October 30 — Lan Samantha Chang brings her sensitive portrayals of Chinese in China, Taiwan, and America
Director of the prestigious Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Lan Samantha Ching is becoming one of the most influential Asian American writers. The five stories in Chang’s Hunger (1998) mainly look at Chinese in America; the final story is set in pre-Communist Shanghai. Inheritance (2004) is the story of a wealthy but declining family in Republican China, beginning in 1925 and extending through the period of the Japanese invasion and the post-war flight to Taiwan and then the US.
When: Thursday October 30, 7:30-9:30 PM
Where: Robertson Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall, Butler University 4600 SUNSET AVE., INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46208
Says LitLinks about Lan Samantha Chang:
Lan Samantha Chang was born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of Chinese parents who survived the World War II Japanese occupation of China and later emigrated to the United States,
hoping to give their family the security they never experienced. After graduating from the local high school, Chang attended Yale University, first as a premedical student and then as an East Asian studies major. She went on to Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government but dropped out to take courses in writing at a Boston adult education center before earning an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At Iowa, Chang felt that she became “somewhat proficient in writing short stories.”
In her fiction, she focuses on the fragility of family relationships and the Chinese American immigrant experience. At the age of twenty-eight she published her first story, in The Atlantic Monthly. The next year, “Pipa’s Story” was selected for Best American Short Stories 1994 (chosen by Tobias Wolff). At Stanford, Chang attempted to write in the novella form. The result was Hunger, included along with five stories in her first book of the same title (Hunger, 1988). Recently, she has published the novel Inheritance (2004).
