Trigger warnings for rape, child sexual abuse, forced prostitution, other forms of abuse, and suicide.
The Chow family is haunted by a terrible family history of violence and rape, but only some of them know that they’re also haunted by something that is desperately seeking an impossible revenge. Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Hunger We Pass Down is a harrowing, challenging read about historical atrocities that can never be forgiven or forgotten.
There are two events that cursed the Chows: a suicide that followed the threat of a forced marriage and the kidnapping and forced prostitution of thousands of women by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War/World War II. I have always loathed the term “comfort women,” to the point that my skin crawls when I see or hear it used. Women from across Asia were kidnapped or lied to about jobs and were forced to serve as, essentially, sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. They were beaten, starved, and sometimes killed in addition to being raped repeatedly. Gigi, the ancestor of the other primary narrator, was snatched off of the street in Hong Kong and sent to Nam Koo Terrace, a real place in Hong Kong that still exists that really served as a brothel for the Japanese Army. Her descendants know only a little of the abuse and misery she suffered there. And they know that she died shortly after giving birth around the end of the war in 1945.
Most of the book is narrated by Gigi’s great-granddaughter, Alice. Alice is stretched thin with the demands of her business, her children, her strained relationship with her ex-husband, her new lover, too much alcohol, and her domineering mother. What she doesn’t know is that there is something in her home in Vancouver, Canada that’s also driving her towards breaking. Alice was never told the full extent of the history her family carries, nor was she told that she should have been on guard against (what I think is) a very hungry ghost. If the Chow women are not careful, not vigilant, they risk losing everything in their lives and their very souls to that ghost.
I struggled with this book, but perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. I had a hard time finishing this book because of its pacing and for the far too casual way that it handled the abuse suffered by Alice’s mother and grandmother. The way the pacing of The Hunger We Pass Down reads to me, there are three sections. The first section primarily deals with Alice’s depression. There are alternating passages that relate scenes from Gigi’s incarceration in Nam Koo Terrace, but most of this section shows us in far too much detail just how much Alice is suffering. (This might sound dismissive, but bear with me.) Around the half-way point, once Alice learns more about what’s really going on, we readers are galloped through a very fast history of what happened to Gigi’s daughter, Bette, and Alice’s mother, Judy. This section is almost a blur. The last section of the novel is the climax, in which the Chow women face up against all of the things that are haunting them. This climax is the best part of the novel, though I don’t think it makes up for the other issues I had with this book.
Now, for the second thing that bothered me. One thing that bothers me about depictions of abuse in fiction is that, sometimes, abuse is treated like a simple motivating factor or just a detail in someone’s backstory, rather than with thoughtfulness and nuance. In these stories, abuse is a trope akin to fridging. I loathe when abuse is unnecessary to the narrative. There are some absolutely horrific things that happen to Judy that are so briefly mentioned in the narrative that their only effect was to make an already terrible childhood even nastier. It reads to me like piling on rather than character development.
There are some interesting ideas in The Hunger We Pass Down but the execution doesn’t honor the premise or themes those ideas raise.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.