Analysis
Among the almost universally positive reviews that Lan Samantha Chang’s first book received, there were some that inevitably compared her to other Asian women writers, such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. It is true that Chang charts some of the same thematic territory as did those established novelists, especially the familiar Asian American conflict between parents and children, the Old World and the New. However, those reviewers who liken Chang to Bernard Malamud or James Joyce are perhaps more accurate. Like those masters of the modern short story, Chang is a consummate stylist, more concerned with tightly structured aesthetic form than with abstract social issues, such as marginality, cultural diversity, and the status of the immigrant.
Also like past masters of the short story, Chang is often oblique in her narrative presentation, frequently situating the heart of the story in places other than where the reader first assumes it to be. Thus, while the title novella Hunger seems to be about the ambitious hunger of the husband, it is really about the lyrically implied hunger of the wife; and while the prizewinning “Pippa’s Story” seems to be about the escape of the daughter into the future, it is really about the hold the mother has on her through the past.
The fact that Chang’s stories have been received with wide praise for their universality, lyricism, and formal control rather than for their cultural particularity and postcolonial political stance perhaps signals that, in the late 1990’s, the multicultural and the marginal are not praised for exoticism alone; if Chang’s reception is indicative, the focus in contemporary fiction seems to be on what unites us as human beings rather than what separates us as multicultural individuals.
Hunger
More than half of Chang’s first collection of stories is taken up by this novella of a Chinese immigrant violinist, his wife, and their two daughters. Although the plot focuses on Tian’s “hunger” to be a professional musician in America, the psychological interest of the novella centers on the narrator, his wife Min, on whom Tian’s passionate desire has the greatest impact. Tian’s account of swimming half a mile across the Taiwan Strait from mainland China to a refugee ship, holding his precious violin out of the water, is a central image of the hunger at the core of the story, but Min’s hunger, revealed indirectly by her simple, lyrical voice, resonates throughout the story and colors everything. Although Tian is obsessively passionate, first about playing the violin himself and then about compelling his daughters to learn to play, it is Min, hungry for the love denied to her by her self-obsessed family, who lives her life destined to receive very little of what her mother calls yuanfen—“the apportionment of love” destined for one in the world.
What also makes the story more than a domestic tragedy of one man’s unfulfilled immigrant ambitions is Min’s sense of the magic and mystery of human passion and transcendent reality; she is like a finely tuned violin, quiescent until her own passion is evoked. When Tian gives up on becoming a professional musician and loses his job at the school where he has been teaching, he turns his attentions to Anna, the oldest daughter, only to discover that she has a poor ear for music. By next directing his teaching attentions to Ruth, the younger daughter, he puts Anna in the same situation Min has endured, yearning for his love. Min identifies both with Anna, who feels shut out, and with Ruth, who hates the violin and wants to leave their closed-in world for someplace...
(This entire section contains 1401 words.)
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The story works itself out in classically tragic fashion: Ruth runs away; Tian dies unfulfilled; Anna seems destined to be alone; Min, ill with cancer, has only the past from which to gain sustenance. However, in spite of this darkness at the end of Hunger, what remains is Min’s endurance. Although she fears that there may come a time when no one will remember their lives, the story she has just told is a guarantee that this is not true.
“The Unforgetting”
This is Chang’s most explicit, almost parabolic, treatment of the familiar Asian immigrant story—the tension between hanging on to the traditions of the Old World and wholeheartedly embracing those of the New. The Hwangs are the prototypical Asian family, who move to the heartland of the Midwest to forget what they no longer need to know and learn what they do need to know. When their son Charles is born, they forget even more, replacing all useless memories with thoughts of him. Still, their memories persist, the world of their past growing larger and larger. When Charles decides to go away to school, the mother blames the father for making him like other Americans who leave their parents and create their own homes. In a bitter scene in which they blame each other for the loss of Charles, the couple break every plate in the kitchen. At the end of the story they both realize that the world they once knew now lives only inside them and that they are the end of that world. “They had no solace, and no burden, but each other.”
“The Eve of the Spirit Festival”
Chang again presents the conflict between generations in this story, although not in such stark terms as in “The Unforgetting.” The Chinese father has aspirations for academic promotion and invites his colleagues over for drinks, “watching the Americans and studying to become one.” As in Hunger, two daughters are involved: Claudia, who narrates the story, and Emily, who berates her father for mimicking the Americans. Although Claudia tries to be a good daughter, Emily puts on makeup, dresses in pants, and goes out with boys against her father’s wishes. After Emily has gone away to college and the father has died, the focus of the story shifts to the two sisters—the good daughter, who has stayed home, and the prodigal one, who has returned. In the climactic scene, Emily asks Claudia to cut off her long, black hair, and Claudia, who has scraggly, brownish hair, enjoys it. When she is awakened that night by Emily’s screams, Claudia understands that her father’s ghost will never visit her, but she lies awake waiting anyway.
“Pippa’s Story”
“Pippa’s Story” is the only story in Hunger that is not based on immigrants in America. Although the plot centers on a young woman who leaves her Chinese village to work for a wealthy family in Shanghai, the thematic heart of the story is the relationship between the girl and her mother, who stays home. The mother works in charms and is a powerful figure in her village; the girl thinks she will disappear if she cannot escape her mother’s shadow. When she leaves, the mother gives her a small stone and makes her promise to find the heart of the house where Wen, the man for whom she is going to work, lives and to hide the stone there. Although the girl does not know the story behind the promise, it is clear that even though she is leaving, the shadow of her mother accompanies her.
The daughter gets rid of the stone when she arrives, but later she hears the story behind it—how Wen desired her mother when they were young and murdered her father just before she was born. Although she insists that she will not keep her promise to her mother, that none of the story has anything to do with her, she begins to think that even her flight from her mother fits into some incomprehensible design. She finds the stone and, when Wen sexually assaults a friend, hides it in his bed.
The story mixes history and folklore; when the Communists enter the city, they execute Wen, as a result of either the mother’s curse or Wen’s political leanings. The narrator says her story is a small one compared with the larger events of the Communist occupation of China. However, in its delicate treatment of the past’s impingement on the present and in its complex combination of the political, the personal, and the supernatural, the story reflects, the narrator says, how our buried pasts are like ginseng roots, all with different shapes.
