Lan Samantha Chang: The Family Chao (A Novel)

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The Family Chao – Lan Samantha Chang – W.W. Norton – 9780393868074 – 320 pages – Hardcover – $29.00 – February 1, 2022. eBook versions available at lower prices.

This is a beautifully written and thoughtfully composed novel about three brothers in a Chinese American family living somewhat awkwardly in a small town in Wisconsin. It has elements of the picaresque, the humorous and a great deal of sadness and pain that suffuses all.

At the heart of the novel are the three sons of the family patriarch, Leo Chao, who with his wife established and operated the Fine Chao restaurant in this small heartland community for over thirty years. The mother and father are almost mythological characters, he being the large appetite materialist and she being the spiritual – almost mystical – counterpoint to his outsized public persona.

When he dies, he is presumed to have been a murder victim by the residents of Haven, Wisconsin, and consequently unwanted attention is turned toward the brothers, each of whom has attempted to carve out an individual identity separate from their parents. Each of them is suspect in their formerly quiet community – Dagou, now the restaurant’s boisterous chef; Ming, financially successful but emotionally stunted; and James, the youngest, who is a dreamy college student not at all suited to the family tradition.

The book is a wonderful homage, well crafted by this very talented writer to The Brothers Karamazov. Each of the sons must struggle to understand and cope with what happened to his father, and one becomes the public scapegoat in the story. Chang is never heavy handed in her approach, and you don’t have to remember your Dostoyevsky to appreciate The Family Chao completely.

This is a complex and compelling story of what it is like to be an immigrant family in the heart of the heartland. It is also an American story, and very much a universal one at that. I enjoyed Chang’s writing and her storytelling, the many intriguing characters so finely portrayed, and the mystery in the novel that is unveiled unexpectedly that quite deftly ties together the entirety of the family Chao. Lan Samantha Chang is a terrific novelist and we had an equally terrific conversation about this book, her writing and her sense of the world at large.

Lan Samantha Chang is the Director of the Iowa Writers Workshop and Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa. She is the author of a collection of short fiction and two novels and one book of nonfiction, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Author website is here.

Buy the book here.

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