This December, Weike Wang is bringing a story of cultural diversity and familial tension to bookshelves.

Wang is the author of “Joan is Okay” and “Chemistry,” the latter of which she won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting award for. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Alaska Quarterly Review and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Last month, Wang’s upcoming novel “Rental House” appeared in the Daily Bruin’s fall book preview. “Rental House” chronicles the marriage story of college sweethearts Keru and Nate, whose clashing cultural backgrounds lend to two very chaotic family vacations.

Wang spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Sydney Gaw about “Rental House” and its publication process leading up to the book’s release Dec. 3.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: What inspired the premise of “Rental House?”

Weike Wang: The first half kind of fell out of my head, sort of together, from this idea of “How bad could a family vacation get?” And it was just something that I’ve been thinking about a lot during the holidays – when you’re planning to go see people, how much time you want to see each person. I just thought, “How about we just make it even more intense and have parents visit this couple back to back?” This is no vacation that anybody maybe would ever want to take, but for the sake of fiction, it works really well.

The second half of the novel was my interest in this couple and getting to know them as they got older. Sort of like, “What if?” As a writer, you’re always asking, “What if? What if they try to take a vacation alone? What if they try to have a happy vacation? Is that even possible for some people?”

DB: Your novels, including “Rental House,” are often informed by your characters’ background in academia. Knowing that Keru and Nate meet as students at Yale, how does their shared educational background influence the way they and their starkly different families interact throughout the novel?

WW: Education is very important in my community, my culture and my family, and I think I’m always coming back to these characters who are kids of immigrants, or immigrants themselves, first-gen, trying to get into college. But Nate comes from a very different type of first-gen. He’s the first generation in his family to go to college, but they’re Native Americans. They’re born here, so I was thinking about those competing demands and different cultures’ perspectives of education.

Also, I’m a teacher. I’ve been a teacher since I was a grad student. I’ve never left school. I’ve never left this idea of the classroom. So I’m sort of on the pulse of campus life, and that’s what I think about a lot. I’m surrounded by kids and students and their needs, so that kind of permeates the story.

DB: What was your writing process like?

WW: It was fun. I like writing from multiple perspectives, so the book is structured where I follow Nate for a little bit. I follow Keru a little bit. I like the multi-third-person perspective. Third person is always fun to play with when you kind of go back and forth.

It was a lot of fun bouncing back and forth between the perspectives. I think it brought in my ability, my writing range. It made me a little bit more immersed in the fiction world of creating characters, creating their lives. And I was also interested in following a couple who don’t have kids. I feel like that’s very rarely talked about. When I workshop stories with my students. Whenever someone’s like, “At 28, they have kids,” I’m just like, “Are you going to have kids at 28?” In their minds, the adult world is defined by having kids. But honestly, a lot of my friends at this age, or in their 30s, don’t have kids. So the reality is sort of changing – this idea of what the nuclear family looks like. And that’s sort of the story here as well.

DB: Why did you decide to frame “Rental House” around two different family vacations?

WW: I think one of the hallmarks of fiction is making your characters suffer. And I think that’s what I’m really good at – I’m kind of a sadist. You want to make these characters as uncomfortable as possible – make them kind go against each other, make them really question it. It’s like a problem that they’re trying to solve, and you’re putting them in an obstacle course. A fiction writer has to be brave enough to do that. They also have to recognize this is not you. You know, I’m not writing me, I’m not writing my friends, I’m not writing an exact marriage, but I’m writing a marriage that’s going through something. I think it’s coming to terms with that and coming to terms with the fact that you have authority over these people, and you can kind of make them do whatever you want.

DB: What are you most excited for readers to experience in your upcoming novel?

WW: The way I kind of structure this book, it’s almost like two novellas handling a marriage. So I sort of want that continuous reading experience of the train wreck of a family vacation, and you just can’t look away. And then taking a breather and jumping back into the second vacation.

I want it to be this immersive experience of what happens. It always feels like family vacations are very concentrated. Maybe you have four days to spend with someone or three days to spend with someone. So every hour counts, and I want that running clock in readers’ minds.

Given what the next four years are going to be like, I’m sure family discussions for a lot of things – politically, ideologically – will be very tense. And I think taking stock of that situation, coming to terms with, “You’re in it together, whether you like it or not this is the family that you have.” Taking stock of that situation is really important.

DB: What do you hope readers will take away from “Rental House?”

WW: Despair can be funny. Like certain unfortunate circumstances can be funny. Humor has always been my coping mechanism. There are situations where I just don’t want to be so somber and so serious, and I don’t want this book to take itself too seriously. There’s a lot of serious issues in it. There’s a lot of ideas in it, but I also want the reader to have a good experience going through it and to laugh with and at these characters. These characters are so universal in terms of what you see in family. The key is the enjoyable reading experience and to take away something about this family and to see your own family reflected in that chaos.