Lan Samantha Chang: The River Styx Interview
Photo credit: IfeOluwa Nihinlola
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of three novels (Inheritance, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, and The Family Chao) and one story collection (Hunger). She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin, and an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 2005, she has served as Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Our conversation took place virtually over two consective days in June 2025.
CASTILLE: You grew up in Wisconsin, and you’ve lived in Iowa City for a large part of your life. Do you consider yourself a Midwesterner?
CHANG: I’ve been in Iowa City now for twenty years. I was born and raised in Wisconsin. This means I’ve spent the most amount of time in the Midwest and that I am a Midwesterner. But I did also live on the East Coast several times, for a number of years, and I lived on the West Coast for almost six years.
CASTILLE: Your parents emigrated from China to the United States in 1949. Is that right?
CHANG: They emigrated from China to Taiwan. And from Taiwan to the United States.
CASTILLE: In a 2006 interview with The Iowa Review, you said, “I grew up with a sense that China was unreachable.” What has it been like to watch China's evolution as a writer and as the daughter of parents who emigrated from a very different China?
CHANG: Well, that's a fascinating question. It's been both estranging and oddly confirming. In the years when I was growing up, mainland China was shut off from the US and other capitalist countries. My parents, especially my father, were very reserved about their lives and told me very little—I knew there’d been the Japanese Invasion, followed by wars, then the Communist Revolution. That was about it—China was all in the past. Eventually, when the door between China and the US opened again, I visited a couple of times, and our family was reunited with what remained of my father’s generation. Then these people became older and passed away.
And then this wonderful thing happened, which is that all of these newer generation immigrants and their children started coming into my classrooms. I have now worked with a number of wonderful writers, some of whom are from China and some of whom are the children of more recent Chinese immigrants, and I feel now that I have, in many ways, a strong personal connection again.
CASTILLE: Your novel, The Family Chao, opens in a train station where there are these two men, one an English-speaking Chinese American, and one who is a Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrant. And they're struggling to communicate past a language barrier. I think it's a beautiful way to open the novel because this conversation is happening, first of all, and for a long time these conversations didn’t happen because China was cut off from the world.
CHANG: Right.
CASTILLE: How much of that—the history of separation—was in the back of your mind when you were writing the opening of the book? Why does it begin there, with that conversation?
CHANG: This was called the “Bamboo Curtain,” and it was a disconnect that took place following the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. The borders of the country were closed, and people weren't allowed to come and go freely. My father was estranged from his family of origin in Beijing. This all took place before the advent of the internet. There was no FaceTime through which relatives could converse across thousands of miles. The mail had been stopped. Letters were not really a thing for so many years. China began to open again with ping-pong diplomacy during the Nixon administration. My father didn't go back until 1979.
He had been away from the country for a long time. During that time, we were pretty much alone in Wisconsin with occasional contact with our American relatives (my mother’s relatives). As the third child out of four, my Chinese skills were not as strong as those of my older siblings, or as those of my younger sibling who stayed at home after I left.
In the scene with James in the train station, I was remembering the experience that I have had of being asked for help by people to whom I then have to speak in imperfect Chinese. I did take four years of intensive Mandarin at Yale. It's not that I can't read anything or haven't been exposed as an adult to the language, but people seeing my face would assume that I can speak to them fluently. I wanted James to have that experience. I wanted a way to introduce him that helped readers understand his position in the family, which is that James was a member of a family for whom much drama had taken place before he was born. He was essentially the comet's tail of the intense early lives of his parents. He was trailing them. Having grown up in a family of four siblings, pretty widely spread out siblings, I wanted to write about that experience and the way it can affect the siblings’ exposure to the parents' culture. I feel in some ways that The Family Chao is about assimilation to a dominant culture. It plays with the idea of assimilation in different ways. There are a lot of jokes about assimilation, but essentially it's about what happens to a family when they've been in a country for so long that they … [pause] These are questions that I don't really think people have asked me before. Maybe because they're not as bright as you are?
