{"id":36130,"date":"2004-10-28T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-28T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36130"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:00:52","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T19:00:52","slug":"issue-55-a-conversation-with-lan-samantha-chang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-55-a-conversation-with-lan-samantha-chang\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 55: A Conversation with Lan Samantha Chang"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in Willow Springs <\/em>55<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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OCTOBER 28, 2004<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Brian O’Grady and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH LAN SAMANTHA CHANG<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Lan<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: University of Iowa<\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Lan Samantha Chang was born to Chinese immigrants,\u00a0<\/strong>who left China when the communist government came to power in 1949. Her parents moved to the small Midwestern city of Appleton, Wisconsin. Chang said that since her Midwestern youth, she\u2019s \u201cconstantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents\u2019 experiences.\u201d Her books\u2014a collection of stories, <\/em>Hunger (1998), and the novel <\/em>Inheritance (2004)\u2014demonstrate a desire to not only learn about and replicate her family and cultural history, but also to discover more about how culture and family relate to identity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale, an MPA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop\u2014an experience she said was \u201cthe best thing I ever did.\u201d She is currently the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Chang was interviewed over lunch at the Silver City Grill, a restaurant in the Ridpath Hotel, downtown Spokane, Washington. Before the interview, we discussed politics, moving, then her writing process.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ADAM O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: What does an \u201con\u201d writing week look like for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG<\/strong>: I\u2019ve been fortunate to be able to get up and write right away. So, an \u201con\u201d week for me would have me waking up in the morning with very little interaction with people and working for three or four hours\u2014until my mind gets tired. For a long time, I lived in a studio apartment, so it was basically twelve feet from my bed to my writing desk. I kind of liked that. I felt like my life was focused in a way it no longer is. When I \ufb01rst moved to Cambridge\u2014because of the high price of real estate\u2014I wrote in my o\ufb03ce at school. I think writing at school slowed me down, because of the internet. I would turn on the computer and worry that somebody had written me an e-mail; that would take up a few minutes and divert my mind. When I\u2019m really \u201con,\u201d I write before I check my e-mail. And I\u2019ve organized my life so the e-mail is at school and I don\u2019t have access at home. After I started living with somebody in my studio apartment, it was hard to work at home so I worked at school. I think that\u2019s one of the reasons the last part of my novel took so long to write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRIAN O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: Did you move as you were \ufb01nishing Inheritance?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I moved constantly while I was writing the novel. I wrote the \ufb01rst draft of the novel in California. Then I moved to Iowa City for seven months. I moved to New Jersey for about a year. One month, I lived in Wyoming. That was my o\ufb03cial residence, because I was between apartments at the time. Then I moved from there to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, then I moved to Iowa City for a year, then I moved back to Cambridge and \ufb01nished it there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: With so much moving around, how long did it take to complete the novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Seven years. And I probably lost a year to those moves. Every time I moved, I lost at least two months. One month to pack up, the other to get settled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY: Did that throw your writing o\ufb00?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: It didn\u2019t throw my writing o\ufb00\u2014teaching threw me o\ufb00. Starting a new teaching job can disrupt my rhythm, depending on the intensity of the experience. Another thing that disrupts me is changes in my non-writing life. Getting married, that was a disruption. But other writers I know say it\u2019s possible to make these adjustments and \ufb01gure out a way to get the work done. I think the challenge for writers is \ufb01guring out how to write and live at the same time. That\u2019s why graduate school is great. Even though you don\u2019t realize it, you have so much time. It\u2019s really wonderful. Later, you look back and think \u201cLord, I could\u2019ve done so much more.