Hunger: A Novella and Stories

These stories are wonderful--highly recommended. Chang's sentences are gorgeous, and her observations are moving. Her characters are well-rounded and complicated, and their plights are sympathetic--the kind of characters that stay with you. The stories are a fine balance of subtlety and utter stark clarity.

Chang's stories are about love, memory and all the things that remain unspoken within families. The stories beautifully evoke the wrenching pain of leaving home--the pain of immigrant Chinese parents starting anew in America and the pain of their children, whose inevitable departures underline their parents' rootlessness and loss.

In the main story, Chang gives us a glimpse of a very private individual and his inability to come to terms with his daughter's development. It is a very well constructed view of immigrant life and the isolation it produces and the strenght of the characters in the novel to surpass their problems.

I really enjoyed Hunger. It was refreshing in its use precise, knife-like imagery and I loved the gaps that appeared between the people, small spaces that crumbled into ravines--the natural disintegration between wives and husbands, children and parents, language itself--all these are richly and painfully explored here. I think it is different from the other asian american writers I have read so far in that it seems to well from that painful blank spot in our childhoods, the place where so many things happen and are unspeakable because they seem unsolvable. She offers no easy solution to the dilemmas at hand but explores the possibilities through each character, man, woman, child. No one's viewpoint is disregarded. It is not merely the mother and daughter speaking. It is wider and deeper than this. Lastly, it brings in the world of music most vividly and honestly. Hunger, for me, rings true.

These stories are engaging, moving and beautiful. The prose is evocative, creating visual images with just a few words that draw you in and make the stories come alive. The characters could be any of us, as they struggle to follow their hearts while they are grounded in a sometimes invisible web of relationships that confine them yet give them strength. This was a hard book to put down.