———. “Writer in the Hyphenated Condition: Diana
Chang.” MELUS 7, no. 4 (1980): 69–83.
Rexroth, Kenneth. Review of The Frontier of Love,
Nation, 29 September 1956, 271–273.
Bennett Fu
Chang, Lan Samantha (1965– )
Born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, Lan Sa-
mantha Chang is the third daughter of Chinese
parents who immigrated to the United States be-
cause of the political upheaval in 1949 in China.
Growing up in a midwestern town where very few
Chinese immigrant families resided at the time,
she constantly felt like an outsider. Chang received
a B.A. in East Asian studies from Yale University,
an M.P.A. from Harvard University and an M.F.A.
in creative writing from the University of Iowa.
She is the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer of Creative
Writing at Harvard University. In January 2006,
Chang began serving as the fifth director of the
University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, the first
Asian American and woman to head this presti-
gious workshop.
The title of her debut work, HUNGER: A NO-
VELLA AND SHORT STORIES (1998), and her novel,
Inheritance (2004), reflect the recurring themes
of her stories. Hunger is not only about the desire
for love, independence, and other things lacking,
but, more important, about the need for under-
standing and dealing with the spectral persistence
of the past deliberately forgotten and denied;
“inheritance” is the way in which to soothe this
“hunger.” Chang’s tendency to reach for the past
in Hunger is more clearly seen in her account
of a family history in Inheritance. Mainly set in
China from 1925 to 1949, the story traces three
generations of women whose lives are fashioned
by traditional Chinese values as well as the socio-
political turmoil in China during the first half of
the 20th century. Attempts to control their fate
often fail despite the power of human passion
and desire. The story revolves around the love
and struggle between Junan and her younger sis-
ter, Yinan. When their mother, Chanyi, commits
suicide because of her inability to produce a son,
the two sisters are left to live with their gambler
father. To pay his gambling debts, the father mar-
ries Junan off to the ambitious and handsome
soldier Li Ang. Love blossoms between Junan
and Li Ang, which leads to the birth of their two
daughters, Hong and Hwa. When Li Ang is as-
signed to a post in Chongqing during the Sino-
Japanese War, however, Junan, now possessive
and controlling of others around her, sends her
sister Yinan to keep an eye on him. Contrary to
her plan, a true bond starts to develop between
Li Ang and Yinan. Junan refuses to forgive them
despite their appeal for reconciliation. The family
becomes fractured when Junan and her children
flee to Taiwan in 1949 and immigrate to America
in the 1950s. Li Ang, Yinan, and their child stay in
China and undergo hardship during the political
turmoil. The spell of the past is only to be lifted
with the normalization of Sino-American rela-
tions and the reconciliation of the two sisters.
In Inheritance, Chang’s prose remains concise
and subtle in unveiling the multifaceted existence
of her characters. It received a PEN Beyond Mar-
gins Award in 2005. However, written from the
perspective of America in the 1990s, Inheritance
sometimes lacks precision in rendering the social
and cultural milieu of China.
Yan YingChang, Leonard (1968– )
A Korean-American novelist, Leonard Chang
specializes in hard-boiled stories that explore
the ethnic and other sources of personal identity
crises. Born in New York City, Chang attended
Dartmouth College but transferred to Harvard
University, where he completed his B.A. in 1991,
graduating cum laude. In 1994 he completed an
M.F.A. at the University of California at Irvine.
Since 1998 Chang has been a member of the core
faculty for the M.F.A. program at Antioch Uni-
versity in Los Angeles, and from 2001 to 2003, he
was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills Col-
lege in Oakland, California. His stories have beenChang, Leonard 37