“San” by Lan Samantha Chang opens with the betrayal of a father, leaving the family house as observed by his daughter, Caroline. Lacking any context for the reasons for his departure, the reader is informed that the father carries an umbrella that looks “gaudy and ridiculous” in his hands, yet is held “jauntily” without shame (126). Caroline remarks that the father had “scoffed” at Chinese superstitions warning that taking an umbrella without paying for it causes one’s life to fall apart (126). However, with the umbrella being a gift from her father, he ironically fulfills the very superstition he ignores. Overall, these opening scenes of defiant, naive optimism characterize him as a bold man that holds little regard for consequence.

Context: San is a Chinese word with a double meaning, with san (傘) meaning umbrella, san (散) meaning to fall apart. 

Moving back a few years in time, the story illustrates the instruction Caroline’s father had provided to her. From counting, to arithmetic, and later to the concept of probabilities, he nurtures Caroline’s precocious grasp of mathematics. However, Caroline knows innately that something is wrong. She observes that signs of “hard luck and good fortune” come upon the family “like sudden storms,” as quick to arrive as they are to vanish (129). Her father’s watch disappears, revealing a “pale stripe” on his “tanned wrist,” only for a new pair of “aquamarine slippers” to appear on her mother’s feet shortly after (129). Objects around the house mysteriously go missing, and the father always seems to be enthralled by something beyond the house, getting home at a later and later hour as he “drift[s] far” to search for “some intoxicating music,” with each mysterious journey seemingly costing him “more effort to recall us” (131).

Eventually, the revelation that her father is a gambler finally comes. In a climatic moment, the family loses the suitcase filled with things from China, their last tangible link to their homeland, prompting Caroline’s mother to break down, demanding when he will get it back. He responds with empty, placating promises, and the very same night, Caroline witnesses her parents’ act of intimacy, although she feels a deep sense of unease at its abrasive violence. She views her father moving in a “consuming” way that “frighten[s]” Caroline, thrusting against his wife as if “pass[sing] through her,” a force that fixates on a single ambition and devours all else– a scene almost reminiscent of Tian in Hunger (136). 

Two days later, paralleling the opening scene, he leaves the house with the umbrella. Left to survive on their own, Caroline and her mother make do with what they have, with Caroline continuing her pursuit of mathematics. An older Caroline eventually reflects that she sometimes understands the way her father saw “innumerable, luminous possibilities” in everything, yielding tragic insight into a man who was incapable of seeing the risks of his gambles, and would ultimately gamble away even his familial bonds for delusions of grandeur (139).

This insight resonates in Caroline’s loveless pursuit of mathematics: although she masters trigonometry, calculus, and linear algebra, she finds that “things fall apart” with “terrible slowness” and that true mathematics, like love, moves toward the “unexplainable,” where “centuries of scholars work to solve a single puzzle” and “the riddles matter most” (139). This reflects the change in her initial presumptions, from a system of order and control to the realization that increasingly advanced math moves toward the “unexplainable,” mirroring life’s slow, fated unraveling, where loss, love, and even her father’s choices follow their own inscrutable, inexorable course.

Thus, through the recurring motifs of the umbrella, themes of chance, and mathematics as a metaphor for inevitable collapse, Chang examines the allure– and cost– of the immigrant dream, seeing nothing but boundless possibility.