When you long to do something unexpected with your life, you never know where resistance will come from. In the case of Lan Samantha Chang, 39, who had known she wanted to be a writer before she could read, some came implicitly from her parents, and some grew out of her desire to honor their hopes for her.
"I had this problem that took me many years to solve," she said in the canvas-cluttered studio of her husband, painter Robert Caputo. "I was never good material for the kind of job where you don't want to think about what you have to think about all day." Fortunately, this problem made possible her just-published novel, Inheritance, a tale of China and America, of war within nations and families.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Following her short-story collection, Hunger, Chang spent seven years toting her developing novel around the country, from one teaching job or fellowship to another, trying to make it whole. Starting in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford, she moved to Iowa City to teach at the Writer's Workshop, then to a fellowship at Princeton, followed by a monthlong fellowship in Wyoming, then a Radcliffe fellowship at Harvard, back to Iowa City, and finally back to Cambridge, where she holds the Briggs-Copeland lectureship in creative writing at Harvard. After long labor, the novel is out of the writer, between covers, in bookstores.
Inheritance covers a period from 1925 to 1993 and concerns a tragic division between two sisters, Junan and Yinan. The 1937 Japanese invasion of China separates Junan, the elder sister, from her husband, an officer evacuated with Nationalist forces to the western interior. In contact with him by telegraph, Junan begs him to let her take their daughters and join him, but he refuses. Desperate to maintain some kind of contact, she sends her artistic younger sister to him, with grievous consequences that reverberate across time, generations, and immigration to the US.
Before she could write freely and publish, Chang had to solve her "problem" -- that she could not embrace a secure, stable, relatively predictable field such as medicine or law. Her three sisters -- a doctor, a lawyer, and a physical therapist -- did so, but she was cut from different cloth.
"At a certain point, I had to rebel," she said.
Her parents, born in China, had endured the violence and privation of the Japanese occupation, followed by civil war. They moved to Taiwan after the Chinese Communists took over in 1949, and both eventually came to the US: her mother to attend Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; her father to go to graduate school in chemical engineering at Columbia University.
They met in New York, married, and moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, near Green Bay, where her father took a job with a research institute affiliated with Lawrence University. Lan Samantha, the third child, was born there.
As she and her sisters grew up, Chang said, their parents "sacrificed an enormous amount so that we could become financially and professionally secure." Still, for Chang there was "the problem."
"They wanted me to become a doctor," she said. "I remember listening to their views on it for years, then going to first grade and realizing that I didn't like math and science as much as I liked reading. And I knew that I wanted to be a writer from the time I was 4."
Facing `the problem'
Chang went to Yale, and when she admitted to herself that she couldn't bear to study chemistry or math, she changed her major to East Asian studies, which she says was acceptable to her parents. After graduation in 1987, she took the Law School Admission Test -- "because if I wasn't going to medical school, my parents wanted me to go to law school. But the test made me realize I had no desire to think the way the LSAT made me think."
After two years as an editorial assistant for a publisher, she was accepted at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a two-year program in public administration. "I came to the Kennedy School," she said, "There would be assignments such as, `Read this story about the Detroit debt crisis of 1978 and write a two-page memo solving the problem.' I realized that I didn't like answering problems, but I did like describing problems."
Which is, she knew, what writers do.
"Writers don't answer questions about the world," Chang said. "They ask questions."
She decided to give writing a chance and took a fiction-writing workshop at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, in the spring semester of 1990, her first year at the Kennedy School. She loved it and took another workshop in the summer, while her Kennedy School classmates were taking internships in governments or public agencies. In her second year, she said, "every morning I would get up and write for three hours, then do my schoolwork. It was a wonderful time. I had this screen of being a respectable student in a respectable program."
After graduating from the Kennedy School in 1991, she applied to the Iowa Writer's Workshop and was accepted.
"It was the best thing I ever did," she said. "My teachers were wonderful. It was such a luxury to have time to think about my writing, and to be with other writers."
Her parents "were skeptical," she says, but did not fight her, thinking she would get it out of her system. She graduated in 1993 and went to Stanford, where she lived and wrote the stories that became Hunger. In 2000, during her Radcliffe fellowship, she met painter and art teacher Robert Caputo.
Making her parents proud
Chang's love and respect for her parents is obvious, and she makes clear that they were not opposed to the study of humanities. Her mother was a piano teacher, and Chang showed such talent for the violin that her parents thought she might follow a music career. Most of all, with roots in such a tumultuous world as prewar China, they wanted stability and security for their daughters. Chang had been an excellent student, valedictorian of her high school class, and many career choices seemed open to her. In a telephone interview, Chang's parents said they knew she had the talent and desire to write but that the writer's life was fraught with uncertainty.
Her father, Chang Nai-Lin, said: "We did worry. I definitely was always concerned about the future of my kids. Even in the Iowa program, not all the graduates are successful."
Yet they hasten to say they are proud of their daughter. "I admire her ability to make up stories, to make them real," said her mother. "Sam somehow can always capture the audience."
Lan Samantha Chang has been a writer long enough not to have illusions. "Now that I'm actually a writer," she said, "and I realize how uncertain the life is, how difficult writing is, I understand why my parents were worried. I'm doing OK right now, and I have a steady job. But the process of writing this book makes me realize how terribly hard it is. I threw away 400 pages, rewrote it 14 times, moved four or five times, and most of the moves were solely to get funding to write the book. It was exhausting and isolating. I put my life into the book for seven years, and now it's out, and it's going to be on a shelf as long as a carton of yogurt. The book business is terrible and terrifying."
Nevertheless, she said, "I love writing, and more than that, I don't know how to do anything else."
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