Hunger: A Novella and Stories by Lan Samantha Chang (W. W. Norton, 1998)
★★★★☆
A taut collection of stories centered on the Chinese American immigrant experience, with special attention to parental sacrifice, assimilation, and inter-generational trauma.
This collection hurt. It hurt because it spoke to how my Chinese immigrant parents love/d me, and to how I’ve rebuffed and rejected that love—things I reckon with to this day.
While I don’t share that many facts of life with the characters in these stories, I am well familiar with the conflicts depicted herein. Parents sacrifice, and children believe them overbearing. Collectivism demands enmeshment; individualism retaliates. Families clash, often tragically and irreparably, despite each caring deeply for the other(s). Forgetting and unforgetting both demand heavy costs.
Chang’s work toes the line where these forces meet, skillfully navigating the complexities there, but it also exploits the cracks to either side. The titular novella, Hunger, is incredible. It depicts one family’s slow shattering at the hands of the father (Tian)—a failed violinist who forces his daughters to follow his path—and by the inaction of the mother (Min), a young bride-turned-housewife whose timidity hobbles her. Chang draws her characters lovingly, with vivid, incisive prose. She captures deep tenderness (some of it achingly reminiscent of my own father) in one breath, and impossible expectations in the next:
Ruth sensed him standing there and flicked her gaze away from the screen. She scooted down into the sagging couch, pulling up her t-shirt to expose her belly button, daring him to tickle her. He set down his instrument. Solemnly, slowly, he came forward. She allowed him to tickle her, squirmed and giggled until Tian’s mouth twitched.
“Mushroom head,” he said finally. “Rice bucket.” She flipped in his arms like a fish so that her legs kicked over the back of the couch and her head hung over the seat. She gazed at him upside-down. Her mouth hung open in delight, her eyes gleaming, filled with greed and with his love.
Anna worked at the violin to earn this love that came so naturally to her sister.
I cried when Min, powerless to stop her child from leaving, yet provided for her in the only way she knew how. I believed that Tian’s behavior was unequivocally abuse, but I also believed his pain and self-loathing and hope.
“I didn’t think about the hardships and sacrifices I was making, but of what was going to be. (…) Whenever I looked at—Anna’s sister.” He would not say her name. “Whenever I looked at her, I saw the violinist she might be. I saw past her poor behavior, her disobedience, her laziness, and I could see it—brilliance, like a star.”
Chang is nimble with perspective, in some stories sympathetic to the older generation, in others to the younger, often to both at once—gloriously fleshing out this timeless/timely conflict. Her child characters are sometimes cruel or rude or willfully disobedient, and in them I saw past versions of myself, heard past unkind thoughts I’ve had. While I hope those thoughts aren’t ones I’ve ever voiced, I can tell how American I am by the part of me that asks: would it truly have been so wrong if I had?
Four stars. Thank you to Thomas for the recommendation.