| Chinese American families -- Fiction. |
| Brothers -- Fiction. |
| Murder -- Fiction |
| Mystery fiction. |
| Chinese Americans -- Families |
| Families, Chinese American |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Carver Public Library | FIC CHA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Easton - Ames Free Library | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Holmes Public Library | CHA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Middleborough Public Library | F CHA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... New Bedford Francis J. Lawler Branch | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Norfolk Public Library | F CHANG, L. FAM | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Norton Public Library | FIC CHA | DISPLAY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Pembroke Public Library | FIC CHANG, L. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Raynham Library | FIC CHANG, L | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Rehoboth - Blanding Free PL | FIC CHANG, L. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Rochester - Plumb Library | FIC CHA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Seekonk Public Library | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Somerset Public Library | CHANG LAN SAMANTHA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Taunton Public Library | CHANG, LAN SAMANTHA | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wareham Free Library | F CHA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Westport Free Public Library | FIC CHANG | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family's secrets and simmering resentments erupt at last.
Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found dead--presumed murdered--and his sons find they've drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant's reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. As the spotlight on the brothers tightens--and the family dog meets an unexpected fate--Dagou, Ming, and James must reckon with the legacy of their father's outsized appetites and their own future survival.
Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Chang follows up All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost with an ingenious and cunning reboot of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The harrowing and humorous family drama is wrapped in a murder mystery about a family of Chinese immigrants headed by patriarch Leo Chao, who builds a successful Chinese restaurant in Haven, Wis., with his wife, Winnie. Like Leo's Dostoyevskian equivalent, Fyodor Karamazov, he has three sons: the youngest, James, who's lost his Mandarin; the middle, Ming, who now lives in Manhattan; and the eldest, Dagou, the restaurant's head chef. All is not well in the family. The sons reunite in Haven for the annual Christmas party to find that Winnie has tired of her tyrannical husband and has left him to seek spiritual enlightenment. The locals, meanwhile, have turned on Leo, as well: some in response to his cutthroat business dealings, others out of racism. After the party, Leo turns up dead, the authorities suspect foul play, and Dagou is charged with murder. As in Dostoyevsky's novel, there is a trial, and important Chao family secrets will come to light, but Chang retells the story in a manner all her own, adding incisive wit while retaining the pathos. In this timely, trenchant, and thoroughly entertaining book, an immigrant family's dreams are paid for in blood. For Chang, this marks a triumphant return. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Lan Samantha Chang's third novel begins by bringing history to the table: "For thirty-five years, everyone supported Leo Chao's restaurant." The Wisconsin eatery is a family affair. Everyone assumes it will eventually be peacefully handed down to one of Leo's three sons - but they overlook just how fraught and bloody inheritance can be. "In dark times," Chang writes, with a characteristically cunning sense of slow-boiled foreboding, "there is really nothing like a good, steaming soup, and dumplings made from scratch." The Family Chao was not quite made from scratch. Some of the dough that forms its schemes and themes comes from The Brothers Karamazov. In fact, Chang's story at first brings to mind another Dostoevsky-influenced state-of-America novel: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. In both books, the reader meets three adult siblings coming home for a family Christmas as the patriarch loses his grip on power. But where The Corrections sprawled and swelled, The Family Chao has a laser focus: one restaurant, one town, and one crime that will transform the family's fortunes. As with Zadie Smith's On Beauty, a novel that took its blueprint from Howards End, you get the sense that borrowing the bones of a classic has freed up the author to focus on making every interior detail as perfect as it can be. One of the many pleasures of The Family Chao is the way the novel dramatises the gap between how a family wants to be seen, and its messier inner realities. The neon sign that greets new arrivals at the restaurant is "FINE CHAO". (If the head of the family would only relax his grip on singularity, the place might be rebranded more appropriately as "FINE CHAOS".) Inside, beyond the "small, shabby dining room", we find a bulletin board covered with chaotic scraps of paper. The increasingly absent matriarch of the family, Winnie, has pinned up a list of foods that American customers prefer to be served. One is chop suey. "What is this?" her husband has written in the margin. "I don't know," Winnie replies. Amid a drama of family betrayal, Chang has created a wonderful comedy of American consumption. To quote a heading from one of the many short sections that make up the book, like small plates slowly filling