\u201d I could be wrong, but in general, that seems to be the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: In the novel, Inheritance<\/em>, people move a lot, too. Do you think that\u2019s related to your real life?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I think that because of the material I covered in the novel, moving was a structural challenge I had to overcome as I wrote. My characters were born in the eastern coastal area of China, then they moved to in- land China, then to the eastern part again but to a di\ufb00erent city, then Taiwan, then two di\ufb00erent parts of the United States. I think that was a typical pattern for a person born of that era and of that particular class or group. There\u2019s a whole group of immigrants to the United States who left China in the late 1940s or even 1949, when the communists came to power, moved to Taiwan, then came to the United States for their educations. And they all know each other; it seems like they do anyway. Whenever I run into their children, it always turns out they had some- thing in common with my parents. It was a little diaspora. Their lives were highly mobile. My mother, for example, moved 26 times before she was 18. After that, she moved to the United States, met my father and settled in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Are they still there?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: They\u2019re still there. I think that\u2019s because my mother needs to feel like she belongs to a place. Although she\u2019s never said so in so many words, I think their moving around so much when they were young has made them appreciate being in one place, whereas I grew up in Wisconsin, was born and raised in Wisconsin, went to high school in Wisconsin. And since then, I\u2019ve constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents\u2019 experiences. But I think it\u2019s more that I\u2019ve followed my writing opportunities, and I haven\u2019t had any control\u2014but no, that\u2019s not true: it\u2019s not that I haven\u2019t had control; it\u2019s that I\u2019ve chosen to fol- low the opportunities with nothing to tie me down. Until now. Now I\u2019m married. Now I work in Cambridge. We\u2019ve moved to Somerville, bought a place to live. And we still don\u2019t feel tied down. We feel like we could move. We feel like we could still be free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Did Inheritance mirror your own family\u2019s history?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: It\u2019s not a family history. In fact, there\u2019s almost nothing in the book that happened to my family. But my father\u2019s brother was actually a communist. And my father did \ufb01nd out about it sort of accidentally. Not in the same way Li Ang discovers his brother\u2019s a communist. What happened to my father was, he and his brother spent some time traveling when they were young, for college, because the Japanese had encroached upon the north and had occupied Beijing, where they were from. People left the occupied territories in groups, and one of the groups was an educational movement. The universities tried to move to southwestern China, where the new capital was, and form their own interim, wartime university. My father was part of that university. So he left home pretty early on. But his path led him away from his brother, to Taiwan. My father wasn\u2019t a communist but he wasn\u2019t a nationalist, either. He was apolitical, so he left China because he thought there would be upheaval and trouble when the communists took over. There was a period from 1949 until the 1980s when China was basically out of reach to the average person who didn\u2019t live there. My father had no news of his family at all. Then when Mao died, the country began to slowly open up. My father found news of his family and went to visit them, at which point he learned his brother had died. And he also came to understand that his brother had been a very active communist party member. He returned to China in the early 1980s, and when he was there, while looking at some publication, he saw a list of high-level communist o\ufb03cials and saw the name of a guy he knew growing up, his brother\u2019s best friend. And he realized that somehow the two of them had become communists together. This was so interesting to me\u2014because I knew so little about my father\u2019s family\u2014that it worked into my mind. I was writing about a country divided by politics and war, and it seemed that writing a book about a divided family would be an accurate view. I wanted to write about the intersection between something very large and a very intimate story, so that was one of the ways I was able to access such an intersection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: While Inheritance<\/em> might not be a \u201cpolitical\u201d novel, it has a de\ufb01nite interest in politics in so many ways\u2014family, sexual politics\u2014but also the politics of immigration. How did the political changes in China a\ufb00ect the families and eventually push them to America?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: That is something that has happened as long as immigrants have been coming to the United States. Pressure\u2014often political\u2014in their home country pushes a people out in search of a better life, and, as I said, I think my parents belonged to a certain wave generated by civil war, the fall of nationalism, and the rise of communism. That\u2019s interesting to me. I think about all immigrant writers, especially the wave of Jewish writers after World War II\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY: I wanted to ask you about that. You mentioned in an interview that you had a real interest in second generation Jewish immigrants.