Editorial Reviews

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.

The New York Times Book Review, Claire Messud
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 Washington Post Book World, Helen C. Wan
...a work of gorgeous, enduring prose.... Chang's writing is just plain good. 

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.

From Booklist October 15, 1998
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 , September 15, 1998
A wonderfully written debut collection focusing on Chinese immigrants to America and the troubled lives of their children. Chang concentrates on depicting with considerable insight and originality the 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. 

Choice, J.P. Baumgaertner, February 1999
With this volume Chang makes a strong contribution to the flourishing field of Asian American fiction by women. Her style is lucent, as direct and disarmingly simple as that of Fae Myenne Ng, and she ranges more widely and deeply than Amy Tan. 

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Michele Wucker, 8 November 1998
"Hunger" places Chang firmly among the group of novelists whose writing about lost homelands has received high acclaim: the Cuban-Americans Oscar Jijuelos and Christina Garcia, the Chinese-American Amy Tan, the Haitian-American Edwidge Dandicat, and the Dominican-Americans Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz....Chang is a talented writer with great promise. 

Margot Livesey, author of Criminals
Lan Samantha Chang writes superbly about the intricacies of exile and especially about women in exile, caught between the present and the past, their husbands and their children. Hunger is a wonderfully accomplished first collection from a writer whose work we'll be reading for many years to come.

Chicago Tribune, 24 January 1999
With clarity and deftness, Chang brings together the forces of war and magic, ghosts and family, in these spare and haunting tales that ask ordinary questions about that extraordinary emotion: love. 

Gish Jen, author of Mona in the Promised Land
Hunger mesmerized me, not only with its dead-on portrayal of immigrant life, but with its devastating depiction of the world of music. Here in riveting detail is the relentless struggle to produce beauty--Chang beautifully sets up for us the mania that is love, the life that is performance, the sorrow that is song. Many congrats on a powerful and affecting debut. 

Andrea Barrett, National Book Award-winning author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal
These radiant, heartbreaking, soul-touching tales form a working definition of all we hunger for. Lan Samantha Chang writes beautifully of the hungers of the heart: of desire, of ambition; of all we might be, and aren't; of all we most want, and can't have.

Janette Turner Hospital, author of Oyster
Lan Samantha Chang's writing is like a Chinese brush painting: delicate, spare, and deceptively quiet. The tumult of emotions not expressed seethes beneath the tranquil spaces, pressing against them, and the effect in the reader is like a series of silent implosions. These are poignant and haunting stories. 

Harvard Book Review, Kathleen Guico, Fall 1998
In her debut work, "Hunger," Chang imbues...mundane items with a deeper significance, epitomizing a man's passionate drive, a family's indelible bond, or a father's painful betrayal. This amazing ability, coupled with Chang's clear, crisp prose, makes the everyday world of Chinese immigrants depicted in her short stories and novella one of great intensity. 

Booklist, Joanne Wilkinson, 15 October 1998
In this haunting fictional debut, Chang presents a novella a five stories limning the immigrant experience....In spare, evocative prose, Chang meticulously details the burdens imposed by family bonds and the cultural confusion of immigrants. 

Book 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

Synopsis
With powerful intensity, Lan Samantha Chang explores the experience of being Asian American. 

From the Publisher
"Hunger" was shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction. 

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