Trigger warning for cannibalism and brief depiction of rape.
The Nguyen family works very hard to keep up appearances. Ronny’s father works hard to keep a roof over their heads. Her mother cooks delicious Vietnamese dishes. Her older brother Tommy is the family’s hope for further upward mobility. Until Tommy’s sudden death early in Catherine Dang’s shocking new novel, What Hunger, Ronny is able to drift along in Tommy’s wake while she tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life.
The summer and fall after Tommy dies are the worst of Ronny’s life. He was the glue that held everything together. Without him, Ronny’s father is lost to anger and alcohol, and her mother is falling into a deep depression. And now Ronny is the one to bear the weight of her parents’ expectations. She’s always been an indifferent student but now everyone expects her to excel in high school, go to college, and get a high-earning job. It’s not surprising that the pressure and grief might lead Ronny to act out. Her one act of teenaged rebellion is to sneak out to a party being held by friends of friends of friends, where she drinks too much. A boy Ronny thinks likes her offers to take her upstairs to get away from the noise, where he assaults her. Thankfully, Ronny finds enough of a spark of violence to fight back.
Ronny has no questions about what Michael did to her. Instead, she has a lot of questions about that spark of violence, the one that led her to use her fingernails and teeth to stop Michael. Why does she now crave meat? Why does she constantly imagine the textures and tastes of raw meat? Why does she wonder what it might be like to literally bite back? With her parents lost in their own misery, Ronny has to navigate the emotional aftereffects of what Michael did to her and her increasing need to consume blood and flesh. Is she even human anymore?
I appreciated that Dang answers these questions, though I felt the ending of What Hunger was somewhat rushed. What I liked most about this book was the thoughtful way that Dang developed the theme of food and survival. Food carries a lot of symbolic weight in every culture. Recipes are memories as often as they are nourishment. Most of the foods mentioned in What Hunger are only referred to by their Vietnamese names, leading me down a fun rabbit hole of Vietnamese cuisine and its soups and braises and intriguing combinations of ingredients I’d never heard of before. Ronny’s mother and aunt are proud that they can feed family and friends until they burst. Ronny’s mother, however, can remember the hungry years during and after the Vietnam War. It’s little wonder that Ronny’s parents are so careful about money, even decades later, because they know what it’s like to starve. Without the right food, human beings can think of little else but getting calories into our systems. And this line of thought brings me to one of the biggest questions I had about What Hunger: what feeds Ronny, literally, emotionally, and intellectually?
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.