Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$9.99$9.99
FREE delivery: Monday, May 22 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $7.12
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
88% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
85% positive over last 12 months
+ $3.99 shipping
84% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Wangs Vs. The World Paperback – June 6, 2017
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
Purchase options and add-ons
Charles Wang, a brash, lovable businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, has just lost everything in the financial crisis. So he rounds up two of his children from schools that he can no longer afford and packs them into the only car that wasn’t repossessed. Together with their wealth-addicted stepmother, Barbra, they head on a cross-country journey from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the Upstate New York retreat of the eldest Wang daughter, Saina.
“Highly entertaining” (BuzzFeed), this “fresh Little Miss Sunshine” (Vanity Fair) is a “compassionate and bright-eyed novel” (New York Times Book Review), an epic family saga, and a new look at what it means to belong in America. “When the Wangs take the world, we all benefit” (USA Today).
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
An October 2016 Indie Next Pick
A PopSugar Best Book for Fall
A BuzzFeed Incredible Book for Fall
A Nylon Amazing Book for Fall
A Bustle Book for Your Fall TBR List
A Millions Most Anticipated Book
A Frisky Book to Read for Fall
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEcco
- Publication dateJune 6, 2017
- Dimensions5.31 x 1 x 8 inches
- ISBN-101328745538
- ISBN-13978-1328745538
"Read Between the Lines: A Novel (Ms. Right)" by Rachel Lacey
From award-winning author Rachel Lacey comes a playful romance about a Manhattan bookstore owner and a reclusive author who love to hate―and hate to love―each other. | Learn more
Frequently bought together

What do customers buy after viewing this item?
Editorial Reviews
Review
New York Times Editors’ Choice PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction Finalist Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Selected as A Best Book of 2016 by: NPR • BuzzFeed • PopSugar • Refinery29 • Electric Literature • Self • Elle "A fresh Little Miss Sunshine." — Sloane Crosley, in Vanity Fair “Bright and funny…when the Wangs take the world, we all benefit.”—USA Today “Richly entertaining . . . Chang’s smart and engaging novel remains defiantly cheerful. Perhaps this is because its ultimate subject, across a colorful span of geographies and cultural settings, is love.”—The Guardian "Jade Chang is unendingly clever in her generous debut novel....As much as THE WANGS VS. THE WORLD is about Asian-American identity, it is also a sprawling family adventure compressed into a road trip novel. The result is a manic, consistently funny book of alternating perspectives as the Wangs make various cross-country stopovers in their 80s station wagon...[A] compassionate and bright-eyed novel." —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) “Sharply funny.”—New York Times "Fresh, energetic, and completely hilarious, The Wangs vs. the World is my favorite debut of the year." — Jami Attenberg, author of Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins "A moneyed Chinese-immigrant clan loses it all, then takes a healing, uproarious road trip across the United States." —Entertainment Weekly "With mischievous, Dickensian glee, Chang’s prose power-drives the appealingly dysfunctional family, now a disgrace to the wet dream of capitalism, through their postfall paces . . . Chang’s confident, broad-stroke, and go-for-broke style makes her fresh twist on the American immigrant saga of the woebegone Wangs one of 2016’s must-reads . . . You will laugh your ass off while learning a thing or two about buying into, and then having to bail on, the American dream. But mostly, you’ll get to savor, thanks to a wildly innovative plot twist, the I Chang of this diabolical dramedy: how it’s love, not money, that really makes the world, and all the people in it, go round."—Elle “It all comes crashing down for Charles Wang, so he and his family hit the road. This endearing debut is more fun than you’d expect from a trip with this backdrop.”—Marie Claire “On the brink of financial ruin, Charles Wang has a plan to start over in his homeland of China. But first, he has to reunite the fam via a madcap, cross-country road trip from their palatial Bel Air digs.”—Cosmopolitan "a highly entertaining debut novel . . . A meditation on what it means to be an immigrant in America, The Wangs vs. the World shows the often surprising ways hardship can bring a dysfunctional family closer together." —BuzzFeed "[Chang's] book is unrelentingly fun, but it's also raw and profane — a story of fierce pride, fierce anger, and even fiercer love....The Wangs vs. the World drives home the fact that there is no one immigrant experience — just humanity in all its glorious, sloppy complexity, doing its best to survive and thrive despite the whims of society and circumstance. With plenty of laughs, both bitter and sweet, along the way."&m —
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Ecco; Reprint edition (June 6, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1328745538
- ISBN-13 : 978-1328745538
- Item Weight : 10.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 1 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #93,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #630 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
- #2,406 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #6,723 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jade Chang has covered arts and culture as a journalist and editor. She is the recipient of a Sundance Fellowship for Arts Journalism, the AIGA/Winterhouse Award for Design Criticism, and the James D. Houston Memorial scholarship from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. The Wangs vs. the World is her debut novel. She lives in Los Angeles.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Chang tells us the story of a family whose financial security was ruined by the crash of 2008. They were a wealthy California family living the good life, never questioning the privileges which they enjoyed. Through a series of very bad decisions made by the patriarch of the family, Charles Wang, the family lost everything. Their palatial home, their cars, their bank accounts, the son's college career - all gone in the virtual blink of an eye.
It could be the story of any one of many families who suffered through that precarious period of the world's financial systems and came out the other side much poorer and perhaps wiser than they went in. But this is a very particular story of a particular family.
It is a family headed by immigrants. Charles and Barbra Wang are originally from Taiwan, where their own families of origin had been pushed by the Japanese or the Chinese Communists. Charles' parents had followed Chiang Kai-shek and he was born there. He had never set foot into China.
