| NOTE: To temper my convoluted writing and encourage some level of brevity, this article will be split into 6 different parts: one for the titular novella and the other 5 dedicated to the short stories “Water Names,” “San,” “The Unforgetting,” “The Eve of the Spirit Festival,” and “Pipa’s Story.” |
A Different Portrait of the American Dream
By all accounts, this story is a rather strange one.
After all, most stories of the pursuit of the American dream end with neat arcs: a journey of mental fortitude, the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants, and a satisfying payoff audiences can savor.
Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger promises no such feast.
Telling the story of a dysfunctional immigrant family, the novella follows Min and Tian, an Asian couple in America whose turbulent marriage is shaped by Tian’s obsessive pursuit of the violin. Their children, Anna and Ruth, suffer under this roof, growing up under the exacting eye of their father’s ambitions and their mother’s docile role as a silent bystander.
The story that unfolds from these ruins is not the triumphant narrative readers might expect, but rather a tragic story of unfulfillment: a family haunted by inherited trauma even as they yearn for love and connection.
The Silent Wife
Narrated in first person, the “hunger” of each character throughout the story is fleshed out in stark clarity. Min, the voice that tells the story beyond the grave, hungers for love and belonging, bending to her husband’s whims and moods like a reed in a tempest. Meanwhile, Tian hungers for success and mastery of the violin, a drive so all-consuming that he pushes it onto his children, who in turn only hunger for his approval– attempting to vicariously realize their father’s dreams for but a sliver of his affection.
In a discussion with my peers, we kept spiraling back to the same question: Why on earth does Min stay so docile and compliant, enabling Tian’s destructive tendencies? At first glance, it is easy for audiences to scorn her lack of defiance, reading her as a complicit, powerless figure.
However, Chang complicates that reaction. It becomes evident through Min’s words and memories that the definition she has for love is a rather skewed one. For example, in the opening scenes of the story, Min’s mother defines yuan fen as the amount of love “destined for you in this world,” a notion that Min carries on to her marriage with Tian (23). Explaining to Anna that it was “fate” that brought Tian and herself together, she has fully accepted the idea of love as a fixed, immutable destiny one is bound by (70).
This fatalism is only compounded by traditionalist expectations, where Asian women are taught that to be a good wife is to be silent and self-effacing. And indeed, Min plays the role well, quietly altering dishes her husband dislikes, anticipating his moods, and appeasing his every want. When she cannot produce a son, she imagines herself “joining generations of women who lay awake in anger and confusion, trying to understand how to make their husbands happy again” (43), once again viewing herself as being trapped by an unchangeable fate she must inherit.
Finally, Min’s view of herself as a bystander is crystallized through one of the novel’s most devastating lines: “To love is to be a custodian of that person’s decline– to know this fate, to hold onto it, and to live” (62). Here, Min frames love not as an action in which she is an active participant, but as an act of witnessing, positioning herself as a fixed observer within her own life. As a result, she drifts through the story like a living ghost, allowing her husband’s desires and moods to control the entire household. Trapped within a cage of her own making, Min is condemned to the bequeathed obligation of watching her loved ones morph into grotesque versions of themselves– all while bearing the knowledge that she is powerless to intervene.
Icarus with a Bow
Meanwhile, Tian embodies the archetype of the doomed genius, driven skyward by ambition only to be engulfed by excessive hyperfixation.
Tian playing the violin is described as something “wild and foreign” to Min, bow dropping like a “hawk plung[ing] with sudden swiftness to its victim,” music playing with a “violence” that leaves the violin “uncaged” as it “attack[s] the air” (26). The animalistic diction signifies Tian’s uncontrolled obsession, a deep-rooted nature to prey and demand that twists an act of beauty and expression into feral greed.
Meanwhile, Min realizes she married a stranger, wondering, “How could I have chosen such an unforgiving man?” (26). Even Tian recognizes the corrosive nature of his obsession to some extent, remarking, “Sometimes I’m afraid of my music, too. I think that’s the reason I married you,” as if hoping a wife could mitigate his mania (29).
At some point, there is an ambiguous scene with a tuning fork that mysteriously ends up in Min’s pocket– later revealed to be the possession of another musician. Whether it was stolen by Tian is unclear, but the item symbolizes the weight of Tian’s obsession, a metaphorical burden Min is forced to carry while having no say in the matter.
Through this marriage, neither party finds satisfaction. Even Tian, who manages to chase his dreams in America, likens finishing a recital to childbirth: “All that waiting, hoping, building” only for there to be “emptiness” (32). This strange word choice illustrates the tragic nature of his doomed pursuit: no matter how much he attempts to fill the void through artistic strivings, he still feels empty.
Then why does he keep pushing himself so?
Only in the end is a picture of his motivations made complete: before going to America, Tian is forced to make a fateful choice. His father tells him that should he choose such a disgraceful path, Tian has “no right to ever think about [his family] again” and would be renounced as a son (34). Tian grimly accepts this fate, abandoning his family, leaping into the sea, and boarding a refugee ship to America. From that moment, the hunger to make his loss matter is implied to ignite the obsession that will define him.
