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.
Themes
Loyalty, Filial Piety, and Sacrifice for Family
A central source of conflict in The Family Chao is the question of familial loyalty and obligation—what is owed to family members, especially a parent, when a bond of blood has not been supportive or nurturing. All those around Leo Chao wrestle in different ways with what they owe him as a father, husband, and member of the Chinese community—struggles that in turn raise questions of what they owe to each other.
One way the notion of family loyalty has shaped each of the Chao brothers is their relationship to the restaurant, where Leo demanded they work as children and where Dagou now works as an adult. From James’s perspective, familial loyalty is something leveraged by Leo to manipulate them into doing his will, and James ponders “how this idea of family love—this hierarchy of responsibility and of obedience—has helped to create Big Leo’s kingdom” (100). James, like his brothers, feels “he will always struggle against his family’s shadows” (219), reinforcing the idea that the fraught nature of the Chao’s family dynamic causes them to view familial loyalty as a burden rather than a blessing.
The novel positions Leo himself as a malevolent ruler of this kingdom. He claims he has made great sacrifices for his children, but he mocks his wife when she wishes to withdraw to the Spiritual House and refuses to support her, leaving Ming who pays the dowry so Winnie can stay there. Likewise, Leo breaks his promise to make Dagou a partner in his restaurant, instead boasting he will sell it. Even when he tries to send food to O-Lan and her mother in China, Leo fails to follow through because he doesn’t like how the postal workers challenge him. He only offers O-Lan a job because Winnie and the abbess of the Spiritual House pressure him. Leo expects obedience and loyalty from his family but believes his own obligations fulfilled if he provides food and board. This failure to connect with his wife and his children emotionally—as well as abandon and steal from his first wife and daughter in China—defines Leo as the villain of the novel, and positions O-Lan’s murder of him as vengeance.
The Chao sons wrestle with filial piety—an important virtue in Chinese culture, traced to the teachings of the philosopher Confucius—introducing the question of whether or not filial respect should be given when it isn’t earned. Chang symbolizes the Chao sons’ familial connection to Leo as their progenitor with the dog nicknames each of the boys have, referencing Leo’s identification as the big or alpha dog. This mirroring is complicated by the aspects of Leo that each son sees in himself. Dagou, who is the least like Leo in personality, resembles him the most physically. Ming fears he has inherited Leo’s ruthlessness, and James compares his own experience of desire to Leo’s sexual appetite. The compulsion to respect and obey their father is complicated for each son by their dislike of the man himself and their resentment for his lack of moral code or nurturing behavior. Only O-Lan, who has grown up distant from Leo, and has nursed the strongest resentment, feels no remorse about his death, or guilt for causing it.
Ironically, Katherine—who has no blood relationship to the Chao family—represents perhaps the best example of filial piety toward them. She proves faithful to Dagou, holding fast to their engagement though he has fallen in love with Brenda, then providing her legal knowledge to aid Dagou’s case during the trial. Ming says Katherine owes the Chao family nothing and suggests this exhibition of extreme filial piety represents a fetishizing of Chinese culture, of which she doesn’t longs to feel authentically a part of since she was raised outside of it. Katherine’s performance as a dutiful daughter provides a contrast and foil to O-Lan, the daughter by blood.
Chang’s inclusion of peripheral examples of filial piety (or perceived lack thereof) in other Chinese families in the novel reify it as a central virtue prized in the Chaos’ wider community. The Chin parents despair that their daughter is showing a lack of respect for their sacrifice, hard work and provision by throwing away her education on journalism, a skill they do not take seriously. Fang shows no ambitions at all to pursue a career, while Alice feels trapped in the family grocery store by the obligation she feels to her mother for working hard to support them. The narrator notes that many other members of the Chinese community in Haven, especially first-generation parents who understand the sacrifices immigrants make, come to the trial to show their loyalty and solidarity to the Chaos. Through these various examples, the novel explores the nature of loyalty, who is owed in return for sacrifice, and what obligations are imposed by blood or familial relationship when affection, true respect, and moral character are lacking to justify the expression of this loyalty.