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: When I was \ufb01rst learning to write, I was deeply in\ufb02uenced by a Bernard Malamud story called \u201cThe Magic Barrel.\u201d I don\u2019t know why the story stuck with me as much as it did, except that there\u2019s a deep sense of longing there. In the story, Leo Finkle\u2019s parents are both dead, and there\u2019s a sense that, while he\u2019s living alone, he needs to move on, and yet he doesn\u2019t know how to \ufb01nd somebody with whom to do that. I think that sort of isolation, cultural isolation, a\ufb00ected me, as did the character Pinye Salzman, a sad marriage broker who smells like \ufb01sh and has an unpleasant home life, who is trying to work miracles for this young man and eventually does. The fairy tale quality of the story seems to have combined the contemporary life of New York at the time with a sense of long ago and far away. It speaks of the idea of an \u201cold country.\u201d The emotional resonance of post World War II Jewish writers really speaks to me. Phillip Roth\u2019s \ufb01rst book was really important to me while I was learning to write as well. I read an introduction he wrote to an anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus<\/em>. In the introduction, he said that he was completely taken with the idea of departure, obsessed with the idea of leaving, at the time. And really, the book is about leaving your culture and holding on to your culture and I think that really struck me at di\ufb00erent points of my life. Particularly because in studying writing, in becoming a writer, I was essentially leaving behind some of the hopes of my parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: You\u2019ve talked a little about the assimilation issue and how that ties in with your interest in Jewish writers after World War II. How does that play out in your stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I think assimilation is a central issue only in one of my stories, one called \u201cThe Unforgetting.\u201d It\u2019s about a Chinese family that moves to the Midwest and tries to leave their old life, but as time goes on, they \ufb01nd that they can\u2019t forget the old life. Meanwhile, their son, who was raised American, does what Americans do: leaves home. I think that captured some of my feelings about assimilation\u2014that it\u2019s necessary to a certain extent, but at the same time, it\u2019s a tremendous loss. I mean, it can be a particular loss in the relationship between parents and children and di\ufb00erent generations of immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Related to that, I read that you visited China for the \ufb01rst time as an adult. Did you feel more like an American visiting a foreign country, or more of a \u201chomecoming\u201d feeling?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I felt both like an American and a person coming home. We entered China by \ufb02ying into Hong Kong, then we \ufb02ew into Guilin, which is in central southern China. It\u2019s a region famed for its scenery, and I recognized the oddly-shaped mountains from beautiful pictures my parents had hung in our living room. But I could tell the people there saw me as a foreigner, since I was clearly raised somewhere else\u2014I didn\u2019t speak the local dialect, and my Chinese is a little awkward. So I felt odd. But as we went further north, closer to where my father was from, I felt more and more at home. China\u2019s a huge country, and the people everywhere are di\ufb00erent. People up north are taller\u2014you could say generally they tend to be taller and look more like me. As we got closer to where my father was from, I felt that I was encountering some familiar element I couldn\u2019t explain, partly because the people started to look more like me and the dialect became more familiar, sounded more like my father\u2019s dialect. Actually, he doesn\u2019t speak a dialect, he speaks Mandarin with a Beijing accent. And as we went toward Beijing and then Xi\u2019an, I felt as if I really was discovering where my family came from. I then met my father\u2019s family and there were a lot of similarities, even though we were essentially strangers. I think in that way, it was a homecoming. And I remember going to Shanghai, where my mother\u2019s from, and seeing all the buildings and places I had read about or she had told me about, so I had the feeling I was going someplace familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Do you think that homecoming feeling inspired what Xiao Hong felt in Inheritance when she returned to China to visit her aunt?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I do. And it\u2019s also a feeling that many people have told me about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Were any of the place descriptions of China based on what you saw when you were there?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Almost all. The description of Chongqing, the description of the landscape around there, the Yangtze River, the description of West Lake, were things I had seen. I will say, though, there were certain descriptions I had to completely invent. For example, I was in a bomb shelter when I was in Chongqing. I went to a couple of them, but I was never in one when it was being bombed at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: That would\u2019ve been hard to simulate.