t even seem to care enough to bond with their own kids either. Neither Keru nor Nate seems to have done very much to try getting to know their in-laws (save Nate learning Chinese). It’s not even clear to us why they fell in love, or what keeps them in love. They just seem to go through life hating it, waking up in the morning only out of duty.

Back in college, I had a roommate. Her boyfriend’s parents didn’t approve of her. And yet, somehow, they all went on a road trip with happy pictures that were plastered all over social media. While she fretted about how they thought she oughtn’t be their daughter-in-law, that somehow didn’t stop any of them from having fun together - they gambled together, flew kites on beaches, and bought each other souvenirs.

While I was very black and white back then, that was my first lesson on how complex people were, and how much people typically prioritize getting along over nuking everything. Like, you’re supposed to have fun on holiday, and most people would focus on having fun together even if they don’t get on with someone long-term. Seems like that’s emotional maturity - having conflicting feelings, but being able to appropriately weigh them and chart your course of action.

Part of the reason this kind of complexity hit me only in college was that literary fiction didn’t talk about this kind of complexity in relationships. What they instead focused on was how horrible everything is and why the main character is so sad all the time. Rental House, too, follows in that mold.

None of the characters seem emotionally mature. There’s a scene where Keru’s father only seems to talk about a few topics, because that’s the stuff he feels confident talking about in English, and Nate just goes along with it. I found myself wondering, they are both academics, why don’t they talk about NSF grants or department politics? Why isn’t his father-in-law giving him unsolicited advice about getting tenure? If Nate’s from a blue-collar background, wouldn’t Keru’s father try to mentor him more, seeing as his own kid didn’t go into academia like him?

The characters seem to hate everything and everyone. Everyone around them seems to also hate everything and everyone. Without this attempt to connect, what ends up happening is all the characters are caricatures.

Nate is the character from a blue-collar background who did good and doesn’t want to go back to the town of illiterates and degenerates he came from. His parents, of course, are antivaxxers who want white DEI, and are disappointed their son isn’t a lawyer or something ‘real’. They also think Keru and her parents are wealthy due to DEI and handouts. Keru’s parents don’t believe Nate’s parents are poor, because how can you be when you have entrenched roots in America? Their European neighbors tell them they don’t like America because of guns and drug ads on TV. Nate falls out with his parents over the results of the 2016 election, because, of course.

IRL, people try to make differences work all the time, like my college roommate. And that takes emotional maturity, love, and just being human. Without the love, though, all you see about family is just the work of family.

This is something I come across constantly in media depictions of family life. Husbands complaining about being nothing more than a wallet. Wives complaining about husbands leaving socks on the floor. People saying having children sounds like too much work, and why would anyone have kids when it’s all just wiping butts and sacrificing your career.

When I read these accounts, two things occur to me. One, marriage is not just the work of running a home, and parenting is not just the work of parenting. Two, these accounts seem so devoid of love and connection, which is why marriage, parenting, and family gatherings all seem like pure work.

Dishes discourse

I recently had a tweet go viral.

This is a popular topic to weigh in on. People are writing entire books and selling courses, with their central point being that they (and other people) routinely get divorced over the dishes not being done.

Matthew Frey, author of a viral piece titled “She divorced me because I left my dishes by the sink”, has a book and a course counseling men getting divorced. He wrote a book called This Is How Your Marriage Ends which I listened to out of curiosity, because, how did his marriage end? And it brought up every small annoyance in my marriage and had me in angry tears before I realized I was being silly to focus so hard on just the negatives.

But from following the experience of my friend whom I tweeted about, I realized the same thing as I did reading Rental House - the love was gone, and all that is left is the work. And hence the work is more onerous than one can handle.

Can love disappear because the work is too much? Possibly. But it takes a lot of work to get there. And it usually disappears in a bunch of different ways other than chores. I find it hard to believe chores would be the only way someone got resentful. Unless they valued chores an inordinate amount.

But through my own experience, I realized the core of these issues - a disproportionate emotional reaction on one side or the other. I’ll only talk about the disproportionate emotional reaction of the person with high standards for cleanliness.

In my experience, those who find themselves arguing about tidiness usually have it tied to their sense of self.. So if you leave the dishes undone, they feel like a failure for letting that happen. If anything hits your sense of self, you are going to react disproportionately, so they do. They also tend to think of it in terms of your sense of self - what kind of a horrible person doesn’t do the dishes? People at the receiving end behave in weird ways, when it’s implied they are horrible people.

This means a high-tension argument. But when you imply their reaction is unwarranted, it goes into a motte-and-bailey type fallacy.

The bailey is you’re a horrible person for not doing the dishes. The motte is that they just want basic cleanliness. This is hard to resolve unless you identify this argument as such and can get to common ground.

Not everyone whose sense of self is tied to the state of their house manages to have a tidy house. It’s more likely they have a messy house and stay in a state of stress about it. Not everyone with a tidy home has their sense of self tied to it.

