A family falls apart and comes back together Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World. this sparkling — and sharp — debut novel reminiscent of the rollicking comedy of The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, and the warmth of the equally funny Where’d You Go Bernadette. An impulsive decision by a self-made cosmetics mogul rocks his family, but what happens next surprises all of them in this witty story of money and manners, identity and the American Dream.
We asked the author to take us behind the scenes of The Wangs vs. the World, and she shared the following essay with us — The Editors.
When I was an editor at Goodreads, one of my jobs was to gather member questions for author Q&As. After sorting through thousands of queries I can say with a certain amount of authority that readers want to know one thing about fiction: Did any of it actually happen?
When it comes to The Wangs vs. the World, my first impulse was to say that all of it is emotionally true, and none of it actually happened. But that’s not quite accurate, either.
In a way, every page is full of things that actually happened. There are small moments that I witnessed — like the man on a skateboard pushing another man in a wheelchair down the sidewalk — that became things the family sees on their road trip, and ideas that I discussed with my friends that became part of the Wang siblings’ discussions.
And though my father never made (or lost!) a cosmetics fortune, my parents’ shared backgrounds are the same as the one that I’ve given the Wangs. They come from families who for generations owned vast swathes of land, then lost it all during the Japanese invasion and the rise of Communism. That loss is the driving force of this story — it’s a desire to recover his family’s lost ancestral land that keeps Charles going after the collapse of his company.
But in many ways it wasn’t my family’s distant past that influenced the story as much as the just-departed present. When I’m asked about the three Wang children, and why they experience so little angst in pursuit of their artistic dreams — Saina is an artist, Andrew is an aspiring stand-up comic, Grace is a style blogger — I usually say that it’s because I grew up in a San Fernando Valley that was very mixed, where a strong percentage of my classmates were Korean, Indian, Persian, where many of the people who were not recent immigrants from Asia or the Middle East were Jewish or Mormon or Jehovah’s Witnesses. When everyone’s an outsider, the term no longer carries any weight.
But it’s equally true that I was able to write the characters that I did because of the lives that my parents modeled. There’s a checklist for what we think of as typical Asian parents, and in some ways they filled a lot of the boxes — straight A’s were expected, as were high SAT scores and college attendance, at home only Mandarin was spoken — but that was the extent of it. When we were kids, my sister and I joked that there should be a warning sign on our front door: “You Are Now Entering an Absurdist Household.” Until very recently I thought that every family that didn’t hate each other spent most dinners trying to make each other laugh. Turns out, they don’t.
My parents were hippies who came to America in the ’70s because it seemed like an adventure — my father had shoulder-length hair and a corresponding mustache and a purple dashiki-style shirt that made an appearance in almost every photograph. His favorite band at the time was Creedence Clearwater Revival, and he was getting a graduate degree in mass communications, back when that was still a thing. My mother somehow ended up with a degree in nuclear medicine, but she is also a pianist and a painter.
The thing is, this story seems atypical only because it does not get told to a wider audience; I can think of countless examples of immigrant parents whose interests were equally varied. To me, one of the essential truths of The Wangs vs. the World is that it is about immigrants who see themselves as being central to the story of America. And I was able to write it because that is the life that I have lived.
So did any of it actually happen? No. And yet, yes.
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Sig Nordal 