Poured Over: Lan Samantha Chang on The Family Chao,,

“But I do feel like I was on a quest as a writer, for my work to get bigger. I just wanted it to contain a larger portion of the world than it started off with. … I tried to make it large in its emotional scope, as well as in the amount of action that happens in it.” Lan Samantha Chang did, in fact, have as much fun writing our February 2022 B&N Book Club pick, The Family Chao, as we had reading it. She joins us on the show to talk about her post-immigrant novel, The brothers Chao themselves and the debt they owe to The Brothers Karamazov, wanting to throw away the rules of writing she had been taught, Philip Roth’s fiction, a dog called Alf, and more. Featured Books: The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes of Poured Over land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and wherever you listen to podcasts.

From this episode:

B&N: This book is much more plot driven than your earlier work. So what did you learn writing this book, balancing character and plot in a new way?

Lan Samantha Chang: That is such an interesting question. I mean, at the risk of sounding a little like fiction nerdy about it, I had a draft of this that had blown up to 500 pages. And what it mostly was, was character stuff. And it was similar to the kind of characterization that I learned when I was learning to write: take a character, describe their feelings and thoughts, and you plunge into their past and talk about that a little bit. And then at some point, I had a major realization that the book was out of shape, that had no shape. The plot was there..in order to even see the plot, I had to trim away a ton of what I had. And that was fascinating to me….I was trying very hard to entertain myself…And I also want to do something that people don’t usually write at universities, I want to write a book that’s lively, and that has, you know, humor in it, and a lot of dialogue and a storyline that moves along. And it was a real pleasure. And what I discovered is that, you know, the, the model for this book is all of those things and was written in the late 19th century, this kind of work is very traditional in some ways, and yet people are nervous about doing it.

B&N: I think one of the questions that you’re asking is really important. And it’s not something that stories about immigrant families often ask, and we’re going to give up a tiny bit of information in that dad dies. And the question you’re really asking is, are you still an immigrant if your immigrant parents died? I can’t think of a time where I’ve actually really had that question put in front of me by a novel.

Lan Samantha Chang: Right? You know, I think of this as a post immigrant novel. There are a lot of novels right now that describe the immigrant experience; typically, you know, one of the parents assimilates successfully and the other just not; the child for a long time has to become the adult….That’s a story, it’s an American story, and I think it’s gonna be around forever. And that’s great. I am writing about something entirely different, which is okay. All that is over. It’s already happened. Everybody’s sort of moved on in their life. The parents have started a business and they’ve done okay with it and, you know, decades have passed. What becomes of the children, what do they retain from their parents? What metabolic memory of this transplantation from another country to this country? Do the children carry with them into their adult lives away from this seminal incident of the parents coming here? And you know, it’s really interesting to write a story about Asian immigrants undergoing this post immigrant experience. Because even though Dagao and Ming and James are growing up, they’re going to carry whatever legacy they have into a life that’s fully American at this point. They’re surrounded by a culture that may not see them as assimilated. The culture that they live in may look at them and still see them as foreigners. And it’s one of the fascinating things about being an Asian American person, I tried to describe that in the book, the idea that you are seen as one thing, and you feel another thing. So in the first half of the book, the characters interact with each other, and they’re their own community. And they see each other and their flaws and their strengths as a community, in a benign way, ignored by the town where they live. In the second half of the book, though, after Leo’s death. The town becomes, for various reasons, highly aware of this family. In fact, it goes viral online, you know, the story of the family goes viral….