Hunger
- Book Review,
by Lan Samantha Chang
Amazon.com
The characters in Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger are starved for any number of things: acceptance, love, success, and even dreams of home. In the title novella, a thwarted violinist struggles with his second-tier status, forcing his dreams on his daughters and his nightmares on his wife, the narrator. "Some Chinese make their fortunes in America," she realizes. "Tian and I were not among them. Perhaps we lacked the forgetfulness that is essential to moving on." Chang beautifully conveys the pressures on these bewildered immigrant parents, whose aspirations are rarely matched by reality, and their quietly rebellious children. And while Tian remains far more frightening than likable, his long-ago escape from mainland China instantly humanizes this paternal despot: He struggled slowly toward the silhouette of the refugee ship, the Sonya, his throat dried hollow with seawater, his left arm numb from holding up the instrument. At one point, he slowed and floated in the waves, fitted the familiar shape against his chin, as if he were considering a melody. But he only rested for a moment. Though this novella is definitely the collection's standout, Chang's other stories are equally impressive explorations of desire and need, isolation and fear. When it comes to evoking the smash of cultures, national and familial, this superlatively gifted author has perfect pitch. --Kerry Fried
The New York Times Book Review, 25 October 1998
Chang has a fine gift for such evocative concrete descriptions of the abstract; her prose, while generally as restrained as the characters to whom it belongs, occasionally burst into rich blooms of imagery.
The Observer [London], Natasha Fairweather, 10 January 1999
[A] dazzling debut collection [that] will leave the reader hungry to read more by Lan Samantha Chang.
Washington Post, 18 October 1998
[An] extremely agreeable and long overdue surprise....If any book in recent memory might support the proposition that Asian-American authors can and should be permitted to stand on their own terms, this is it.
From Booklist
In this haunting fictional debut, Chang presents a novella and five short stories limning the immigrant experience. In "Hunger," a young Chinese couple meet and marry, and when the husband fails to live up to his overweening ambition to become a professional violinist, he passes on a terrible legacy to his daughters. As his wife listens to him continually berate their musical prowess, she realizes that his hunger has brought their family nothing but sadness and pain. Each of the succeeding stories picks up this theme of familial loss: a father addicted to gambling tutors his daughter in mathematics and then deserts the family for the lure of the dice; a Chinese immigrant couple moves to Iowa and systematically discards all evidence of their culture and previous life. In spare, evocative prose, Chang meticulously details the burdens imposed by family bonds and the cultural confusion of immigrants. Joanne Wilkinson
From Kirkus Reviews
A wonderfully written debut collection focusing on Chinese immigrants to America and the troubled lives of their children. Chang concentrates on depictingwith considerable insight and originalitythe fault lines of assimilation in American society. Her tales nicely capture the sometimes blunt, often painful, and only rarely hopeful negotiations conducted between parents and children, and between immigrants and natives, above this shifting ground. The powerful title novella sounds notes repeated in many of the stories: a long-suppressed family secret slowly corrodes a marriage, hindering the ability of parents to communicate with their children, and slowly, subtly confounding and wounding the children. The wives in many of these pieces, coming from a traditional culture, are deferential to their husbands, a form of submission that ends for many in bitter resentment. The husbands are stern, remote, and tend to die early, having submerged their own sorrows in a lifelong reticence. The American-born daughters of theme unions (sons do not figure in the stories) are uncomfortably caught between two cultures, often angry or resentful, and sometimes rebellious. The rich emotional resonance of these tales is somewhat diminished when Chang departs her American settings for China. This does not, however, much affect the pleasures available from her somber, vivid, deeply original vision of Asian-American life. The debut of a writer possessing a distinctive, fresh imagination and voice. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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