Customer Reviews

Hunger.

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"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.

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.

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.

Lan Samantha Chang touched me with her profound stories in Hunger. The characters in this collection are starving for love, success and respect and said hungers manifest themselves in thought-provoking, dark dilemmas and endless sorrow. My favorite stories are "Water Names," "Pipa's Story," and "The Unforgetting." But it is the novella and book title that touched me the most. The story of a struggling violinist and how his failure affects his family enthralled me from beginning to end. Their problems as Chinese immigrants made the novella all the more compelling. Chang writes with beautiful, flawless prose and hers is a talent that transcends all genders. Her work reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto in that she, too, transmits the characters' emotions flawlessly. If you're in the bargain for thought-provoking short stories and novellas, I recommend Hunger most highly.

I once attended a lecture on the immigrant experience in America and one of the speakers posited that the type of experience an immigrant family would have depended on which type of immigrant they were: the sort who is running to something or the sort who is running away from something.

Both sorts populate Hunger: A Novella and Stories by Lan Samantha Chang. And, if these stories are any basis to go by, they refute the premise of the lecturer I heard that one day. The immigrant experience, as depicted by these stories, has little to do with what motivated the flight, and everything to do with the fact the immigrant is an island unto him/her self-a person who cannot be either a "citizen" of either whence they came or where they come to. This alienation and anomie is exemplified through various aspects of hunger throughout the text-hunger for love, for the past, far acceptance, for independence, for personal and/or professional "success".

These stories, like Chang's prose, are contained and spare yet rich in emotion, symbolism and emotional intensity. Through these few tales Chang is able to convey both a wide range of experience and attitude toward the immigrant experience as well as the psychological toll that such experience entails.

I have to admit that I have a predisposition towards appreciating oriental immigrant stories. I enjoy the primary players in the genre, such as Amy Tan and Gish Jen. Chang provides a nice counterpoint to their work as it is the polar opposite in terms of prose style and intensity-short, intense vignettes as opposed to richly textured, wide ranging more sedately paced prose. Both styles work and both are enjoyable. Chang may not be as accomplished as the others at this point, but this book provides strong evidence that she will be soon.

An excellent debut effort.

After reading this book I came back hopping to find other works by Samantha Chang. Until more of her works gets published, I will definitely read Hunger again.

I read HUNGER and was moved and amazed with the intricate detail of the thoughts and feelings of the subjects in the collection of short novella's.
The thoughts and inner feelings of the subjects were so brilliantly described I felt as though I could feel and understand just like any one of them.
The book is excellent and I recommend it to anyone!

Lan Samantha Chang offers an insightful view into the first generation immigrant experience from a mother's perspective. It's the first time I've seen an author use sophisticated prose and language to narrate (in the first person) the story of an immigrant who speaks no English and otherwise fails to communicate any complex thought to her family - her dauhgters and husband.
Her treatise of the husband's love of music and his violin - and the way this passion insidiously breathes through their family's history of abuse - is superb.

In the main story, Chang gives us a glimpse of a very private individual and his inability to come to terms with his daughter's development. It is a very well constructed view of immigrant life and the isolation it produces and the strenght of the characters in the novel to surpass their problems.

Chang's writing is comfortable and easy, like sitting down with a relative for a long chat. In this case, a long chat about what it was like to grow up in New York as an immigrant--the unsuccessful struggle of Min's husband Tian to fight against unspoken racism to become more than a waiter, the struggle for Min to want her daughters to succeed in this English-speaking world without losing her own ability to understand them, the struggle of finding a way to call anyplace "home." I savored every page....until I got to the last third of the book. It took me several chapters to realize that the novella had already ended and I was now in the head of a different immigrant (five short stories are tacked onto the end of the novella.) A bit disconcerting, especially as I hated to leave Min's story behind.