The Power of Food
The Fine Chao is not only an important setting in the book but an institution that represents Leo, Winnie, and their family’s investment and status within the town of Haven. The opening of the novel, which describes the restaurant, uses the notes Winnie and Leo have written to each other to suggest that food forms the primary means by which the Chaos have been accepted by citizens of Haven, albeit only to a limited extent: the preferred dishes suit a bland American palate, allowing for nothing that might be deemed “exotic” or even offensive to white diners (as represented by the frequent joking references to dog meat). The question about chop suey underscores the disconnect between the Chaos and some of their patrons’ understanding of Chinese cuisine. Historically, the origins of chop suey are debated, but many accounts claim it was invented by Chinese Americans to cater to American palates resistant to traditional Chinese dishes. In the novel, Winnie and Leo’s confusion over their customers’ requests for chop suey exemplifies the challenges of building and navigating a life as immigrants in a new country—a journey uniquely represented in the history of Chinese food in America.
For Dagou, as the oldest Chao son, the struggle to take over the restaurant from Leo directly mirrors the burden he feels to live up to his father’s expectations of his success—a success that Leo simultaneously demands and sabotages. Chang portrays Dagou’s love of food as a gift, a skill and a passion, as well as a way to demonstrate generosity, a virtue he equates with independence and success. By hosting lavish meals, he hopes to increase his status within his community and earn his father’s respect—an effort that ultimately proves futile. He hosts a luncheon at the Spiritual House and throws an extravagant Christmas party as a gesture of generosity, as he tells his brothers, because he wants people to be on his side and support him against Leo. He also tries to impress Brenda with the dinner, proving that he can support her in a lavish fashion. For Dagou, food is both sustenance and largesse.
For Ming, food has loaded cultural and familial associations—he wants to distance himself from the restaurant as a way to distance himself from Leo and the pain he experienced in his family and community growing up. As an adult, Ming avoids Chinese food for the same reasons he claims not to date Asian women; he wants to be perceived as fully assimilated into white culture, and thus have access to the advantages it affords him. Ming doesn’t eat or enjoy Chinese food until O-Lan cooks for him—the same night he realizes she is the one who likely killed Leo. In consuming and taking pleasure in O-Lan’s food, Ming demonstrates his perceived complicity in the familial resentment that motivated O-Lan to murder Leo, as well as an endorsement of her actions. This sense of complicity in and approval of Leo’s murder leads to a psychotic episode in which he hallucinates that Leo is talking to him through the radio, part of Ming’s greater unraveling as he questions his motives, his identity, and his worth.
For James, food represents the innocence that is characteristic of his nature as well as his connection to and love for his family. Away at college, James finds American food exotic, but once he is back in Haven, he easily returns to the familiar habits of buying supplies and preparing and serving Chinese dishes. The drink he shares with Leo on the first night of his return shows how Leo favors James as the one son he believes still loves him. James sees the preparation of food, and maintenance of the Fine Chao while Dagou is in prison, as an act of respect and service to his family and the institution they have created. It’s also an act of fraternal love for Dagou, since he knows his brother wishes to run the restaurant when he is released. Leaving school to help in the restaurant exemplifies James’s wish to have a small life, and he sees the provision of food as a necessary act.
Within the novel, food represents sustenance, a reinforcement of the bonds of loyalty required in return for family bonds and sacrifice, and as a cultural signifier. The Skaers provide meat for Dagou’s Christmas party in part as a peace offering and in part, the narrator suggests, out of guilt that they have what they know to be the Chao family dog. Fang’s joke that Dagou is serving dog meat at the Christmas party, provides a lightning rod that draws scorn toward the Chao family in particular and their Chinese community more broadly during Dagou’s trial—an example of entrenched racism and anti-Asian bias in American media designed to highlight the community’s foreignness, positioning them as other. Ming’s response when he finally eats the food O-Lan prepares for him signals his concession to his Chinese identity, which he has long denied. The restaurant, and the food it provides, offers a way for the novel to examine both the fraught relationships between the Chao offspring and their parents as well as the broader challenges faced by Chinese Americans in Haven.
