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Hunger:
A Novella and Stories
The
1999 Banta Award BOOK There are many kinds of hunger in the title novella. Tian hungers to be a musician but is not free to do so in his native China. He escapes by swimming with one hand the half-mile out to sea to a waiting refugee boat, holding his precious oilcloth-wrapped violin above the water with the other. But such grim determination is not enough to achieve his dream in America. Partly because he cannot master the intricacies of university politics, he loses his job teaching violin at an elite school in New York City and is reduced to waiting on tables to support his family. He tries to pass on his hunger to his daughter but what comes across is not the love of music but such anger and relentless ambition that he succeeds only in driving her away. Meanwhile, his wife, the narrator, helplessly bears witness to the destruction of the love and family harmony she has hungered for. The other five stories in this collection, some set in the Midwest, are variations on these themes. Because they come from different worlds, American-born children and immigrant parents cannot understand each other, although they ache to do so. Immigrants yearn to succeed in the new homeland of their choice but also cling to the past where their identities lie. Easy or reassuring resolutions are not possible here, and Chang does not insult her readers with false happy endings. The last story, the powerful "Pippa's Story," the only one set in China, offers a different view of being caught between two worlds. A young girl leaves her village for Shanghai to carry out her mother's mysterious act of vengeance on a wealthy family there. Once resettled, she tries to forget her mission but events on both a personal and a national scale conspire to ensnare her. Chang's writing is spare, even minimalist, yet with few, deftly chosen words, she conveys passion and beauty. Her insights into family dynamics are closely observed and painfully acute. Her images shimmer. This is a jewel of a book that will haunt the reader. The
AUTHOR Lan Samantha Chang was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Chinese immigrant parents and grew up there with her three sisters. Music played an important role in her family life. Her mother is a pianist and she herself learned the violin as a young child via the Suzuki method. But it was as a bookworm that Ms. Chang began to make her mark. She earned her first literary award in the seventh grade by checking out the most library books. She earned a bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies from Yale and, deciding she would be better off with a normal professional career ("the kind where you wear pantyhose") rather than with a riskier one as a writer, she enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. After one semester, she realized her mistake and switched to the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she earned an MFA. She went on to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow and taught there for three years, also earning a Truman Capote Fellowship. Other career highlights include the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship from the University of Iowa, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories for 1994 and 1996. She is currently at Princeton for a year of what the Humanities Council calls "studious leisure." Besides the Banta Award, Ms. Chang's first book has won the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award for Fiction and the California Book Award's Silver Medal, has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book prize and the PEN Center/USA West Literature Award, and was an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. 1999
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