What is the price that we pay to live in America? How far will we go to understand and help those that we love, even when they don’t reciprocate love in the way that we need? Rental House by Weike Wang, a Creative Writing professor at Penn, explores these questions by following a couple—Keru and Nate—and their delicate relationships with their family and the world around them.
Keru and Nate are a “DINK” (dual income, no kids) couple in their mid–thirties who met as undergraduates at Yale. Keru is Chinese American, with parents who immigrated from China to the United States, while Nate is a “poor white from nowhere” who attended Yale on full financial aid. As a corporate consultant, Keru is money–focused and ambitious, yearning to build a life that fulfills the American dream to offset her parents’ sacrifices of coming to the country. Nate stands in diametric contrast: He’s an assistant professor of science at a private college who’s complacent with his modest income. The novel follows two vacations that the couple embark on: one in Cape Cod and one five years later in the Catskills.
Wang is skillful in creating sharp, incisive observations of family dynamics. She crafts characters who not only feel intimately familiar to children of immigrants but also offer a sense of connection and recognition to anyone who has had to navigate the intricacies of family relationships. This strength of her writing becomes ever–apparent from the moment we are introduced to both Keru and Nate’s families in Cape Cod.
Keru’s parents visit the Cape Cod house first, taking no time to comment on “small imperfections” of the house, like the “narrowness of the driveway, the lack of a garden hose,” subtly revealing their perfectionist tendencies. Conversations revolve around predetermined topics, like careers and kids that Keru hasn’t had yet. The family has no boundaries and every opinion is spat out at the dinner table—except for Keru’s. She feels stifled around her parents, like a mere “listening board” who is “not expected to have opinions of her own.”
Nate’s parents soon arrive at the house after Keru’s parents leave. Unlike Keru’s parents, they are too nice to Nate, greeting him with pleasantries. This niceness, though, cannot be conflated with mutual understanding as Nate and his parents disagree on their core values and beliefs. His parents are anti–vax, pro–Trump, and insistent Nate reaches back out to his brother, with whom he has a sordid past. Nate argues back at them to no avail.
Nate’s mother, specifically, “demand[s] to be understood by everyone around her, yet was not willing, ready, or able to extend the generosity to others.” Like Keru’s parents, Nate’s family circles back to conversations about children: “Most adults on this planet are parents, and to understand most adults and your own parents, you must become parents. Else you will never understand anything, Nathan. You will be completely oblivious to everything that’s good.”
Five years later, the couple ventures to the Catskills in the vacation that becomes the centerpiece of the novel’s second half. This time, it’s just Nate and Keru in a quaint bungalow with no parents. They meet a neighboring European couple—Mircea and Elena—who critique American culture and label them as a “DINK” couple. Wang keeps the story unexpected yet cohesive by introducing elements from earlier plots such as Nate’s estranged brother, who manifests at the bungalow asking for a large sum of money.
Here, Wang offers us even further insight into the couple’s lives, peeling back the layers of their relationship beyond the problems they face with their families. Mircea questions Nate in ways that belittle his manhood, telling him that “teachers have no power” and that he should “buy property and take better care of [his wife].” Elena gawks about how she has met several “one Asian, one white” couples and how marrying outside the racial group causes kids to become less “cohesive.”
These external judgments reflect the critiques that Nate and Keru had received from family in prior parts of the novel, but hearing them from outsiders make the verbal attacks far more wounding. This is the sad reality of adulthood—that existential crises are recurring and vulnerabilities become more exposed. Wang unravels these conflicts like an onion, stripping away layers swiftly and precisely, until the raw, stinging core is laid bare.
At its very core, Rental House is about rental houses in a literal sense. But it’s also about the metaphorical concept of rental houses—what it means to not feel a sense of full belonging in a space where someone else has every right to feel like they fully belong. For Keru, her identity as a Chinese American renders the United States her rental house; her constant grappling with her nationality and ethnicity is the cost of rent—an unavoidable toll that she must pay to live in America.
No amount of money that she spends on either of her rental houses can forestall America and its people from rejecting one, or both facets of her identity. Therefore, America is and can never be a home that she owns, because she will always experience a subtle tang of discomfort in this nation where her identity is unrelentingly scrutinized, where her identity as an American citizen will always be denigrated by other Americans who interrogate “what kind of immigrants” she and her parents are and if “they enter[ed] the country the right way.”
But even her place within her family seems fickle, rented perhaps, as she struggles to connect to her parents, describing them as “claw–parents” who leave holes in her chest. Nate, too, often feels misplaced in his own family, differing with them on his politics and core beliefs. They cannot understand why he chose a job as a professor when he would “make a better lawyer than scientist.” Both families push Keru and Nate to have children even though neither of them want to.
The theme of suffering permeates every corner of this novel, complicating the characters’ sense of existential meaning. Keru’s mother believes that “suffering is required.”
“To suffer is to strive and to set a bar so high that one never becomes complacent. To become complacent is to become lazy and to lose one’s spirit to fight, and to lose one’s spirit to fight is to die. So, to suffer is to live,” she says.
This philosophy begs the question: How many bruises, marks, scars can someone take before suffering reaches its capacity? What exactly is so wrong about choosing complacency, and the constant state of being satisfied, rather than choosing to feel disappointed in life, even if a disappointing life begets a life of more accomplishments? Wang provokes ideas that linger long past the novel, causing the reader to wrestle with the delicate balance between fulfillment and suffering, and to reconsider what it truly means to live a life worth remembering.
Rental House concludes on an abrupt note, with Keru and Nate contemplating whether they should go to the hospital after Keru breaks her ankle. They’re now pushing 40. We have seemingly watched them throughout the years, beginning from college, with Wang’s quiet transitions between past and present, memory and reality. Their story is not neatly resolved, but this ambiguity is intentional.
Life, like a rental house, is replete with transience and impermanence, and it is up to us to assign meaning to our lives and the spaces that we inhabit. We catch only fragments, a fleeting segment of Keru and Nate’s story, but this is the nature of existence. Always partial, always in motion, and inevitably bound to end.
