THE FAMILY CHAO

Featured on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Reading List
A Vogue Best Book of the Year
One of Literary Hub’s and The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2022
A Goodreads Readers’ Most Anticipated Mystery of 2022

“Family drama, murder mystery, love story, The Family Chao is an oftentimes funny and sometimes sad portrait of a Chinese American family who runs that most ubiquitous of institutions: the Chinese restaurant. With nuance and slyness, wit and empathy, Chang turns the desires and deceits of one unhappy family into a moving and compelling saga of that classic American illness: ambition.” –Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed

“A Dickensian drama of family conflicts and intrigues; an insightful comedy of the American immigrant experience, and of a small town’s inner workings. Chang’s creation of characters through dialogue is worthy of a great playwright.” –John Irving, author of Avenue of Mysteries

“A playful literary romp with a serious heart. Ostensibly it’s a murder mystery…but it’s also an exploration of genre, of literary types and stereotypes, and the impact of these types on the hopes and dreams of its characters… The action soars… Chang’s narrative [is] operatic and subversive.” –May-Lee Chai, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[A] sizzling…bravely unsentimental murder mystery about a Chinese American family in small-town Wisconsin.” –Richard Lipez, Washington Post

“The story culminates in a trial that becomes a stage for broader debates over obligation, morality, and family. But Chang is excellent at exploring this at a more intimate level as well. A later plot twist deepens the tension and concludes a story that smartly offers only gray areas in response to society’s demands for simplicity and assurance. A disruptive, sardonic take on the assimilation story.” –Kirkus Reviews (starrred review)

1. Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao is rife with lost possessions: Alf, the blue carpetbag, and the jade ring, to name a few. What else was lost? How do these lost items progress the plot? What is their symbolic function?

2. Why is Katherine’s appetite for Chinese food full of “complications” that are “played out in the real world, not in her palate”? (p. 81) How does this compare to Ming’s rejection of Chinese food? What does this suggest about the relationship between food and belonging? Are there any foods or meals in your life that help you perform particular identities?

3. The Family Chao is divided into two parts: “They See Themselves” and “The World Sees Them.” How do these sections differ in terms of tone, narrative voice, and subject? Who is “the world”? Who are “they”? How do both interrelate? What does this distinction imply about your presence as a reader?

4. To what extent does the aphorism “Like man, like dog” (p. 61) capture the novel’s exploration of desire? How do dogs appear throughout the novel, and what might this motif signify?

5. How does the idea of sacrifice resonate throughout The Family Chao? What does each character sacrifice? For whom? With what intentions? In what social, political, and economic contexts? How do your experiences shape your emotional connection to each character’s struggles?

6. Ming tells James that “America is not a democracy, it’s not a place of opportunity . . . if you can’t choose to be white” (p. 94). How does The Family Chao’s narrative uphold this statement?

7. From her hospital bed, Winnie asks Dagou, “If you don’t love your father, how can you begin to love the world?” (p. 111) How does this interaction explore themes of familial duty and loyalty? How do protagonists define themselves through family? How do different characters’ understandings of love shift throughout the novel? In what way does your experience of love influence your reading?

8. In her blog, Lynn asks, “Will the jury believe a flawed but heartfelt Asian man?” (p. 273) What does Lynn’s firsthand blog offer the reader? In what way does her perspective of the trial differ from its media portrayal? How do these differences engage with Fang and James’s discussion of the children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers? What might this suggest about the relationship between race and criminal justice?

9. Deciding on Dagou’s guilt, Judge Lopate asserts that “We are not merely victims of fate” (p. 277). Can you think of examples from the novel that either support or undermine Lopate’s claim? What literary techniques does Chang use in this regard? How do you interpret the role of fate in your life?

10. What do you make of O-Lan? How do you relate to her motivations? Do you feel empathy? Anger? Understanding? To what extent is O-Lan the most autonomous character? How might O-Lan’s character tie into the novel’s wider themes of visibility and invisibility?

11. What do you make of the relationship between James and Alice? What drives their interest in each other? How does their connection develop over the course of the novel? Why does Alice end the relationship?

12. James lets O-Lan escape because “It is more terrible to be a daughter of Leo Chao—worse to be his Chinese daughter than his American son” (p. 271). How does James’s recognition, and the novel more generally, explore the intersections of race and gender?

13. In confession to Alice, James says, “We’re all guilty. We let this happen under our watch. We let him mistreat her and we let one us of do something unconscionable” (p. 274). Who is “guilty,” and of what? To what extent do we all share in this guilt?

14. The novel ends as O-Lan, gazing at the desert’s “dream of tranquillity,” recognizes that her siblings share “the blood of the thief, the pioneer and the marauder, the yearner and the usurper” (p. 296). How do these archetypes influence your read of the novel? Does this ending offer any form of closure? Why?

Oprah Daily Interview by Leigh Haber

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

Under Lan Samantha Chang’s mentorship, a new generation of writers has emerged.

When Lan Samantha Chang was appointed director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2006, she became the first female and the first Asian or non-white person to head the program since its founding in 1936. The four directors who preceded her were all white men, and while it counted among its student and faculty alumnae such renowned writers as Flannery O’Connor, Robert Frost, and Raymond Carver, it had a reputation for insularity.

That began to change under the directorship of Chang’s writing teacher, Frank Conroy, but when Chang took over, her goal, she told O Quarterly, was to “create a more aesthetically, culturally, racially diverse program” in terms of students, faculty, and the kinds of writing considered for acceptance to the program. “I was really interested,” she says, “in finding voices that would reflect our changing country.” One such voice, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie author Ayana Mathis, an Iowa grad and ex-faculty member whose book was a 2012 Oprah’s Book Club selection, told us: “In my cohort in 2009, which was early in Sam’s tenure, there were only three Black women, which was in itself unprecedented then. But by the time I left Iowa as a professor in 2018, the program was a much truer reflection of literature in this country. There were so many Black students from the U.S. and other parts of the world—the Caribbean, Ghana, Botswana, Nigeria, etc.—Latinx students, Asian students. Sam made it her mission to ensure the Workshop drew the best and brightest, which can’t truly happen if only one sort of person is admitted.” Yaa Gyasi, an Iowa alum and author of the novels Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom, put it this way: “Lan Samantha Chang taught me the importance of being fiercely protective of your writing life, of keeping the work central, even as other things start to make demands. I wouldn’t have finished Homegoing without her.”

Chang also wanted to foster a climate not of competition but of cooperation, which meant leveling the funding process so all students got the same amount of financial support. Previously, the amount of aid students received depended on what faculty thought of their work, but under Chang, that changed. She says that “this was important to free people up to do more innovative work—to write what they really wanted to.” The program began to encompass writers of science fiction and fantasy, and other, more experimental work. “This was necessary,” Chang felt, “because Iowa is the first and in many ways the seminal creative writing program in the country, so it’s essential we reflect not only America’s growing diversity but also the complex mix of writers and cultures that are now our country.”

One of those writers is Chang herself, whose new novel, The Family Chao (Norton), is a harrowing, mysterious, and at times hilarious reimagining of The Brothers Karamazov. In it, a Chinese American restaurateur in Wisconsin is murdered, and one of his sons is accused of the crime.

Chang believes teaching has helped her grow as a writer. For the new book, she says, “I was inspired by my students, freed by the gradual recognition that I no longer had to strictly adhere to all the rules of writing that had been taught to me by my professors.” She says: “There’s a cross-pollination of words and thoughts and ideas that takes place in our community that makes possible the evolution of a literary generation.”