our table: "The Fortune You Seek Is in Another Cookie." Chang's prose moves with the unfussy ease of a shark through water - for the longest time you are just enjoying your swim, soaking up the story. Only midway through the book does it occur to you that a master hunter is at work: a writer cutting through the darker depths of what it means to be treated as an outsider in America. At the novel's halfway point we are confronted with the words "THREE MONTHS LATER". The central events on which the plot turns have taken place off stage, in an unlit space. Chang is more interested in consequences, and she has great fun unpicking the slightly breathless trial that occupies the final third of the book. One late chapter on the fate of the family is written as a student blog for a course on Writing for New Media. Chang, who is the programme director at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, starts out with the student's bullet-pointed "personal goals". These include "Use bullet points when possible". If the writer's greatest fear is being misunderstood, the restaurateur's true terror may be getting locked in the freezer room. That is just one culinary nightmare (I won't spoil your meal) that creates this book's atmosphere of laughter in the dark. Meat is everywhere in the novel: fresh, rotting, chopped, fried - and thrown, in one memorable scene, to a pack of dogs. Like crazed siblings, the animals fight over the scraps, unaware that the next meal might be them. In the background, a group of nuns protest. But the soul is no match for the stomach. "Do you think I want this dog's life?" Leo Chao asks one of his sons in a key moment. A man of presence, impatience and profanity, he believes in doing whatever American appetites require. Like a small-town version of Logan Roy, the patriarch in another drama about siblings squabbling over succession, Leo has "the authority of a man larger than he actually is". He tells his most innocent son, a soulful virgin pre-med named James, that "we came to America to colonise the place for ourselves. That means spreading seed. Equal opportunity for fucking." But however appalled the sons might be by their father's perspectives, they continue to absorb elements of his character. You are what you eat, the novel seems to suggest. And you eat what your family, or your country, puts on the table. "As far as parties are concerned," Chang's omniscient narrator tell us, "there are many ways to greatness. There's greatness of style, of setting, of occasion, and of company." The Family Chao has a little of all these ingredients - but even better, it arrives with something to say.
Kirkus Review
A Chinese American family reckons with its patriarch's murder in this modern-day reboot of The Brothers Karamazov. When James, the youngest of the three Chao brothers, returns home to Wisconsin from college for Christmas, he's braced for drama. His imperious, abrasive father, Leo, has driven his mother to a Buddhist sanctuary. The middle brother, Ming, made his fortune in New York to escape the family's orbit and is only grudgingly visiting. And the eldest brother, Dagou, has labored at the family restaurant for years in hopes of a stake in the business only to be publicly rebuffed by Leo. Leo is murderously frustrating, so it's not exactly surprising when he's found dead, trapped in the restaurant's freezer room, its escape key suspiciously absent. Chang's well-turned third novel neatly balances two substantial themes. One is the blast radius of family dysfunction; the novel is largely told from James' (more innocent) perspective, but Chang deftly shows how each of the brothers, and the partners, exes, and onlookers around them, struggles to make sense of Leo and his death. (Handily, the plural of Chao is chaos.) The second is the way anti-immigrant attitudes warp the truth and place additional pressure on an overstressed family: When one of the brothers faces trial for Leo's death, news reports and local gossip are full of crude stereotypes about the "Brothers Karamahjong" and rumors of the restaurant serving dog meat. As with Dostoevsky's original, the story culminates in a trial that becomes a stage for broader debates over obligation, morality, and family. But Chang is excellent at exploring this at a more intimate level as well. A later plot twist deepens the tension and concludes a story that smartly offers only gray areas in response to society's demands for simplicity and assurance. A disruptive, sardonic take on the assimilation story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In her first book in a dozen years, Chang (All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, 2010)--the first woman and first Asian American director of the storied Iowa Writers' Workshop--introduces the family Chao who, for 35 years, has been feeding grateful customers at their Fine Chao restaurant in Haven, Wisconsin. More recently, the Chaos have been mired in, true to their name, utter chaos with that capital C; Chang is especially clever with names throughout. Long-suffering mother Winnie finally escaped emotionally vicious father Leo to become a Buddhist nun. Oldest son William "Dagou" (Mandarin for Big Dog) returned home expecting to eventually inherit the family business. Ming fled for a prestigious East Coast education and enviably lucrative career. James is still in college and was supposed to become the proverbial doctor. Christmas demands another uncomfortable reunion. That this year is different is grave understatement: both parents die, leaving Dagou accused of murder. Glimmers of Chang's irrefutable pedigrees occasionally sparkle through multigenerational wrongs, disastrous relationships, and complicated expositions. Alas, tenacity is necessary to endure didactic screeds about race, identity, love, and loyalty for a perhaps-too-obvious whodunit reveal.