Summary: Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Jade Chang, whose debut novel The Wangs Against The World was released just this month by Houghton Mifflin. Jade has worked with the BBC, Glamour and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. She has been the recipient of a Sundance Arts fellowship and currently lives in Los Angeles. ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– The Wangs Against the World is a book about the American dream, the losing of that dream and the attempt through an erratic, hilarious and poignant road trip to regain that dream, or actually an Asian dream. Our protagonists are Charles Wang, an entrepreneur whose cosmetics line was a fabulous success and then not. Or as Ernest Hemingway says in The Sun Also Rises, How did you go bankrupt? “Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” He resents what America has done to him, and yearns for what may be an illusory homestead in China. Barbra his second wife, a stoic woman, is forced constantly to be reminded of Charles glamorous first wife, May Lee and her dramatic exit from the story. Andrew, the wealthy student whose life is uprooted as are all the characters by Charles sudden and complete financial meltdown, is an aspiring comic, who stand up routines, up until a moment of epiphany are mediocre at best. Then Grace is a 16 year old, whose social media prowess is side tracked by the financial circumstance that resonate throughout the work. Saina is the one character who at times seems settled, and then not and whose home is the place to which each of these prodigal family members hope to find their peace. Throughout the journey, a portion of which is narrated by a non human protagonist we are caught between laughing out loud, which I did several times and thinking seriously about what it means to be American, to be Asian, to be wealthy, to be poor and to yearn for various things in life things that on the surface may be ephemeral by resonate with each of us.
