By Justine Trinh
In so many ways, Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao is similar to her first novella, Hunger, which is her best-known work and still taught in Asian American literature classes throughout the United States. Both works deal with the symbolism of food/appetite and the intergenerational conflict between the first-generation parents who have given up everything for their dreams and their children, and the second generation, who bear the burden of paying back their parents for their sacrifices but ultimately never measure up. Yet while Hunger is defined by the controlled emotions and forced sterility necessitated by a father who attempts to control his daughters through their movements and sexuality, The Family Chao tackles these intergenerational issues through a discussion of angry and hypersexualized masculinity. Although Hunger was published twenty-four years before The Family Chao and despite Asian American scholarship dismissing these “filial angst” stories as cliché, the publication of The Family Chao shows that the same issues discussed in Hunger still haunt the second generation and deserve address.
The narrative follows the Chao family, who run the only Chinese restaurant in Haven, Wisconsin. The patriarch, Leo Chao, immigrated to America to make his fortune, where he met his wife, Winnie. Together, they have three sons: Dagou, Ming, and James. They project the heteronormative family of the American Dream with Leo as the breadwinner father, Winnie as the caregiving mother, and each son as exceptional in his own right. Dagou is the filial son who gives up his New York music dreams to come home to take care of his mother, Ming holds a financially successful job in Manhattan, and James is a first-year college student with dreams of becoming a doctor.
However, this ideal illusion fails to veil the problems within the family. Leo is tyrannical, verbally abusive, and controlling; Winnie is ineffectual against her husband’s domineering personality. The two older sons, Dagou and Ming, resent Leo. Dagou hates how his father controls every faucet of his life while Ming despises him for being Asian and therefore unable to give Ming an advantage in white America. James, the only son to express love towards Leo, is young and naïve, but lacks the same life experiences as his brothers. However, when Leo ends up dead in the freezer of their restaurant and his sons are murder suspects, the brothers must reckon with family secrets and the town’s racism, which comes to the forefront. The brothers, and by extension, the small Chinese American community, are branded as barbaric dog eaters and the uncivilized yellow peril.
This may sound very familiar: The Family Chao, after all, is a modern retelling of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Chang, however, is able to superimpose the basic elements of this classic novel onto a Chinese American community and make it unique and relatable to the Asian American experience of growing up in America. Chang takes these uncomfortable truths, elegantly shoves them in the reader’s face, and forces them to confront the discomfort that has been brewing beneath the surface.
Much to my shame, I could understand Dagou’s frustration of not being enough, his ugly feelings toward his father – the same father who constantly humiliates him by calling him a loser in front of the whole community– and his yearning for this hurtful barrage to end. I could feel my heart breaking when Ming admits his desire to be white and to belong, and this desire engenders a self-hatred he is honest about. Ming absolutely despises himself for being Asian, and “self-hatred [becomes] his meat and drink, self-hatred is the fuel of his emotional life, his life in the world, his soon-to-be adult life.” Yet despite being saddened by these sentiments, I am guilty of these feelings myself when I stare in the mirror echoing what Lisa Park writes in her essay “A Letter to My Sister:” “pretty/normal=big eyes, white.” Even sweet, young James is not excluded from Chang’s critique as he recognizes the control his family has on his life through food. Food is seen both as a form of love and control that indebts the child, and while he is aware of this contradiction, he does not fight against the notion both out of love for his family and because of the obedience ingrained into him over the years.
Yet despite the serious themes Chang tackles, she is still able to interweave relatable humor into the narrative; even the book’s vulgarity has nuance. I remember my jaw dropping in horrified amusement and mortification when Leo says, “We came to America to colonize the place for ourselves. That means spreading seed. Equal opportunity for fucking” before realizing my own parents say ludicrous things like Leo all the time. Like my parents, Leo is unable to empathize with his sons’ plight of growing up as Asian American and the pressures of the model minority myth, but his ideas are framed in such an absurd way that I could not help but laugh.
Asian American studies has cast the filial angst novel as a “foreclosed project” which erin Khuê Ninh argues against in her book Ingratitude: The Debt Bound Daughter of Asian American Literature. Asian American studies has often criticized these filial angst stories for portraying the Asian/Asian American parents as cruel and oppressive jailers, and as a result, the pressure to succeed is placed onto the parents rather than institutional racism and the model minority myth. Therefore, these stories are often dismissed. However, Ninh argues that these narratives need to be addressed because while it is true that both institutional racism and the model minority myth contribute to the pressure to succeed, the parents do play a role as well, and for that reason, these stories need to be recognized.
The Family Chao is unapologetically a filial angst novel. It grapples with hard feelings that the second generation undergoes daily, but Chang never dismisses these invisible wounds as whiny complaints nor does she ever portray them as overdone clichés. Rather, she breathes nuance and complexity into them while still bringing in humor. Perhaps like erin Khuê Ninh, we too must combat the notion of the foreclosed Asian American project, for such a project is far from foreclosed—the issues of inadequacies, self-hatred, debt still persist in Asian American communities, twenty-four years after the publication of Hunger.
The Family Chao is available from Barnes and Noble, Books Inc., The Last Bookstore, Loyalty Bookstore, Powell’s City of Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.