As a young man, Charles left his parents and migrated to America. He fell in love with a country which welcomed entrepreneurs and made it possible for them to make their fortunes. He proved adept in doing just that, but he never saw his parents alive again.
Not only did Charles make his fortune, he also married a beautiful woman, May Lee (Mei Li), a model. They had three children, two girls and a boy. Charles seemed to be living a charmed life. But just when everything seemed perfect, tragedy struck.
When the youngest child, Grace, was only two months old, her mother was killed in a helicopter crash at the Grand Canyon.
Back in Taiwan, Barbra, who had longed to marry Charles, heard about May Lee's death and immediately made plans to emigrate. Her plans came to fruition; she made it to California and married Charles.
At the time that we meet the Wangs, it is sixteen years later. The older daughter, Saina, has moved on to New York and had a successful few years as an artist but recently has suffered a setback when one of her shows was widely panned. The middle child, Andrew, who wants to be a stand-up comedian, is attending Arizona State. Grace, the youngest, is in high school and is the purveyor of a popular blog about fashion.
Once it is clear that the family is bankrupt, Charles' first thought is to get all his family back together again and so he piles his wife and younger daughter and all their remaining belongings into an old car he had previously given to their servant (she loans it to them for the trip) and they head out on a road trip to pick up Andrew in Phoenix and then go on to Helios, New York, to the farmhouse where Saina is now living. His second thought is to get back to China and claim his family's ancestral lands, lands that he has never seen.
We travel with the Wangs on that chaotic road trip as they learn about the country and about themselves. Somewhere crossing Texas, Charles meditates on this country which he once loved, the country which he feels has betrayed him.
America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles. A Great Wall? Ha! This country could never build itself anything as epic as that. America wanted to think of itself as a creator, but all it could do was destroy - fortunes, families, lives. Even the railroads needed the Chinese to come and build them.
I suspect he speaks for many disillusioned immigrants in those thoughts.
I found The Wangs vs. the World to be a very entertaining, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, and in many ways thought-provoking read. It's a book that brings a personal perspective to the catastrophic events of the 2008 financial crash. It is a saga that explores just what it is to be a part of a family and what it is to be a part of a country, a culture. As I said in the beginning, I think Jade Chang has a future as a writer.
The story of the Wangs is the story of the American Dream with all the good, the bad and the ugly. It is a testament to the power of hard work, ingenuity and opportunity for those willing to pursue it. It shines a light on the dark underbelly of greed and its corrupting force. And finally, it picks at so many of the strains of evil that course through American society and break us apart in our communities, hurt our hearts and undercut all that we work for. Chang zeroes in on consumerism, the over sexualization and lack of connectedness of our youth, the perfection paradigm of social media and the lies we tell ourselves about what it means to be successful. In the process Chang also highlights the transitory nature of wealth, our short attention spans, and the ways we convince ourselves that our personal happiness is of supreme importance and hang the consequences of our decisions. Each of the five Wangs exemplify these things in varying degrees, but each is unique.
For much of the story I felt like Chang was building these fascinating characters built by their immigrant status and the powerful forces of modern day American culture. The way modernity ravaged each character in unique ways was fascinating and I was really impressed with her writing and where she was going with her commentary… but then she just stopped going there. Maybe I felt that way because I have the common western sensibility that likes a trajectory and lessons and “closure” in my novels. And maybe Chang is more insightful in giving us real life with messy ends and death and no real answers that are helpful or satisfying, but there was such a sense of building momentum and she was doing such a grand job that I was honestly a little shocked to get to the end and find that there was no more. Perhaps the fault is with me for not getting it, and I am disappointed that I did not get it, because in so many ways it was clever and funny and original, but leaving me hanging made it a 3.5 star read for me.
Top reviews from other countries
Jade Chang does a brilliant job portraying the characters. She really gets inside all of their various heads so that we KNOW them. First of all, there's Charles, sunny even in the depths of adversity, who is in love with his family. Then there are the kids: Saina the artist, who's had two successful shows and one that bombed, Andrew, who's at college and wants to be a stand-up comedian, and 16 yo Grace, pulled out of boarding school, who has a successful style blog. What's remarkable about these three is their love for each other, and how well they get on, without ever being sentimentalised or boring. Then there's stepmother Barbra, who is remote from the kids, who still revere their dead mother (though Charles doesn't). She has taken tough steps to be with Charles and escape her Taiwanese poverty and wonders why she is sticking to him now they've lost everything. Her character must have been harder to write, but Chang pulls it off brilliantly. We see Barbra's point of view, and can sympathise with her. She softens towards the end of the book, and becomes closer to the kids. I like the fact that the Chinese in the book isn't translated. Chang does an excellent job of allowing us to glimpse the meaning. The peripheral characters are thoroughly realised too, including the fascinating but abominable Grayson, to whom Saina was engaged, her next boyfriend Leo, the black, orphaned child who is now an organic farmer, and so on.
Another thing to like about the book is the depth of knowledge of so many diverse topics. An economics professor has a rave about the 2008 financial meltdown. A bayou wedding party makes you feel like you're there eating crawdads. Casual racism is neatly encapsulated. The NY art scene comes alive. We are shown how a successful business may come undone, the old and new Chinas, what it's like to stand up at an open mic in a strange city, etc. All this at a romping pace that has you glued to the page. This really is a terrific book, and even if Chang never writes another thing, her place in literary history is assured.
It is as long as it is messy.
I did not manage to feel anything, whether love, empathy or even hate, for the characters
I never understood whether the frequent sentences in chinese were not translated, were the translation of the above or below sentence...
I tend to give as many chances as possible to all the books, out of respect for the writer, but I am sorry to say that it was an ordeal to go to the end....
The idea is great but is not well developed.