CASTILLE: [laughs] I don’t know about that.
CHANG: And so, the characters have been in the country for so long that they've learned to succeed in the country, they've benefited from the country; they’ve benefited from being Americans, and yet they're still subjected to the gaze of people who see them as newcomers. From the first chapter I wanted to make it clear that that dynamic is one of the primary narrative levers later on in the book.
CASTILLE: There’s a murder at the center of the book. That feels like a major turn for you.
CHANG: Back when I was teaching undergraduates, before I came to the Workshop, I had a student who was obsessed with The Brothers Karamazov. I started reading it and became obsessed with it also. When I was at Iowa I taught a couple of non-credit classes during which we discussed The Brothers Karamazov. Everyone would promise to read it, and then they would come and we would discuss it for like five hours. I also taught what they call a “bookshop” class at Warren Wilson College on The Brothers Karamazov. I think it was a member of the Iowa class of 2013 who told me during a thesis meeting that all the work he did was based on other work. He was writing a novel that was based on The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, a wonderful book. After he left my office I thought, that’s really interesting. If I were going to do a project like that, it would be in conversation with The Brothers Karamazov.
CASTILLE: And then you started The Family Chao.
CHANG: The thing is, in around 2005, I had written a hundred pages from the point of view of these kids in this family, with this impossible father, who in some ways is very much like my own father. And I decided that I would make that character over into the character who became Leo Chao and change the siblings. There were two boys and a girl, and I changed them into three boys, and these characters were in conversation with the ones in The Brothers Karamazov.
Anyway, that book contains a murder—that’s the event around which the entire book is centered. I had to think about it for a while. I thought, What kind of book am I capable of writing? What do I want to write? I realized that I wanted to write with a kind of freewheeling quality that I was unable to incorporate into my other books, like Hunger, which is a low-key, slightly repressed narrative of immigrant angst. I realized that when I was growing up in Wisconsin, my family was often riotous, pissed off, loud, funny—possessing all kinds of tonal qualities that didn't get into that more repressed narrative. I think my characters in Hunger were living lives of quiet desperation, and the characters in The Family Chao are living lives of noisy desperation.
CASTILLE: That allowed room for the murder.
CHANG: The new tone was capacious enough to include crazy happenings. It opened up so that I could include this murder plot and the trial that followed it.
CASTILLE: What do you understand about novel writing today that you didn't understand, say, when you were at Iowa and Stanford?
CHANG: I didn't know anything about writing novels when I was a Stegner Fellow or a student in the MFA program. [laughs] I didn't start learning about novels until after I had left the Stegner and I was working as a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. I have clear memories of feeling very stuck with my writing and having a coffee with John L’Heureux, a professor at Stanford, and John explaining to me that it sounded like I was trying to figure out how to write something longer, and that longer narratives were a different form. And at that point, I began to understand that writing a novel can be as different from writing a short story as writing an essay is from writing a short story. The two forms are just very different. Once I understood that I had been trained on the short form, I was able to retrain myself to understand the long form. I really enjoyed learning about the novel, but I hated writing my first novel because I just felt like I couldn't understand what I was doing. I was lost the entire time.
CASTILLE: Hunger was transitional for you, then. I would call that a novella.
CHANG: Hunger is a novella. It was my first effort at a long narrative after talking to John. I realized that before I could write a book-length narrative, I would have to attempt something in between.
CASTILLE: What is a novella? Does it just come down to page count? What are the ingredients that make it different from a novel?
CHANG: Everybody has a different opinion about this. I would say that the forces among characters in a novel are different because there are generally more major characters in a novel than there are in a novella. This is obviously just an opinion. Jane Smiley—she has published three beautiful novellas—once said in an interview that she thinks the novella is about a relationship between two people. I think time is different in a novella than it is in a short story, for example, although it would take a long time to talk about how and why.
CASTILLE: In a short story, time is generally compressed.
