The narrator of Weike Wang’s début novel, “Chemistry,” published earlier this year, is an unnamed female chemistry Ph.D. student navigating American academia and modern romance. She is also the daughter of ambitious Chinese parents who immigrated to the United States after the Cultural Revolution. The novel repeatedly upends our expectations: it’s a bildungsroman in which the heroine doesn’t so much go out into the world to conquer it as go out into the world to only gradually turn inward.

The book’s most striking attribute is the narrator’s voice: clipped, understated, and curiously affectless. Here, for instance, she describes the difference between her life’s trajectory and that of her white Midwestern boyfriend, Eric, who is also a chemistry grad student:

I am certain that Eric will get the job. His career path is very straight, like that of an arrow to its target. If I were to draw my path out, it would look like a gas particle flying around in space. The lab mate often echoes the wisdom of many chemists before her. You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally.

Voice, that ephemeral yet indelible quality, poses a challenge for critics: it is embedded in language but seems to hover just beyond it. And more than other similarly amorphous literary effects—tone, mood, atmosphere—voice seems intimately connected to the human speaker behind the text. Indeed, as I read “Chemistry,” I found myself identifying not only with Wang’s protagonist—we’re both female Chinese immigrant grad students in America—but also with Wang herself, who, like me, was born in China in 1989. Wang’s first-person voice, in other words, returned me to my own.

I was also reminded, by the voice, of other books that are not so near to my experience but which all might be classified as works of Asian-Anglophone fiction. I thought, for instance, of the dispassionate first-person narrators in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels; of Chang-rae Lee’s similarly evasive, if not entirely affectless, speaker in his novel “A Gesture Life”; of Ed Park’s office novel “Personal Days,” which features a distinctively impersonal first-person plural voice. I thought of Tao Lin’s Internet-age autofiction. The backgrounds of these writers vary widely: Ishiguro is the son of Japanese immigrants to England; Lin is the son of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States; Lee and Park are Korean-American. But all of them, in their work, have employed voices that seem unusually detached—voices that are often later reattached, by critics and other readers, to the authors themselves. (There are, of course, many more Asian-Anglophone writers who don’t downplay affect in their fiction, from Gish Jen to Alexander Chee to Jenny Zhang and so on—it’s a long list, and Lee himself has written more lyrical narrators, such as Henry Park in “Native Speaker.”)

“Asian-American” as a pan-ethnic identity category is a newish construction, one that unites people, sometimes awkwardly, from dramatically disparate cultures. As Jay Caspian Kang wrote recently in the Times Magazine, “Discrimination is what really binds Asian-Americans together.” In the West, the Asiatic figure has long been associated with aloofness and obfuscation, as exemplified by the notion of the “inscrutable Oriental.” The image is rife in fiction and poetry, found in the writing of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. The phenomenon persists in contemporary literary fiction, as in the affective alienness of David Mitchell’s dystopian Korean community in “Cloud Atlas,” or Adam Johnson’s navigation of North Korea in “The Orphan Master’s Son,” through the character of Jun Do. (The pun is intended.)

Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian. From Ishiguro’s famously oblique British-butler narrator in “The Remains of the Day”—whose voice has since become a hallmark of Ishiguro’s style—to Lin’s impassive young people, these protagonists, created by vastly different writers, work against standard ideas of rich novelistic subjectivity. These writers seem to be engaging with enduring stereotypes in order to overturn them.

Sunny Xiang, an assistant professor of English at Yale, is writing a book about how post-Cold War Asian-American novels represent literary voices as “Asian.” Xiang is interested not only in the racialized stereotype of the inscrutable Oriental but also in Orientalist scrutability—that is, those literary factors that make a narrative voice scan, for readers, as Asian. I told Xiang about my reaction to Wang’s book. She said that when a reader is confronted with an unplaceable or “inscrutable” voice, “an intuitive response seems to be the interpretive gesture you’re describing—that of reattaching the voice by way of the author or the reader. For you, it was the shared biographical profile that provided the most reliable footing, even if you weren’t relying on this footing for the purpose of interpretation.”

I decided to ask Wang if she saw things the way I did. But, when I suggested a reading of “Chemistry” in terms of the trope of Asian affectlessness, she demurred. Over the phone, she explained that she didn’t see her heroine as primarily Chinese or, for that matter, as primarily female but, first and foremost, as analytical. “I wanted the narrator to be very self-aware,” she said, “to have that scientific lens that’s a little bit objective but also crazy.” Of course, one might trace that attribute in part to China’s postwar prioritization of scientific pursuits as the path toward upward mobility and economic expansion—another Asian-American stereotype is the science nerd.

All of the characters in “Chemistry” are left nameless except for Eric, the narrator’s boyfriend. (Even he gets only a first name.) I suggested to Wang that there was something impersonal about this absence of names; she saw it, she told me, as a matter of scientific categories: there’s the dog, the lab partner, the shrink, the immigrant parents, the best friend, the cheating husband, the nanny. Chemistry is a generalizing process, Wang explained, in which you “build a small rule that applies to everything.”

In “Chemistry,” character depth is established, unexpectedly, through a kind of under-telling. The narrator’s Chinese immigrant parents—who are, perhaps not incidentally, the novel’s most obviously racialized characters—achieve interiority precisely because they appear at first to so dogmatically eschew it. In college, the narrator learns that, when her father was young, he carried his dying sister on his back to see a doctor, and that his sister died on the way there. She hadn’t even known that he had a sister. It is “the Chinese way,” she explains, “to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon.” As the novel progresses, “the narrator realizes that her parents have thoughts that are separate from hers,” as Wang put it to me. The parents have kept their stories from their daughter, and her evasive narrative voice echoes what we come to understand is their own. By the end, we have an idea of all that has not yet been said.

Although Wang does not think of her narrator as primarily Chinese, it’s impossible to read the narrator’s story without sensing the history behind it. The narrator in “Chemistry” worries that she will always lag behind her white boyfriend. “Please stop, just for a little while, and let me catch up,” she thinks. “How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up?” When we spoke, Wang connected China’s economic and cultural “behindness” after the Cultural Revolution—which had precipitated not only political upheaval but also economic and cultural stagnation—to her protagonist’s anxieties. “You have this void you’re trying to fill all the time,” she said. “And that’s why she latches onto Eric: he is such a full person. For her, there’s something missing.”