published in literary journals such as Bamboo
Ridge, Confluence, Crab Orchard Review, Crescent
Review, and Prairie Schooner.
Chang’s first novel, The Fruit ’n Food (1996) re-
ceived the Black Heron Press Award for social fic-
tion. It depicts the economic, social, and cultural
sources of the tensions between Korean Americans
and African Americans.
For his second novel, Dispatches from the Cold
(1998), Chang received the Outstanding Local
Discovery Award for Literature from San Francisco
Bay Guardian. The novel focuses on the entangle-
ments in the lives of Raj Shin, a Korean-Ameri-
can troubleshooter for a chain of sporting-goods
stores, and Farrel Gordon, an employee in one of
those stores. Superficially the men are almost op-
posites: Shin is a workaholic, whereas Gordon is
so preoccupied with his life’s dissatisfactions that
he has at best an intermittent interest in his work.
In letters addressed to his sister Mona, Gordon
pours out the details of his failing relationship
with Shari, his current girlfriend, and his deep-
ening affair with Shin’s wife. But Mona has died,
and the current occupant of the apartment where
she had lived (the novel’s narrator) finds many in-
tersections between Gordon’s letters and his own
professional and personal disappointments. His
decision to reveal himself to Gordon in order to
prevent Gordon from channeling his despair into
violence provides the novel’s climax.
In his two most recent novels, Over the Shoul-
der (2000) and Underkill (2003), Chang focuses
on Allen Choice, a Korean-American personal-
security expert specializing in providing protec-
tion for corporate executives. In Over the Shoulder,
Choice and his partner have been hired to provide
security for a Silicon Valley executive. The assign-
ment seems uneventfully routine until someone
shoots Choice’s partner through the head. Profes-
sional ethics compel Choice to find the killer. It is
a narrative premise that has recurred frequently
in hard-boiled detective fiction back to Dashiell
Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. In the process of
resolving a case that becomes much more complex
and dangerous than Choice has any reason to ex-
pect, he also confronts some difficult truths about
his own family background and ethnic identity.
Critics lauded the novel’s compelling synthesis
of elements of the ethnic novel and the detective
novel. Somewhat less successfully, Chang attempts
the same sort of multilayered narrative in Un-
derkill, as Choice attempts to find his girlfriend’s
missing brother while trying to sort out the truths
about his own relationship with her.
Martin KichChao, Patricia (1955– )
Although Patricia Chao has also published short
stories, poems, and several children’s books, she
is most widely known for her novels. Her first
novel, The Monkey King (1997), was a finalist for
the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writ-
ers Award. That first novel and her second, Mambo
Peligroso (2005), reflect her interest in characters
seeking to come to terms with ambiguous or oth-
erwise troubling aspects of their identities. The
contexts for these exercises in self-exploration are
compellingly and vibrantly multicultural.
Born in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, Chao is
the daughter of Howard S. Chao, a journalist, and
Chie I. (Imaizumi) Chao, a teacher. Raised pri-
marily in New England, Chao completed a B.A. in
creative writing at Brown University and an M.A.
in English at New York University. She has subse-
quently taught writing courses at Sarah Lawrence
College and New York University. Her writing has
been supported by fellowships from the MacDow-
ell Colony, Fundacion Valparaison in Spain, and
the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil.
The Monkey King draws its title from a Chinese
myth and refers to the protagonist’s deceased fa-
ther. The novel opens in a psychiatric unit where
the main character, Sally Wang, is being treated
after a suicide attempt. The traumatic resurfacing
of long-repressed memories of her father’s moles-
tation of her had caused Wang to begin to behave
out of character. With very little previous indica-
tion of any emotional disturbance, she had sud-
denly left her husband, quit her job, and begun to
mutilate herself. Chao convincingly links Wang’s38 Chao, Patricia