CHANG: A lot of the time, yes. Although there are some wonderful short stories in which time is dilated.
CASTILLE: And in a novel, you can go on for hundreds of unnecessary pages. We can have digressions. We can step in and out of time.
CHANG: One of the big misconceptions about novel writing is that novels contain unnecessary pages. I think digressions are necessary. In good novels, the pages that seem unnecessary are essential. People have a misconception about the novel if they haven't written one. They assume that they can throw in the kitchen sink, and actually, in my opinion, you can't.
CASTILLE: Because of the form or because of aesthetics?
CHANG: Because of the basic fact of art as artifice, and how a novel is designed to appear as if it were a piece of the real world. One of the elements in the real world is that it contains this surprise: that we're moving forward in time and we don't know what's going to happen to us, and so anything could happen. A novel needs to feel that way. It needs to be capacious enough so that we feel that way. But at the same time, a novel is unlike real life because it needs to end. Most novels sort of work to create an ending for themselves, which is different from real life. You see what I mean? My life could end—knock on wood—tomorrow. I am not prepared for that. But by the time a novel ends, the reader has technically been prepared for that. That work has all been done by the novelist. Everything in a novel appears, as in real life, to happen at random, but is actually essential to the art.
CASTILLE: In your story, “Painting of Hannah,” which you published in Harper’s in 2023—a story that I loved—
CHANG: I’m glad you liked it.
CASTILLE: I read it several times, and I hardly ever do that with a story unless I’m editing it. I read the story five or six times over a couple of days and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then while I was watching Robert Eggers’s remake of Nosferatu I was suddenly reminded of your story, and I thought, Gaugnot is Dracula. He’s in this castle, right? This sort of ancient man who draws these enchanted youth unto him and possesses them.
CHANG: Oh, that’s so fucked up. [laughs]
CASTILLE: Were you reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula when you were writing “Painting of Hannah”?
CHANG: No! [laughs] Not at all. That’s so interesting.
CASTILLE: Jacob Jiang, the main character, is a New York-based painter who travels to rural France in 2007 to study naturalism under a reclusive master, Thomas Gaugnot. Hannah, a fellow student, becomes an object of desire and inspiration for Jacob. There’s a lot of longing. Is longing a vital experience for the artist?
CHANG: I think it is. I mean, I do. I think—
CASTILLE: What do you long for?
CHANG: What do I long for? [pause] I long to escape the boundaries of normal life. I realized maybe twenty years ago that writing has a particular function in my life. The function is that it gives me something to think about and a place to go that is not reality. If I don’t have myself deeply inserted into a project, my mind does all kinds of funny things.
This comes usually when I finish a long project and I don't yet have a new project. I’ll give you an example. While I was writing Inheritance—which was just this completely abysmal experience that I know was valuable, but I had a horrible time writing it—it was as if I struggled and strained for almost ten years to enter the novel’s world entirely. (My own world was separated in terms of time, space, generations, characters.) Just when I felt like I had all of it barely in my understanding, I finished the book and was left on the outside of that world. I remember waking up one night and telling my husband, “They’re gone. They're all gone.” It was like they were sealed away, or even dead, the characters, because the book was finished. It had been sent to the publisher, and I was just empty. Then I decided that I would apply to be director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
CASTILLE: You’d completed this Herculean task of finishing the novel, and then you suddenly felt a little—
CHANG: Bored.
CASTILLE: Bored?
CHANG: I felt bored. I get bored and I do stupid things. I think longing is central to my existence. I'm always interested in what another world would be like. When I was a child, I read fantasy novels. I can remember being in Appleton, Wisconsin, and reading about a new kingdom that some travelers had entered, and just feeling this terrible yearning to be in the new kingdom. Fiction helps me to have adventures.
CASTILLE: There’s a scene in the chapel where Hannah reveals to Jacob her backstory with Gaugnot, that Gaugnot has possessed her, and then Jacob mentions Nietzsche's belief in eternal recurrence—that our lives repeat infinitely. Where did that come from?
