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I loved talking to Su Chang about her debut novel, THE IMMORTAL WOMAN, which came out in March from House of Anansi Press and has been much buzzed-about in literary circles. And for good reason—this debut novel includes 70 years of contemporary Chinese history, and crosses both continents and generations to tell an epic mother/daughter tale that grapples with the traumatic legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution. It’s a powerful, moving and incredibly dynamic novel that complicated my understanding of China and its history in surprising and essential ways.
In our conversation, Chang talks about the ambitiousness of one’s debut novel being an epic, but also why she couldn’t have told a story of the Cultural Revolution any other way. She talks about how she understood the Cultural Revolution as a child growing up in China overhearing discussions at the dinner table, but about how it wasn’t until she’d left China and began reading uncensored histories of her country that she began to understand just why those dinner table discussions had been so different from what she’d been taught in school. She describes the kind of broad reading that’s required to get close to something resembling truth, and also the ways in which she identified with the protagonist of Ayad Akhtar's HOMELAND ELEGIES and the paradoxical way in which he understands Americanness.
A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind.
Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin. Their final confrontation results in tragic consequences, but ultimately, offers hope for a better future. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman reminds us to hold tight to our humanity at any cost.
SU CHANG is a Chinese-Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors' Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, the Masters Review's Novel Excerpt Contest, among others.
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