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Summary
Summary
Making a pact to stay together after their mother's suicide, Junan and her sister, Yinan, find their vow challenged when Junan is separated from her husband by the Japanese invasion of China and sends Yinan after him.
Author Notes
Lan Samantha Chang was born, 1965, and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is the daughter of Chinese parents who survived the World War II Japanese occupation of China and later immigrated to the United States. Chang attended Yale University, first as a premedical student and then as an East Asian studies major. She went on to earn an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
In her fiction, she focuses on the fragility of family relationships and the Chinese American immigrant experience. Chang's "Pipa's Story" was selected for Best American Short Stories 1994. Her books include All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), Hunger (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), Inheritance (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A complicated sister bond echoes through generations in this somber follow-up to Chang's well-received debut novella and stories, Hunger. In China in the early 1930s, sisters Junan and Yinan are inseparable, even as Junan matures into beauty and Yinan remains awkward and plain. Junan enters into an arranged marriage and falls in love with Li Ang, her soldier husband. Separated from him when the Japanese invade China, Junan sends the unmarried Yinan to keep her husband's household. What is intended as an arrangement of convenience turns to betrayal when Li Ang and Yinan have an affair. As China is divided by communism, the family is also rent in two. Junan and her daughters Hong (who is also the narrator) and Hwa end up in the States, while Yinan and Li Ang remain in mainland China with their son and are effectively banished from memory. It is memory-rather than dramatic action-at which Chang excels; her prose is lovely, but even images of the turmoil of war and displacement read at somewhat of a remove. Still, the sense of long family histories both spoken and unspoken is powerful, and the restrained conclusion has the force of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Chang's sophomore effort may not chart new ground, but is still a solid effort. Agent, Jin Auh. 4-city author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Sisters Junan and Yinan are still only children when their mother, fearing her husband is on the verge of taking a second wife, commits suicide. Having observed at first hand the damage that loving someone too much can cause, Junan grows up insulating herself from possible hurt, maintaining a chilly distance from everyone around her. Yet she is not immune from human emotion and when she sends her shy, sensitive younger sister to stay with her soldier husband Li Ang, who has been posted to China's wartime capital, she unintentionally sets herself up for a betrayal from which she never recovers. While Lan Samantha Chang's prose has moments of real lyricism, there is a familiar feeling to much of the narrative; her themes have been explored more powerfully elsewhere. Though Inheritance rather skilfully spans some 70 years of China's turbulent history, the plot meanders and, with the exception of the austere Junan, the characters don't ever fully come to life. The result is a bleak, only occasionally affecting account of the pain that can be passed down through generations by the inability to forgive. Caption: article-gravy.1 Sisters Junan and Yinan are still only children when their mother, fearing her husband is on the verge of taking a second wife, commits suicide. Having observed at first hand the damage that loving someone too much can cause, Junan grows up insulating herself from possible hurt, maintaining a chilly distance from everyone around her. - Natasha Tripney.
Booklist Review
In China in 1931, two sisters are coping with their grief in the aftermath of their mother's suicide. Cool, reserved Junan makes dreamy Yinan her primary focus and anchor, while their preoccupied father gambles away his fortune. As part of a reconciliation of his debts, he promises Junan in marriage to the young lieutenant Li-Ang. Although she struggles to preserve her distance and her dignity, Junan falls deeply in love with her new husband, but her upbringing and her mother's influence render her cold and possessive. When the young couple is separated during the Japanese invasion, Junan sends Yinan to stay with her husband, unconsciously setting in motion the betrayal that will haunt their family for generations. The novel, set in both China and the U.S., is narrated by Junan's daughter, and its inherent drama is heightened by the delicacy and restraint with which it is told. Chang fulfills the promise of her haunting short-story collection, Hunger (1998), with an elegant first novel that seems impossibly wise about the strictures of love and culture. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Not even an arranged marriage and Japan's 1930s invasion of China can separate devoted sisters Yinan and Junan. From the award-winning author of Hunger; with a four-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