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Right, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: The gambling in the book\u2014did you do research?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Well, I went to Las Vegas and I played Paigao.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY: They have that in Vegas?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Yeah, and it\u2019s actually all over in California, too. I learned a lot about it when I was living in California. And I asked my mother about it. She had played it as a child on New Year\u2019s. It\u2019s sort of a child\u2019s game, but it can be quite devastating. Basically the host either wins or loses big, and it\u2019s entirely up to chance; there\u2019s no skill involved. Not like poker, where there\u2019s some skill involved. Paigao isn\u2019t like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: You say your mother knew how to play, but in Inheritance<\/em>, only the men get to play.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Well, the men were the ones who got to leave home and start gambling, although women gambled all the time, too. I mean, my grandmother was a huge Mahjong player; she played constantly. According to my mother, they would start in the morning and play until early morning, go to sleep, then get up and start playing again. I don\u2019t understand what the pleasure was. I\u2019m not interested in games. But my father is interested in games, and my parents play Mahjong now that they\u2019re retired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: So you didn\u2019t have much fun in Vegas?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Not really. I\u2019m not a gambler by nature. It seemed to me that after I\u2019d been writing the book for a while, I realized one of the interesting aspects of the book was that there was an element of extreme chance that was represented by the game, and an element of extreme control, which was Junan, the main character. She was obsessed with trying to control the outcome, control the outcome to the point where she made the biggest mistake of her life\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: She took it to her death, really. That was the one sad thing I felt about the ending. I felt that a lot of things in the book were resolved happily, though bittersweet. But Junan stuck to her guns until the end.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: She really did. See, I like her for that. I mean, I was interested in a certain kind of characterization, character development di\ufb00erent from the psychological model that says someone undergoes a transformation, or that we, as readers, must understand more deeply the psychological reasons for the characters\u2019 behaviors. And I feel that in my book, no one really undergoes a psychological transformation. Well, several of the characters do not undergo psychological transformations. Particularly Junan. She is the same; however, we see her in so many settings that we learn more about the degree and the nature of her obsessions. That is a di\ufb00erent kind of character development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: But I think as a reader, I rooted for Yinan to reconcile with Junan. Her not achieving reconciliation set a different tone for the end of the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I like the idea of acknowledging that there are things that are not settled by our lives, and there are questions that can\u2019t really be resolved. That feels more real to me than the idea that everything can be happily resolved. I don\u2019t know, because I haven\u2019t died yet. I don\u2019t know what that\u2019s like and it\u2019ll be too late by then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: How has your degree in Asian Studies helped your writing? Do you think it\u2019s important for a writer to have knowledge of an outside discipline?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I have mixed feelings about how to answer this question. I teach undergraduates, many of them very serious writers, and they want to know if they should major in English. I always tell them they don\u2019t have to. At the same time, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would take a lot more English courses than I did in college. Of course, when I was in college, I had no idea I was going to become a writer, and I was taking English classes as electives that I worked in secretly and enjoyed. It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t take them seriously, but I didn\u2019t take seriously the idea that I should study English. And when I went to my MFA program, I realized there were all these books I hadn\u2019t read. I feel like I\u2019ve been catching up ever since. So that\u2019s one side of the story. On the other hand, I don\u2019t think I could\u2019ve written Inheritance if I hadn\u2019t majored in East Asian Studies. I learned so much about China in college. And I learned the language, which was very important to me in writing the book. I encourage my students to do as many di\ufb00erent things as they can, because once they get writing, it\u2019s hard to get out to do too many di\ufb00erent things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Many writers have mixed feelings about MFA programs, but coming from an MFA program yourself, what do you think are the bene\ufb01ts and disadvantages to attending one?