CHANG: I think it came from the reading that I was doing sometime when you were in the program. I was reading a lot of contemporary philosophy.
CASTILLE: You were reading Foucault, I remember.
CHANG: I was reading a lot of things. The thing about “Painting of Hannah” is that I started it in probably 2007, and then I worked on it again a little bit in 2010, and then maybe 2015.
CASTILLE: That’s a long time.
CHANG: And then I put it aside for a long time and tried it again, but I didn't work on it while I was doing The Family Chao. The problem with that story was that I thought that Jacob and Hannah should sleep together, and then I realized after many years that they shouldn’t, and that was when I was able to finish it.
CASTILLE: It feels inevitable throughout the story that they will. And then it doesn't happen.
CHANG: No, but it makes total sense that it doesn't happen.
CASTILLE: And then in the chapel scene I'm like, is it going to happen here?
CHANG: Well, I thought it would. I've had whole sections that were written where it was happening in the chapel and it just never worked. It never worked because [Jacob] couldn't do it. Not that he couldn't do it, but that he wouldn't do it.
CASTILLE: Is Gaugnot based on someone in real life? I normally don't ask that question, but, you know, it made me think of Frank Conroy.
CHANG: Oh, that's so funny. No, he's based on a painter who had a school for Americans in a small village in France.
CASTILLE: Did you meet him?
CHANG: Yes.
CASTILLE: You have to tell me the story! Is he—
CHANG: He's now dead. My husband is a landscape painter. When I met him, he was interested in going to France to study in a school that had been started by a man who moved to rural France from New York and brought along a bunch of his students. And they all lived in this town for a long time. They mostly did still lifes and figure painting. They used a model. My husband was mostly interested in landscape painting. He did do some really beautiful paintings. That was when I was just starting at the Workshop. He was in France for a lot of my first semester, my first year, for maybe six months. I went out to visit him a few times and saw a lot of interesting things. I wrote down descriptions but I didn't know what to do with them. And then over time it became clear.
CASTILLE: You cooked this story for a long, long time, then.
CHANG: Yeah, I did. I don't write short stories that often. My writing life is completely shaped by how much time I have to work. So when I was at the Workshop in the early 90s, I had two years to work on my writing. I also had regular deadlines that forced me to come up with a number of short stories. Several of those stories are in Hunger. The ones that I didn't think were working as well are not in Hunger. Then I got to Stanford and I was given two years of support and I couldn't really—I'm just a slow writer, and I was in a slow period—I couldn't really come up with interesting ideas for stories. And then I wrote Hunger, and Inheritance, which took a long time, a lot of work, but I worked steadily on it. And then after that, I got married. And after getting married, I started this job. And after I started this job, I had my daughter. And the publication, marriage, job, and daughter all happened in the space of about three years.
CASTILLE: I’ve wondered what it's like being a writer who also teaches writing. You’re the director of the program, on top of that. I figure you must be very disciplined and good at managing your time. Ash Davidson, who was in the program with me, said she wrote Damnation Spring over the course of something like 10 years at thirty minutes a day. I don't have that kind of commitment.
CHANG: When did she write, before or after work?
CASTILLE: Before? Maybe after. I don’t know!
CHANG: I think I would have to get up and write because once I finish work my head is full of stuff and I can't clear it enough to enter an imaginary space. That is very disciplined of Ash.
CASTILLE: So you're a morning writer.
CHANG: I am. I mean, no. See, I should explain. I try to be a morning writer because it's the habit I developed when I was a student at the Workshop. But if I can get into a project, I can write at any point in the day. I just have to reach that point where I'm deeply inside the project.
CASTILLE: What are you working on now? Do you have a book coming?
CHANG: I seem to be working on two different projects. One is about mortality and it takes place in the house where I grew up. The other project is something that I started in 2021 and drafted a couple hundred pages and then decided was not interesting to me, but which has recently become interesting again.