Bingo square – dough – for the cooking elements AND for the significant impact of money on the family and the story generally
Also, another BINGO!
Every time I read the family name in its plural form, I had to mentally pronounce it, because my mind kept wanting to state “chaos”, rather than the “chow” (fun fact – the parts of our brain involved in auditory processing are full cylinder firing and critically important to reading, even SILENT reading, which is why phonics instruction is so important for emerging readers!). And chaos is an apt term to be thinking about when you describe the Chao family. The patriarch is mean, greedy, and not well liked by his family or broader community – but he does run a more or less successful diner, serving Chinese food and philandering on the side. His long-suffering wife has taken leave of him, opting to spend her post-child-raising years in a sort of Buddhist nunnery rather than endure his antics. Their three boys are vastly different in temperament, but all three have characteristics of their father that they battle with / against. All three sons return home for Christmas, when their family typically throws a party for much of their local Chinese-American community. As you can imagine, something goes terribly awry, and the brothers must deal with the consequences.
Each brother has a distinct personality, but one drawback of the novel for me was that I didn’t really like this family very much, despite feeling a sort of affection for them (if that makes much sense?). The eldest brother was a talented chef, and as the only child who remained at home (well, the youngest was just in college) he was sort of devoted to his family / tradition. But despite being an otherwise intelligent person, his behavior was often unhinged and illogical – engaging in screaming matches with his father, often in very public places, all night cooking sprees, and absolutely no awareness of how to manage money. Something about him felt almost like watching late-Friends Joey – he had an odd string of nonsensical ineptitudes that I found a bit hard to accept. The middle child was smart and cold, removed from the family for the most part and only interested in making money, but also maybe keenly interested in protecting his soul? And the youngest was utterly lost, unaware of how any of his family members truly felt about anything. Their mother had fled their childhood home, and every man in her life was mostly concerned with how that would upset THEM without much thought about what compelled her to leave OR stay all those years. The women around them were inscrutable, often intelligent but also primarily understood as objects of lust or tools for getting needs met.
I enjoyed reading about this family, but it wasn’t one of my favorites this year. I did not feel entirely connected to the story, so that even the “big reveal” in the end did not feel as interesting as I might have hoped. Despite good writing, I think in the end this story wasn’t quite for me.