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I don\u2019t have mixed feelings about MFA programs. I think going to get my MFA at Iowa was the best thing I ever did. I had not studied writing in college. Reading John Gardner\u2019s book, The Art of Fiction<\/em>, a number of times, cover to cover, was the extent of my writing education, aside from a few community courses. So, when I went to Iowa, I felt supported and sustained by the mere fact that I was surrounded by people solely interested in writing. They had given up whatever they were doing, and in many cases traveled thousands of miles, to go to this inland, small-town setting in which writing was taken extremely seriously and there was a long heritage of writing. I think MFA programs can provide shelter and sustenance for people at the right point in their lives. I think sometimes people go to MFA programs too early, before they have time o\ufb00. And in those cases, an MFA program is like an ex- tension of their college educations. I don\u2019t think an MFA program can be appreciated by everybody until they\u2019ve had a chance to leave school and try to write on their own, which is always a real struggle. So it was wonderful\u2014I learned an enormous amount about craft. I met people who are still my readers. I had two really, really good years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: I saw that your books have several Iowa professors in the acknowledgements.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: They matter to me. They still matter to me. When I was at Iowa, each person I studied with taught me something. But I think many people who go through MFA programs are disappointed for one reason or another, often because of expectations. They go to the program expecting to meet a mentor who will then help them. That was not my experience. What I found instead was that I met a peer group that became very sustaining to my life as a writer. A poet who I deeply admire told me that it\u2019s more important for a young writer to see and watch an established writer than for an established writer to see and watch a young writer. In other words, people want established writers to notice them because they think it might be some kind of touch from a world they can then enter. It\u2019s actually more important that they watch that person and see how they conduct themselves, the things that they do and don\u2019t do, what they do that you wouldn\u2019t do. I think that\u2019s one thing the MFA program provides. It provides an opportunity for writers in training or aspiring writers to watch and learn from established writers. The learning is not always direct, it\u2019s not always someone taking you by the hand; it\u2019s often things that you glean. And it\u2019s not necessarily what the established writer wants you to glean. I remember going with a professor to a reading at a place the name of which I won\u2019t mention, to watch a visiting person of high eminence give a reading, and having the professor explain to me that \u201cthis is how not to give a reading.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: A couple stories in Hunger<\/em> have bits of di\ufb00erent styles. \u201cSan,\u201d for example, has a sort of detective story in it, where she\u2019s picking up clues about her dad\u2019s life. In \u201cPipa\u2019s Story,\u201d she\u2019s getting stories from the outside world, and there are fairy tale elements to the story. Do you try to try to mix forms?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I do try to mix forms. I\u2019m very interested in the tale. The early drafts of Inheritance had huge tales in them. I had a whole generation of characters that aren\u2019t in it anymore. There was this whole big scene in a gambling house, where this big tale\u2019s being told about the evolution of the kiss in lovemaking. This got cut, because, as many readers pointed out to me, it was totally irrelevant to the novel. But it\u2019s always been a form that interests me. In terms of the detective story, I picked up as a child that we are born into time after our parents, and the only way we can \ufb01nd out about them, if they don\u2019t tell us, is by spying on them. And I think that will constantly appear in my work. I don\u2019t see that going away because it\u2019s one of the things that most troubles me, the fact that we\u2019re born forward in time and we can\u2019t go back and revisit. That really bothers me. I think \u201cPipa\u2019s Story\u201d has some elements of the gothic, which I didn\u2019t understand when I wrote it, with the big house and the con\ufb02ict at its heart and the magical qualities. There are also elements of the tale in that story. I was experimenting, somewhat consciously\u2014just stretching my wings and trying to incorporate di\ufb00erent elements of stories I\u2019d heard. In a way, Inheritance takes a lot of its narrative thrust and \ufb02ow from a \u201clow\u201d genre\u2014the made-for-video or made-for-TV movies that a lot of Asian people watch these days. They\u2019re often historical, \ufb01lled with drama, and full of scenes where someone is begging or pleading to somebody for something and they don\u2019t get it. You