The Family Chao: A Novel

For Chang, the child of immigrants who left China in 1949, Berlin presents an alternative way to deal with the past than the Chinese approach, “which has been to eliminate the past, architecturally, politically, and culturally,” she writes. While working on her Academy project The Family Chao (W.W. Norton, 2022), she draws on her own background and perspective of an outsider to dramatize different and contradictory views of Chinese Americans and their stories. In this novel, she takes up the points of view of members of the Chao family, the small Chinese community of Haven, Wisconsin, and the American public at large. The novel’s narrative point of view is, ultimately, omniscient, but it is a subjective omniscience, “the omniscience of an underrepresented community as it observes within and without,” Chang explains. In the aftermath of their father’s murder, the Chao brothers come to wonder if they were ever accepted in their community, and what their future in America means. Their time and trauma in Wisconsin renders them “not quite an immigrant family any longer,” she writes. “If the past year has been about anything, it has been about their recognition that they are Americans now. This country is the place where they have made their ghosts. It is their home.”