Nevertheless, the irony here is stark. Tian’s father would not stand for his dreams of the violin, insisting that his son uphold the duty of being a scientist for which he had been raised. Tian chose to defy these suffocating expectations, living in exile from his family to pursue his art. Yet in adulthood, he mirrors the very tyranny he fled, disregarding his own children’s desires and treating them as vessels through which his abandoned dreams might be secondhandedly realized.
Therefore, in striving to outrun his past, Tian perpetuates its cyclical nature, reconstructing within his children’s lives the very world he longed to escape.
Daughters Fed to the Dream
Lastly, both of Tian’s daughters are pushed to fulfill dreams that are not their own, though the weight of his attention falls unequally.
From the beginning, Tian displays blatant favoritism toward his second daughter, Ruth. Holding her as an infant, his face turns “dreamy and tender and innocent” while Ruth “fussed and cried with the certainty of a daughter who knows she is essential to her father’s happiness” (49). He reveals that Ruth bears a resemblance to his old family, a significant revelation in the story that causes Min discomfort, for how could she ever compete with the life Tian left behind? For Tian, Ruth is living proof that the past he abandoned still exists, as if there’s still a way to redeem himself by getting it right this time.
Anna, the eldest daughter, meanwhile, can only earn his notice by playing the violin, a task she does eagerly for her father’s affection. But when it is revealed she is tone-deaf, Tian abandons her as easily as he once instructed her, turning all his intensity and hopes onto Ruth– now bewildered as to why the father who once spoiled her has grown so stern.
As Ruth gradually begins to find painstaking success in the violin under her father’s education, Tian’s love turns controlling: he demands to know who is taking Ruth to school when he learns she is not riding the city bus and even sleeps on a chair outside her door to ensure she does not escape.
Yet his efforts only intensify Ruth’s resistance. Min observes that, “She had a passion for wandering that grew the more her father tried to keep her home”, a flowering independence that blossomed the more her father’s love tried to constrict her (82). Ruth herself insists on her independence, highlighting a cultural divide by stating, “I’m American, not Chinese!” (82).
To provide some context into Chinese culture, under filial piety, children are essentially expected to obey their parents without question. But, of course, Ruth has been raised in an environment with no such values. Min, weary, concludes that the only way to keep Ruth close is by “bartering permissiveness for her continued presence” (82). The willfulness in Ruth, Min notes, “ran in her blood” (82).
In contrast, Anna responds to Tian’s rejection with careful silence. Having once captured his fleeting approval, she becomes obedient and meek, cautious to never to provoke him. “I’m not like Ruth,” she explains later on, “I can’t afford to play fast and lose the only family I’ve got left. I’m not special enough for that” (109). After all, in Tian’s household, one daughter is smothered by his twisted love while the other starves for it.
The consequences of this conditional love carry on into the sisters’ adulthood. Ruth, having been restricted by Tian’s for years, seeks independence through rebellion– constant exploration, delinquency, and ultimately, running away from home. Anna, neglected and ignored, conversely, turns to the past for answers her parents never provided, earning a PhD in Asian Studies and trying to piece together the story of her own origins.
More devastatingly, both daughters inherit a highly dysfunctional view of love. Ruth marries Caleb, an older man that Min never meets, claiming that she doesn’t “trust” nor “understand” the feeling of love (107). Anna quietly rebuffs the advances of a close friend, “refus[ing] to meet his eye,” not trusting sincere affection even as it stares her in the face (115).
And hence, the cycle of dysfunction continues.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Hunger highlights the common wounds that fester within families of the Asian diaspora: the weight of expectations and inherited familial dysfunction, worsened by cultural and linguistic divides.
It also captures the concealed nature of such experiences, generational pain left unspoken. When she finally passes, ghost still tethered to earth, Min laments the fact that no one on earth will remember their lives.
But through Hunger, Lan Samantha Chang lends Min the voice she was denied in life: the voice of a wife, mother, and a ghost that haunts the pages posthumously, tethered to the earth by a gnawing hunger left unsatisfied.
Fittingly, perhaps, Hunger itself is a tale that offers no satisfying closures, subverting the quixotic American dream with an unfulfillment that survives the story, a hunger shared by the conjoined cry of generations, ravenous and alive. Ultimately, what lingers after the last page is not a romanticized catharsis but merely hunger in another form, reflecting the hollow, ghostly ache that outlives the people and pages it consumes.
After all, for some ghosts, hunger may never be satisfied.
| Hunger, by Lan Samantha Chang ~201 pages Genre: Literary Fiction, Diaspora Literature Themes: Family, generational trauma, identity, belonging, alienation, loneliness California Book Awards’ Silver Medal for Fiction, Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, numerous awards for individual short stories. |
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