know, the ones with enormous turns of plot, huge, dramatic incidents. I took some of that and consciously put it into Inheritance; the way the action is handled is a kind of tribute to popular culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: There is a strong point of view shift in the middle of Inheritance, when you go from a third-person omniscient to a \ufb01rst-person narrator in Xiao Hong. How do you think zooming in on Hong\u2019s \ufb01rst person narrative intensi\ufb01es the e\ufb00ect of her character? Or more broadly, why did you do that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Finding the point of view was one of the hardest things I had to do while writing Inheritance. I knew my material before I knew my narrator, I knew what story I wanted to tell before I knew the narrator, and it took me a long time to understand who would be the best narrator for the story. I never understood, when I was reading the Janet Burroway textbook Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft<\/em>, why she had two whole chapters on point of view, because it seemed pretty straightforward. People are always able to say, \u201cOh\u2014here\u2019s a mistake in point of view,\u201d but I realized as I tackled the novel that point of view is more complex and slippery than I understood it to be when I was starting out as a writer. In the novel form\u2014as in the short story, but especially in the novel\u2014point of view is a crucial choice. The di\ufb00erence between writing a novel and a short story is that in a novel, you have to live with your choice for 300 pages. I look at a novel like The Great Gatsby<\/em> and I understand why Fitzgerald chose the \ufb01rst person and why he chose Nick Carraway as his narrator. But I can also see how that choice, to some extent, dictated so much about the book\u2019s form in many of its complicated places, like where Nick tries to relate stories of things he could not possibly have seen. And I \ufb01nd it interesting that even a brilliant book like The Great Gatsby<\/em> can have places where it is hamstrung by its point of view. I knew I had to choose a narrator, and that the narrator didn\u2019t have to be a person in the story. But I also knew I had to somehow knit many years together. It was di\ufb03cult to rely on repetition as a means of knitting the story together, because the story moved from place to place. There were no physical, geographical locations I could use to anchor the story. Look at a third-person epic, such as 100 Years of Solitude<\/em>: you\u2019ll notice that it takes place in the house, and indeed, Garc\u00eda Marquez\u2019s working title for the book was The House<\/em>, so that every time he returns to the house, you get a sense of continuity and control of the narrative. You can\u2019t do that if you\u2019re constantly moving from one place to another. I decided to rely on a person to be the unifying force in the book. Then I had to decide who it would be, and I had the choice of using the main character, Junan, or someone of her generation. Or someone of her daughter\u2019s generation. Or someone of the youngest generation, which is what I tried to do \ufb01rst because I had been given an admonition by an editor\u2014not my editor\u2014that I should make someone from America the main character or the book wouldn\u2019t sell. Of course, I didn\u2019t go with that editor, but it stuck with me; I wanted to create an American voice, but I didn\u2019t in the end, because I realized the story encompasses two countries, and that the person who could best tell the story was somebody who had lived in both countries and understood the bridge. Hong was that bridge. But I had to start the book before she was born. So I used the idea of the family story to make it possible to create an opening to the book that didn\u2019t include her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: It didn\u2019t feel like an enormous shift in voice, and that\u2019s probably because it was the family story, and she could easily have been recounting it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: That\u2019s right. And I wanted to create that sense of a tale. I think the tone of the book was dictated by the need to \ufb01t the third-person and the \ufb01rst-person parts together. And as a result, I learned while I was writing the book how much choices of material and narrator\u2014all that stu\ufb00 we learn in beginning \ufb01ction classes\u2014have such a huge impact on what kind of object the book turns out to be, what tone it has. I don\u2019t know if this is the kind of book I would\u2019ve written by choice, but it turned out to be like this because of what I chose to write about. That\u2019s how I feel about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: What do you mean, \u201cby choice\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Well, I mean, it comes across as an epic. Although really I don\u2019t know because I can\u2019t read it. But I know that I\u2019m perfectly capable of writing a completely di\ufb00erent kind of book. But not with this type of material. If that makes any sense. I feel like the material in this book is very di\ufb00erent from that in Hunger<\/em>; Inheritance<\/em> has a di\ufb00erent tone than Hunger<\/em>, it is an entirely di\ufb00erent kind of object than Hunger was. I don\u2019t have a problem with it, but I\u2019m aware that part of it has to do with what I was trying to write about, the choices I made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY: Are you working on anything new?