Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Family Chao," by Lan Samantha Chang.
You could say the community ate its way through the Chao family’s distress. Not caring whether Winnie was happy, whether Big Chao was an honest man. Everyone took in the food on one side of their mouths, and from the other side they extolled the parents for their sons’ accomplishments. Heaping praise upon the three boys who grew up all bright and ambitious, who earned scholarships to good colleges. Commending them for leaving the Midwest. Yet everyone was thankful when the oldest, Dagou Chao, returned to Haven. Dagou coming home to his mother, moving into the apartment over the restaurant, working there six days a week. Dagou, the most passionate cook in the family. Despite the trouble between Winnie and Big Chao, everyone assumed the business would be handed down fairly, peacefully, father to son.
Now, a year after the shame, the intemperate and scandalous events that began on a winter evening in Union Station, the community defends its thirty-five-year indifference to the Chao family’s troubles by saying, No one could have believed that such good food was cooked by a bad person.
Years ago, Ming swore to everyone that he would never again spend Christmas in Wisconsin. He would never again deplane into a white tarmac of nothingness; never again slog knee-deep without boots across the airport rental lot under the frigid sky. Never again lay eyes upon his childhood street in winter, with its modest houses feebly outlined in strings of colored lights. He told everyone he would rather spend the holiday in New York, alone in his apartment, than return to this godforsaken heartland of deprivation.
“We Chaos, who are full of passion and inner chaos! None of us can bear to be in our present lives. We’re charged up with unrelenting ambition for the future; it’s why Ma and Ba came to the States. Or we’re sad about what might have been. Ba says he wishes he hadn’t left China. Ma’s trying to get back to a time without Ba. I’m thirty-three and I want to be nineteen again. We want to travel back in time, but we can’t, and so we want to go to a new place instead. Place is what we have instead of time. No. Not true. Money is what we have now, instead of place or time.” He exhales. “Time is money. Place is money. Love, love is money. And power is money. You’ll see.”
Going to college has split him cleanly in two. There’s no overlap between his college self and his identity as Snaggle, the third Chao brother. Is it possible for either of these two parts to fade away, disappear? Is it necessary to choose between them?
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