The Quest for Satisfaction
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The Satisfaction Café, Kathy Wang, Abacus Books, 2025, 352 pages, £20.00.
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The Satisfaction Café by Kathy Wang begins as every novel should: with a stabbing. It’s an opening that proves particularly shocking when coupled with the book’s blurb, which promises a tale of domesticity and the eventual inception of the titular café. The contrast between the violent introduction and the novel’s unassuming packaging exemplifies one of Wang’s many strengths: the ability to narrate the everyday without being mundane.
Joan Liang, the novel’s sharp protagonist, moves from Taiwan to the United States to earn a Master’s degree at Stanford and become a financial buoy for her family. These plans are complicated after she marries a handsome architecture student, Milton Liu, and, as boldly proclaimed in the opening paragraph, stabs him after six weeks of marriage. Shortly following the subsequent divorce, Joan meets wealthy three-time divorcee Bill Lauder, and it is their marriage – the unexpected life it brings – that forms the bulk of the novel’s subject matter.
As indicated by the title, the central thematic concern of the novel is satisfaction; what are the necessary components of a satisfactory life? On that subject, Wang writes:
Joan would think about this later – how few truly surprising, lovely moments one receives in a lifetime. Surely there must be ways to have a new connection, a ‘satisfying’ connection […] Joan would devote a great deal of herself to this question; it would become one of her life’s obsessions.
Potential answers to this question are thrown up in the plot – financial stability as Joan is thrust into a world of old money; family and motherhood as she enters the large Lauder family and its widespread relatives – and at all times, Joan demonstrates that she will prioritise her own happiness and satisfaction over the traditional expectations forced upon her as a Taiwanese woman. Nowhere is this made clearer, of course, than in the novel’s initial impaling.
Satisfaction, the novel suggests, is commingled: it is either heightened or diluted by the emotions of those around you.
When financial satisfaction falls short as an answer to Joan’s central question – the dysfunctional and wealthy Lauder family are constantly engaged in domestic clashes numbed only by alcoholism – it is her parental duties that stand the test of time. Satisfaction, the novel suggests, is commingled: it is either heightened or diluted by the emotions of those around you. Through motherhood, Joan discovers her happiness is indelibly entwined with another human’s, and ‘like all parents who are finally happy, her most ardent wish was that her children could be happy too’.
Joan’s introspective nature, coupled with her witty and direct character, is one of the novel’s main strengths. And while The Satisfaction Café primarily follows her life, the third-person point of view allows for the narrative to oscillate at times between Joan and the other characters. Rather than being hermetically sealed within a singular perspective, the focus shifts to the other Lauders, Joan’s in-laws and direct relations, as well as friends. Subsequently, the effect is a sense of community and family contributing to the individual.
The third-person perspective, then, rather than distancing the reader from Joan when foregrounding other characters, provides a holistic depiction of Joan as a protagonist. The prose telescopes, zooming into Joan’s thoughts and out to the lives of those around her. In this way, an intimacy is created between Joan and the reader whenever her internal dialogue is shared, because the interiority feels like a privilege rather than a given. Simultaneously, outside perspectives become equally pertinent in understanding Joan as they reveal her impact on others beyond her intentions. She is at one point described as ‘steadfast and also impulsive’:
She had been unhappy, and then happy, and unhappy and happy again. She’d been both the best mother in the world and the person who knew the most what [her son] hated about himself and, at times, like many mothers, when frustrated or angry, had pressed her thumb to that tender place.
These fragments of Joan – her internal dialogue, the snippets of what she represents to those in her life – all coalesce into an incredibly absorbing character.
Simultaneously, Joan’s preoccupation with satisfaction, as a lone subject, might eventually feel redundant and trite, but Wang partners it with an exploration of loneliness – the central hindrance to Joan’s satisfaction. In particular, Joan’s identity as an immigrant and an Asian woman marrying into a White family often leads to her feeling isolated from the Lauders. Joan handles these dynamics with sharp, unsentimental humour. When one stranger questions how ‘she, a Chinese woman’ might have a young blondish child’, Joan responds archly: ‘1. Her father is Caucasian. 2. Her hair is very pretty, isn’t it. 3. I no speak English well.’
Indeed, Wang’s style balances wit with a certain lyricism, and I found myself highlighting line after line. The backward-looking prose lends the novel an omniscient wisdom, with lines like:
‘Joan felt she understood with real clarity the cycle of life – the ultimate end and all that currently lay in between and the evergreen problem that there didn’t seem to be enough there.’
‘Your life was the most terrible thing to give away. Day after day, when you passed it not as you wanted, when you spent it as a compromise.’
Such a reminiscent style of narration also tends toward foreshadowing, and various chapters end on elliptical hints such as ‘but that was to come’ or ‘they would learn this later; in fact, everyone would’. In another novel, dramatic nudges like these might feel heavy-handed, but they succeed in The Satisfaction Café because the prose is otherwise restrained, which then affords the occasional literary flourish. Simultaneously, the foreshadowing serves as a reminder of the temporality of the characters’ lives. If foreshadowing is a window into the future, then the inverse must also be true: foreshadowing allows for the insight of the future to reinterpret the past. By including a stream of future perspective to that of the present and past, the comprehensive depiction of Joan is further deepened, so that we, as readers, can witness her from the viewpoint of others, herself, the past, present and future.
Ultimately, The Satisfaction Café is a novel of cumulative force. While its opening drama might suggest otherwise, it is a ruminative and introspective book that never veers too ‘quiet’ thanks to the wit of its narrative voice. In recognising the immense number of ‘lonely people in the world’, and refusing to deny that ‘pain is necessary, loneliness is necessary’, The Satisfaction Café settles somewhere in the middle of a satisfied and lonely life: ‘Life was senseless and unfair and it started over like this each day. But really: life could be nice too. It could be gorgeous.’
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Kathy Wang is the author of Family Trust and Impostor Syndrome. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School, and lives in the Bay Area.
Lee Hatsumi Mayer is an undergraduate creative writing student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lee was raised in San Francisco and trained for over a decade as a figure skater.
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