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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intimate stories with resonant themes,
By Jayne MacManus (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Hunger (Mass Market Paperback)
"Hunger" is the opening novella and anchor for this collection of short stories. Chang is a graceful author with just the right touch of sensitivity and insight into the lives of Chinese immigrants in America. The special talent here is in the individual attention Chang gives to each family, each story. This is not a social history portrayal of the masses. While the family structures are seemingly uniform (husband and wife and one or two children) and the range of vocations unsurprising (restaurant workers, music prodigies, math and tech specialists), the characters are more emotionally dimensional than one would suspect.*** The theme of hunger is the dramatic thread running through all the stories -- hunger for personal expression, parental acceptance or love, or independence. The immigrant experience is a poignant paradox of being closely tied to one's family or home and yet feeling the fierce need to pull away in order to succeed. The ultimate hunger becomes not one extreme or the other, but in wanting both polar opposites to work at once. It is an impossible hunger to satisfy and yet continually churning at the core of every character.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
*~ i DeEpLy aDmiRe LaN SaMaNthA cHanG's WoRk ~*,
By A Customer
This review is from: Hunger (Mass Market Paperback)
Two words...Thank you! I myself am a Chinese-American girl and strive to be a writer. I have lately become more and more interested in looking into the work of Chinese-American authors, and found her book in the bookstore while trying to think of every Chinese last name I could! The book I found was the last copy they had, but I have no regrets in buying it! It's a book full of stories that really and truly capture what it's like for Chinese immigrants to come to America and find Americanized everything. To be honest, everyone loves the famous author Amy Tan...but I think Chang outdoes her in many aspects! Her style for one is beyond Tan's. While Amy Tan writes with primitive simpleness (basically, a way that any person can write) Chang writes intelligently and intellectually. She is someone who not only wrote this story for the surface meaning of it, but there is hidden depth and philosophy. What i liked the most, is that she didn't use the same basic Chinese stereotypes that every Chinese-American author usually uses such as the "ah"s at the end of every name, the overdone superstition of ghosts, etc. She reveals knowledge in her writing and is the first author who I have seen reveal the Chinese culture for what it REALLY is. I hope she writes more books, because I would buy them all in a heartbeat! Thank you so much. I strive to do what she has done for me! Enjoy every page of what she has written with the utmost admiration and respect.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous,
This review is from: Hunger (Mass Market Paperback)
These stories are wonderful--highly recommended. Chang's sentences are gorgeous, and her observations are moving. Her characters are well-rounded and complicated, and their plights are sympathetic--the kind of characters that stay with you. The stories are a fine balance of subtlety and utter stark clarity.
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