“The Family Chao” by Lan Samantha Chang:
In this thoroughly entertaining book, an immigrant family’s dreams are paid for in blood. The novel hovers between disturbing, profound family drama and surprising, unpredictable mystery. Despite the morbid plot that drives the story it is an entertaining, often humorous novel that pays homage to a Russian classic.
It is loosely based on but not a strict retelling of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, it is more of a reboot of the family drama with similar elements but different initials, transposed to a Chinese-American family. There are parallels such as the three brothers with their distinct personalities and their difficult, contentious, competitive and toxic relationships, the tyrannical and overbearing father, the passive mother and a mysterious outsider who plays a crucial role later in the play. And there is a courtroom trial. The pivotal event is the mysterious death of the family patriarch Leo Chao. The novel is full of memorable, complex characters, there is suspense, surprises, twists, family dynamics and human psychology.
Leo Chao, together with his wife Winnie, both Chinese immigrants, succeed in establishing a family restaurant in the small town of Haven, Wisconsin. The first half of the novel sets up the motivations for murder by establishing how obnoxious and tyrannical patriarch Leo Chao is, a very unpleasant person, whom no one likes.
He has three sons:
Dagou, the oldest, handsome and the most reckless.
Ming, the middle one, accomplished and financially successful in New York.
James, the youngest, naive but the good and loving son, a natural peacemaker, studying medicine.
Dagou unsuccessfully tried to make a living as a musician in New York but now, since his return to Haven six years ago, works as head chef in the family restaurant. Ming has left for Manhattan and is the one who the most broke free of family ties and the community of Haven which treated him, based on racist motivation, cruelly during his childhood. Ming and James are on their way to reunite in Haven for the annual Christmas party.
James, on his way from university, is asked for directions by an older Chinese man at a Chicago train station, the old man falls down a set of stairs and dies leaving a bag with his life-savings in James’ possession, an event that forever will alter the lives of the Chao family.
Their mother has left home, the family dog and her tyrannical husband to seek spiritual enlightenment in a Buddhist retreat for nuns.
Dagou, to impress his father, the family and the community, is planning an extravagant Christmas party at the Fine Chao restaurant. Until up to the half of the book everything builds up towards this party. After the party Leo is found dead in the restaurant’s freezer room the following day and Dagou is charged with murder.
While the first half of the novel focuses on the Chao family and Haven’s small Chinese population, the second half shows what happens when that community becomes the subject of scrutiny by neighbors and news of them spread to the wider world. As in Dostoyevsky’s novel, we follow the proceedings that take place in the courtroom, complete with revelations of family secrets and betrayals. Questions of race and identity, community, assimilation and prejudice are discussed as the case against Dagou is heavily tinged with anti-Asian bias and stereotypes. But also fun is poked at some animal rights activists. When the Chao family dog disappears, wild rumors fly around town (it is hinted the Chaos have turned the dog into a dish) and a large section of people in the courtroom show more concern for the lost pet than the death of Leo, a former pillar of the community.
The novel gives insight into the precarious path that children of immigrants have to tread between fulfilling their parents’ dreams and accomplishing their own, between honoring the culture of their parents and becoming too American and thus unrecognizable to them.
And then there is the question what became of the bag of money and a mysteriously lost engagement ring.
The name Chao, which in the plural would make Chaos, seems to be well chosen for the state this family is in. Chaos in physics is a state that balances between order and randomness. It describes a system that may seem random or disordered, but is in fact deterministic and responds with sensitivity to conditions set at their initial start. The universe is not random or neatly ordered, but chaotic. Like life, like family.
I loved this book. For its story, for its humour, for its insights, for its psychology and sketching of family dynamics, for its suspense and twists and its palpable sheer joy in writing.
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