(The short story “Status in Flux” by Weike Wang appeared in the June 26th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)
(As in life, there will be SPOILERS!)
Illustration by Jiayue Li
First, we had stories about Covid arriving. Then there were the stories about living with Covid. Now we have arrived in age of stories after Covid, and what it all meant. “Status in Flux” by Weike Wang is at the vanguard of the “after Covid” era with all the questions: What did it all mean? How has it affected us? Some people have moved on, while others haven’t; why?
As the story begins, the narrator informs us that the world recently opened up for travel after Covid, while at the same time she is having intense insomnia which she is addressing by driving at night to twenty-four hour grocery stores to peruse the froze isle. Just from the opening, this piece is witty, clever, and humorous. The narrator is in process of applying for a green card so her and her husband can travel, because everyone else in her life has gone off to travel. Her Canadian parents, her younger sister-in-law, her in-laws, and her friends. But, because of the green card process, she cannot leave the country. The story daftly intertwines all of these storylines, while also giving the narrator ample ability to dwell on her life as an immigrant, first from China as a child moving to Canada, then moving to America for grad school.
Weike Wang is a very good writer. The story moved at a good pace, the characters felt individual and authentic to their own situations. Like I said, there is a healthy bit of humor in the story, and a few running and call back jokes are thrown in as well. The piece is well structured, showing Wang’s skill of not over staying any one storyline too long.
Yet, at the end of the story I couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing happened. All of the other characters go out in the world, but the narrator and her husband are stuck at home in New Jersey, waiting to see if she gets her green card. I get that narratively, logically and thematically that this is the point of the story, but it didn’t feel satisfying. The narrator keeps doing the same thing at the end of the story that she did at the beginning – driving to all-night places while dealing with insomnia. Also, the narrator doesn’t seem to learn anything, or gain any new knowledge, and emotionally, she never grew from where she started. It was frustrating because in the final moment of the story, the narrator is talking of driving to the boarder, all phrased as questions – so it’s just a hypothetical, and not a choice or an action.
This story really did charm me, and I enjoyed reading it. As I got closer to the end, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it did feel like it was building to something. For that reason, I can’t say that I loved this story, but I most certainly didn’t hate it. I would have to say that I had the mildest, lightest of disappointments with it. But in the end, you should read it.
Matthew Groff 