53 pages • 1 hour read
Lan Samantha ChangThe Family Chao
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Author Context: Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of parents who emigrated to the United States from mainland China. She received her bachelor of arts in East Asian Studies from Yale University and her master in fine arts from the Iowa Writing Workshop, which is considered one of the top creative writing programs in the US. Chang’s literary short stories have been included in the annual Best American Short Stories collections and she has been awarded creative writing fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the MacDowell Colony, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. Chang’s first book, Hunger, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published in 1998 and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her two previous novels are Inheritance (2004) and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010).
In 2005, Chang returned to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop as a director and member of the faculty—the first woman and the first Asian American to hold that role. During her tenure, the workshop has maintained its reputation for high quality while diversifying its range and the student writers it accepts. In interviews, Chang has discussed her wish to depart from common stereotypes about Chinese Americans in her work and instead study the complexity of such themes as racial prejudice, home, and the immigrant experience, and explode myths about Asian culture commonly held in the West. Chang’s writing is frequently praised for her perceptive insights and precision with language. Novelist and critic May-lee Chai, writing in The Star Tribune, called The Family Chao “operatic and subversive.”
Literary Context: The Brothers Karamazov
Chang has said in interviews that The Family Chao was inspired by and began as homage to the Russian literary classic The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880). The Family Chao parallels Dostoevsky’s work in its characters and broad plot outlines, but it takes up its own themes and offers a much different portrait of a family, a town, and its cultures.
In the Russian novel, a crudely mannered and unlikeable Fyodor Karamazov argues with his eldest son, Dmitri, because they have both fallen in love with the same woman, Grushenka. Because of this conflict and disagreements over inheritance, Dmitri, who served in the military but has spent his money unwisely, is accused of his father’s murder. Ivan Karamazov, Fyodor’s second legitimate son known as an intellectual, falls in love with Dmitri’s spurned fiancée, Katerina. Haunted by guilt over his father’s death, Ivan imagines that he converses with his father’s ghost, and later, during the trial, confesses to murdering Fyodor, though Ivan was out of town at the time the crime was committed.
Alexei, the third legitimate son, is a gentle, spiritual man who hopes to join a monastery under the instruction of a kind priest, Father Zosima. A fourth son, Smerdyakov, was born out of wedlock and is kept by Fyodor as a cook and servant. Smerdyakov confesses to murdering Fyodor, motivated by his deep resentment toward his father, but the novel leaves open the question of who performed the actual act, examining all four of the sons as being complicit in some way.
Chang lifts a number of other elements from the Russian novel, including a scene at a monastery where the Karamazov men gather for a mediated discussion but end up shouting at one another; money Dmitri has borrowed from Katerina; and the suggestion that Grushenka might return to an old lover. While The Brothers Karamazov’s themes include family rivalries and grudges, it deals more overtly with questions of faith, morality, and the power of human will. Michael Dirda, writing in The Washington Post about a new translation by Michael R. Katz, published in 2023, called the novel “a work of restless energy and plenitude, filled with unexpected reversals and revelations, at once raucous and poignant, satirical and grand” (Dirda, Michael. “‘The Brothers Karamazov’ is a Classic, but It’s Not Beyond Criticism.” The Washington Post, 24 Aug. 2023).
