Product Description

An award-winning novella and stories that beautifully illuminate the Chinese immigrant experience.

Nominated for numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN Center USA-West's annual literary award, this debut collection by a young Chinese-American writer has garnered stellar reviews and invited comparisons to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves: a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death; and a woman speaks from beyond the grave about her tragic marriage to a man whose own disappointments nearly destroy their two daughters. In luminous prose Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family, into haunting tales that signal the arrival of an exciting new writer and "a work of gorgeous, enduring prose" (The Washington Post).

"Elegant . . . her stories constitute a delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Impeccable. . . . So luminous is this collection, the result is something like a pearl."-- San Diego Union-Tribune
Hunger won the Bay Area Reviewers Book Award for Fiction, a Silver Medal in the California Book Awards, and the Wisconsin Public Library Association's Banta Award
Chang's work has twice been selected to appear in the Best American Short Stories anthology
Hunger appeared on the Wordstock bestseller list

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #468875 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140288483
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
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

From The Washington Post
[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

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Customer Reviews

Marvelous and haunting
Chang's stories are about love, memory and all the things that remain unspoken within families. The stories beautifully evoke the wrenching pain of leaving home--the pain of immigrant Chinese parents starting anew in America and the pain of their children, whose inevitable departures underline their parents' rootlessness and loss.

An excellent debut effort.
I once attended a lecture on the immigrant experience in America and one of the speakers posited that the type of experience an immigrant family would have depended on which type of immigrant they were: the sort who is running to something or the sort who is running away from something.

Both sorts populate Hunger: A Novella and Stories by Lan Samantha Chang. And, if these stories are any basis to go by, they refute the premise of the lecturer I heard that one day. The immigrant experience, as depicted by these stories, has little to do with what motivated the flight, and everything to do with the fact the immigrant is an island unto him/her self-a person who cannot be either a "citizen" of either whence they came or where they come to. This alienation and anomie is exemplified through various aspects of hunger throughout the text-hunger for love, for the past, far acceptance, for independence, for personal and/or professional "success".

These stories, like Chang's prose, are contained and spare yet rich in emotion, symbolism and emotional intensity. Through these few tales Chang is able to convey both a wide range of experience and attitude toward the immigrant experience as well as the psychological toll that such experience entails.

I have to admit that I have a predisposition towards appreciating oriental immigrant stories. I enjoy the primary players in the genre, such as Amy Tan and Gish Jen. Chang provides a nice counterpoint to their work as it is the polar opposite in terms of prose style and intensity-short, intense vignettes as opposed to richly textured, wide ranging more sedately paced prose. Both styles work and both are enjoyable. Chang may not be as accomplished as the others at this point, but this book provides strong evidence that she will be soon.

An excellent debut effort.

Intimate stories with resonant themes
"Hunger" is the opening novella and anchor for this collection of short stories. Chang is a graceful author with just the right touch of sensitivity and insight into the lives of Chinese immigrants in America. The special talent here is in the individual attention Chang gives to each family, each story. This is not a social history portrayal of the masses. While the family structures are seemingly uniform (husband and wife and one or two children) and the range of vocations unsurprising (restaurant workers, music prodigies, math and tech specialists), the characters are more emotionally dimensional than one would suspect.

*** The theme of hunger is the dramatic thread running through all the stories -- hunger for personal expression, parental acceptance or love, or independence. The immigrant experience is a poignant paradox of being closely tied to one's family or home and yet feeling the fierce need to pull away in order to succeed. The ultimate hunger becomes not one extreme or the other, but in wanting both polar opposites to work at once. It is an impossible hunger to satisfy and yet continually churning at the core of every character.