As I looked at my daughter’s face, I began to understand that to love another was to be a custodian of that person’s decline — to know this fate, hold onto it, and live.
Hunger: A Novella and Stories by Lan Samantha Chang (張嵐)
Professor Lan Samantha Chang is the program director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first female — and Asian-American — to hold the position. Her short stories, novellas, and novels generally center around Chinese-American or Taiwanese-American protagonists who find themselves trapped between two cultures, identities, and eras.
An exploration of distance and broken ties on both a familial and cultural level, Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger: A Novella and Stories is a haunting collection of stories that capture often tragic snapshots of immigrants’ lives as they settle into a foreign nation; left with only their longing for the grounded, familiar customs of home, they soon find that longing at odds with their desire to give their future children a better life — two ‘hungers’ that linger like ghosts over the novella’s protagonists.
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