Using a Character's Personality to Foreshadow the Whole Novel
From Joan is Okay, by Weike Wang:
A hundred people came to my father’s funeral, most I didn’t know. He had two brothers and many friends. My mother has a brother, two sisters, and more friends. These aunts and uncles I’d spent less than a week with in total for the entirety of my life.
Eighteen years ago, my parents moved back to Shanghai and have lived there ever since. Once I was bound for college, they saw their jobs as parents complete.
…
At the funeral, I couldn’t talk about my father in a significant way, and once I got a few words out others just wanted me to stop. Afterward, a smaller group of us gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant, in a private room.
…
Hasn’t China changed? my cousin asked. In the last ten years, it’s become brand new.
I said I didn’t know the country too well.
She said that given how my face was Chinese it was a shame to know nothing about myself.
…
I told my cousin that I was sorry for her loss. My father was a good uncle to you and a good comrade overall.
Would you be able to speak at length about your parent at their funeral? Joan of Joan is Okay could not. Yet it’s fitting that the literary existence of Joan’s quiet and unassuming self speaks volumes about Weike Wang’s writing.
By way of the character’s struggle in this establishing scene of her novel, Wang conveys that the next 200 pages you spend with Joan and her family will be awkward, challenging, eye-opening, and darkly funny. She telegraphs the impact and content of the coming hundreds of pages by showing you, in brief, the way in which Joan’s upbringing and personality conflict with an extended family she hardly knows.
You see first that Joan’s family is large and her father’s influence widespread. Not only can you envision in this scene that the stated attendees are present, but also that brothers’ wives and sisters’ husbands and all the friends’ spouses and brothers’ and sisters’ children are in attendance. Joan comes across immediately in the novel as somewhat short-spoken, keeping details to herself and elaborating only when necessary. So when she mentions the number of attendees of the funeral, it’s easy enough to expect her figure of a “hundred” to be rounded from the actual count, which she wouldn’t deem important and which seems large given her father’s and mother’s many friends.
Then you see more of Joan’s personality come forward beyond just the facts. She spoke to many people the funeral, it seems, perhaps speaking to individuals or to groups or both. Again, Joan’s terseness makes its mark, which helps you imagine her speaking to individuals and groups and being turned down at every opportunity. Can she not create the words that would describe the significance of her father, or is her manner of addressing other people so strange that people end their conversations with her because of confusion?
Later you see how Joan forms her sentences, and more significant, you see the social order in which her statements fit. Joan addresses her cousin in a way that essentially swaps their roles. Though Joan isn’t in the wrong for consoling her cousin, she should be the one who is consoled. Joan should be closer to her father than almost everyone else at the funeral, yet she speaks as if she’s the cousin and moreover through the stunted definition of her father as nothing more developed than a “good comrade.”
This scene does such a great job of foreshadowing what’s to come, at only page 10-ish you feel like you’ve already read much of the rest of the novel. Wang’s presentation of this microcosm of Joan’s family shows exactly what’s expected in a modern novel opening, and much more. Not only do you receive a huge amount of information up front to hook you as a reader, you’re left with a number of burning questions that make you want to keep turning the pages. Joan’s personality is a multifaceted mystery (how did she become the way she is, so different from everyone else around her?) and her family history an opaque puzzle you’re compelled to organize.
The density of Joan’s family members’ interactions and their relationships with one another, past and present, have you hoping for the best and expecting the worst. All of that from a scene of a few-hundred words, showing what was and is, and what could be in Joan’s life and in your read through the rest of the novel.