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Last spring I wrote a 100-page manuscript about some poets, but I realized I haven\u2019t written poetry as an adult, and I felt I should include some poetry and I couldn\u2019t, so I stopped. I\u2019m still thinking about it; I was actually writing about an MFA program, but I thought, \u201cThat\u2019s crazy, too; who would want to read about one of those?\u201d But I felt it would be best to put that aside for a while and try going back to it later, since I\u2019m still interested. Since then, I\u2019ve been dealing with changes in my non-writing life: I got married, we bought a place, and we moved into it. That took up a few months. Now I\u2019m working on a lot of the projects I took on after the novel, the ones I took on because I felt my life would be empty without it. I feel that one of them is particularly interesting. It\u2019s a landscape dictionary, edited by Barry Lopez, that will be published in a year or so. In the landscape dictionary, forty writers describe 800 American landscape terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: What words do you describe?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: Some of them are quite technical, such as \u201cdebris cone.\u201d I\u2019m also doing basic words, such as \u201charbor\u201d and \u201cBack Bay.\u201d New England ocean terms, it seems to me; they must\u2019ve given them to me because I live in New England. And I got a couple of desert terms, such as \u201cslick rock,\u201d local to Moab and that area of Utah. And some fun terms like \u201clover\u2019s leap.\u201d There are 52 places in the United States named \u201clover\u2019s leap,\u201d according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and they all have things in common. One of the interesting things about writing for the dictionary is that I had a struggle\u2014I had to break through my resistance to it\u2014but the struggle was trying to adopt an authoritarian third-person point of view about a subject outside of myself. I had never done that before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019GRADY<\/strong>: How long are the entries?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>” They\u2019re about 150 words. And they want us to do them in a \u201cwriterly\u201d way. It\u2019s a lot of fun, and I think I\u2019m learning something, but I\u2019m not sure what. That\u2019s the way it is always, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: How would you like to see your career go? How might you like to be remembered as a writer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[A long pause.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I think what writers really want is to be read. If people continue to read my work, that would be my greatest wish ful\ufb01lled. [Another pause.] I\u2019m thinking about this. It\u2019s a really interesting question. [An- other pause.] But don\u2019t people all say the same thing? Don\u2019t they say \u201cI want to be remembered as an important writer of the 21st century\u201d or something like that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: Something like that. But I think it\u2019s especially interesting to ask because you\u2019re young; you\u2019ve got a l<\/strong>ot of books left in you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: We\u2019ll see. I\u2019d like my books to continue to develop in depth and substance. Obviously. I\u2019d also like to write more short stories and novellas. I love di\ufb00erent lengths and forms. But I think what I want most is for people to continue to read my work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: So it\u2019s a communication itch with you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d put it that way exactly, but I think most writers want to be read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong>: You say \u201cread,\u201d not \u201cliked\u201d or \u201crespected.\u201d Is there a distinction for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CHANG<\/strong>: No. No distinction. I just want to be read. I don\u2019t have very big ambitions at the moment. Well, I\u2019d like to be able to keep going. It\u2019s very hard for people to keep going. People say it gets harder and harder as they continue on. But I\u2019d love to keep going. I always had the idea of improving as a writer over a long period. That was always my goal. I never wanted to be a \u201c\ufb02ash in the pan\u201d or a \u201cone hit wonder\u201d or a prodigy because it can set up disappointment. I always want to continue learning.<\/p>\n\n

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Lan Samantha Chang was born to Chinese immigrants,\u00a0who left China when the communist government came to power in 1949. Her parents moved to the small Midwestern city of Appleton, Wisconsin. Chang said that since her Midwestern youth, she\u2019s \u201cconstantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents\u2019 experiences.\u201d Her books\u2014a collection of stories, Hunger (1998), … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36130"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36701,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36130\/revisions\/36701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}