"There was a hole in our house, filled with love words and lost objects," says the protagonist of the title novella at the heart of this stark debut collection by Lan Samantha Chang.
It is into this dark place that the young Chinese American writer plunges quietly, as into dark waters with a deep breath of hope. Chang, a grauate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born and raised in Wisconsin. She draws on her own immigrant parents' experience by shining a light on each object of pain and joy carried over from China to America and reluctantly handed down to her generation.
In clear, often shining prose Chang paints a world in which most of the characters are no longer sure if they are Chinese, American or somewhere in between. Chang's words about men and women, parents and children, transcend their urban, ethnic settings and resonate with ordinary questions about that mysterious emotion, love.
Dreams and Nightmares
The young women in the stories, who Chang likely conjured from a composite of her three sisters, stretch their curiosity about the China of their parents' generation. Why did they flee? What were they forced to leave behind? What do they choose not say to their children about their past lives?
The events recounted explain some of the difficulty in getting easy answers. A spectre lures a young woman into an overflowing river; a mother demands that her daughter avenge her father's death. The characters, whose culture and families have been lost to the forces of history, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment.
They are hungry for all manner of things: love, success, acceptance, and even dreams of home. In the title novella, a washed-up concert violinist wrestles with his second-tier status, forcing his dreams on his daughters and his nightmares on his wife, the narrator.
Escape from China
"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, the father in "Hunger," 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 the collection's gem, 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 gifted author reminds us of Gish Jen; when plumbing the depths of solitary reflection, of Marilynne Robinson.
The novella and five stories in Hunger were first published in October 1998 by W.W. Norton & Co., and were recently released in a Penguin paperback edition.
HUNGER is for sale at Amazon.com.