Without this aspect involving the sense of self, tidy people can usually talk through the problems they have with a spouse who doesn’t care similarly and resolve them. But when you have the disproportionate reaction for any reason, it makes conversation and resolution difficult.

In online conversations on this topic, it gets tied to gender discourse. Statistics are dished out about how married women spend more time than any other demographic on chores. Single people say, “This is why I don’t want to get married”. Marriage is equated with the work of running a house.

But I think most of us are well aware, even if we don’t phrase it this way — marriage is not the work of marriage.

Parenting Is Not The Work Of Parenting

At least most adults know what marriage means, thanks to a ton of media exploring the topic, and we know it isn’t just about dishes.

But with parenting, all anyone sees is the work of parenting. Including parents themselves.

A frequent phrase that comes up among women is “I’d have kids if I could be the dad”. Because the dad works less towards parenting and gets to enjoy all the benefits of being a parent. Many women without children find themselves worried about the penalty on their career that having children would impose, and being stuck all day at home.

I thought about all this in my own context - Sure, I have more on my plate, less to do it with, and yet, somehow I’m happier with a child than without?! Why is this? Am I just uniquely lucky? Worse, why do I prefer to make more work for myself by doing things the hard way?

The answer, like in Harry Potter, is love.

This sounds quite nebulous, so let me break it down.

Someone without children doesn’t know how the parent-child relationship works from the parent's perspective. Especially if their own parents made them feel like a burden. But what they do see around them is all the stuff that the parents have to do - change diapers, take kids to the park, calm down tantrums in public places, drive them around to classes, pay for all the things.

This is what all the parenting influencers also share. They share clips of making baby food, potty training their toddlers, teaching their kids to make crafts, and in their “real talk” videos, they talk about how much they haven’t slept and how much their marriage has suffered. And then they plaster a big smile over this and say it’s all “worth it”. I can understand how that’s not convincing.

What’s usually missing is the internal experience of parenting—the emotional alchemy that makes chaos make sense. From the outside, it looks like a horror movie montage: diapers, tantrums, mystery stains, car seats that require an engineering degree. But inside that mess is this One Weird Trick due to which the work doesn’t feel like work — you chose each chore, and it’s for something that’s a part of you.

We don’t “have to” make the trek to Monterey, with unlimited whining and bathroom breaks and a bag full of snacks that I’ll still be cleaning out of the car six months later. But I decided it’s important for the child to see sharks in real life. The sharks might trigger some Jaws-level lizard brain instincts that have her run away and hide and not enjoy the whole experience. But something about our relationship makes me feel like a trip to see the sharks is what makes sense. So the spilling of goldfish crackers by the shark tank, and the seagull snatching away your sandwich, are just a little hiccup, not a source of shame or an indictment of failure.

Parenting is a relationship and you get as much out of it as you put in, over a long arc of time.

So, the work is real, but it’s not the only thing. To reduce parenting to the work of parenting is like reducing writing a novel to typing or research. As I hope my communication about my process shows here, that’s not all it is. What keeps it going is the Why. The motivations of characters; the ‘Third Rail’ that powers their story, and that helps you, the reader, empathize with characters in faraway lands and made-up universes. We don’t always know WHY when we start writing, but we figure it out along the way, and there’s always something that keeps it going.

X is not the work of X

I guess this is what makes Rental House not a very enjoyable novel - it’s not clear what the Third Rail is that motivates the characters.

Whenever I read or watch some media that is similarly pessimistic and seems pointless, I usually assume the creator’s life is similar. But… in all my stalking, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The creator usually has a life externally similar to their protagonists, but they go on to enjoy their life anyway. Their protagonist might complain about neighbors or colleagues, but the creator seems to be having a good time with their own neighbors and colleagues, and it’s often clear they aren’t pretending.

It feels like the sad characters originate in the few short moments of sadness they might experience, and they are just frozen in that sadness and go through their limited life sad. Which is the problem - the work of existing as the characters is grounded in reality, but their interiority is not.

That’s what leads me to the idea that “X is not the work of X” — a phrase I use to capture how accounts of a particular state of being often leave out or misrepresent the interior experience of living it.

But that’s the most important part! The love and the relationship and whatever else populate that interiority are what make it all worth it. It’s what turns work into purpose, the noise into music, and exhaustion into satisfaction. It’s what makes space for grace. For effort, for second chances, and for sinks full of dishes that don’t lead to divorce.

That’s what’s been on my mind this week when I’ve been blocked — stories that matter aren’t just about what happens—they’re about why it matters to the people it’s happening to.

That’s what I need to fix in the second half of my book. That’s what Rental House was missing for me. That’s what is forgotten in conversations about gendered division of labor, parenting discourse, and beat sheets for writing novels.

Love isn’t the absence of work. It’s what makes the work meaningful. And the stories that last are the ones where that love is showcased, even if everything else is falling apart.

Now I'd better go write it before I forget.