Being Both Insider and Outsider
While the novel provides several examples of anti-Asian bias exhibited by white Americans, the narrative more deeply interrogates the experiences of immigrants and the complexities of their relationship to themselves and the world they navigate—specifically the search for belonging in a new country and culture, and the challenges of raising children whose own identities reflect that difficulty.
The novel suggests that one challenges of defining one’s identity as a member of an immigrant community in the United States involves navigating the obtrusive perceptions of those outside of that community. During Dagou’s trial, the prosecuting attorney emphasizes the point that the Chinese community within Haven is an “enclave” and that they keep mostly to themselves, highlighting a perception of Asian citizens as other. Fang notes there are only about 600 Asians in a town of around 40,000 people, less than one percent of the population, suggesting it is a natural behavior for people to seek alliance with those in whom they share things in common, particularly shared language, customs, values, or appearance.
The narrator reflects this othering of the Chinese community in Haven in the language of the Chinese characters who refer to the white people as Americans or outsiders (Ming even thinks of them as “villagers,” suggesting ignorance and lack of sophistication). The narrator observes that the physical characteristics that distinguish Asian ethnicities from Caucasian make members of the Asian community “[v]isible, yet invisible” (149). White children like the Skaers use these physical differences as grounds for taunting James and Ming, yet at the same time, as Lynn experiences from the ponytailed woman who slams the bathroom door in her face, the outsiders don’t see the Chinese community members as distinct or individual. Dagou remembers that Ken Fan, who is normally friendly to everyone, was embarrassed by Leo’s behavior in the post office because he knew that, as he physically resembled Leo—as least as far as the white postal workers could tell—he would be classified as having the same poor behavior. The novel emphasizes this paradoxical, visible-yet-invisible quality by suggesting that while the physical signifiers of Asian descent are highly visible to the white onlookers, many of them—like the night nurse who testifies at the trial—admit that they can’t distinguish Chinese American men from one another. They are simply a monolith to her, a foreign collective, instead of individual people.
The Chao brothers each struggle in different ways to reconcile the fact that their physical features feature signal them as Asian, yet none of them feel particularly connected to their Chinese heritage. Only Ming has managed to learn Mandarin, and O-Lan tells Ming that none of the brothers are Chinese; they are tourists (196). She implies they might as easily be considered foreigners were they to visit China. After his parents’s deaths, James realizes that he and his brothers have lost their last link to the country of their heritage. All three of them are Americans, citizens born on US soil, yet their ethnic background marks them as other, defining them by their proximity to whiteness—an inherently problematic metric—despite the fact that the Chao brothers have never experienced life anywhere else but in America.
The discrimination and abuse that O-Lan experiences from the white citizens of Haven (and even to a lesser degree from some of the American Born Chinese characters) represents a racist and xenophobic assumption that a person’s American identity is defined by the degree to which they are able to assimilate into a dominant white culture. O-Lan’s undocumented status in the United States and her perceived lack of facility with English mark her as other. The takeout man voices the racist claim that those not natively born in America don’t belong in America and O-Lan “should go back to where they speak whatever she speaks” (78). The novel demonstrates that such a belief, privileging whiteness and English over other racial identities and spoken languages, results in prejudice and abuse as demonstrated by the taunting O-Lan experiences as well as the bullying of Ming and James by the Skaer boys, who make them feel they don’t belong in the country where they were born, even though they speaks English fluently. Through the experiences of her characters, Chang explores the perils of navigating two cultures which are held to be separate and even foreign from one another.
