Hunger: A Novella and Stories

Rating:
Summary: Intimate stories with resonant themes
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: An emotional and musical ride
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: promising, but not fully realized
Review: (Note: I actually wanted to give this 2 1/2 stars, but it wasn't an option.)

First I want to emphasize that there are many positive things about this book. Chang's prose is intelligent, restrained, never overwritten. Her characters are earnest and sympathetic, and her first-person narrations often have great feeling. Occasionally there are passages of memorable beauty, like her description of Tian escaping to the refugee ship in the novella, or the soldier killing Wen in the last story.

On the negative side, too much restraint can be a bad thing. Chang takes few risks, and her language and sentence-making aren't distinctive or extraordinary, compared to some of her contemporaries. While her characters were believable, their behavior also felt predictable. I wished for more variety and surprise.

Incidentally, the novella is so much better than the stories I wonder if her strength is in longer forms, such as novellas or novels. I expect and hope she'll do better work in the future.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent debut effort.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: HUNGER: Incredibly detailed.
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful collection!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A good start
Review: There is no doubt that Chang is a much better writer than Amy Tan in terms of language and plot. I think the title novella is wonderfully crafted, and full of fresh images and surprises. However, the other stories reduce the book's overall power by recycling the same themes (like Amy Tan's books subsequent to JLC) of Hunger. If only Chang could have the inventiveness of Ha Jin, she would be a major talent.

Rating:
Summary: "...how long must we wait to outlast sorrow?"
Review: This is by all means one of the few most beautiful and crafted I have come across in a while. The rich and quiet style of Chang's prose draws the reader deeply into an place where constrained madness leads to an isolated sorrow. Brilliant in its sweet and inevitable sadness.

Rating:
Summary: *~ i DeEpLy aDmiRe LaN SaMaNthA cHanG's WoRk ~*
Review: 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.