There is a Vietnamese snack that I have never cared for: nem chua. Sinewy, pungent, often eaten raw, nem chua was a favorite among my relatives. Like any good Vietnamese child, I gratified my elders by smiling through the fermented pork’s acidic sting on my tongue. At family gatherings or visits to distant relatives whose names I could never retain, my nem chua tastings sometimes turned into spectacles, much like what Ronny is subjected to in Catherine Dang’s disturbing sophomore novel, What Hunger:
“The entire kitchen was watching me. I knew I didn’t have a choice. I reached out and took the slim piece of meat. It looked like a sick sausage. It was flesh-pink yet wrinkled, as if most of the life had been drained out of it. But it was the taste that had always stuck with me: a tinge of sourness.”
The affective weight and the performativity of taste at play in Ronny’s reluctance may feel familiar for many Vietnamese American readers, who have frequently found their Vietnameseness or Americanness up for debate. Our palates especially fall under scrutiny. Our knowledge of or our appetite for XYZ dishes, Vietnamese or otherwise, can test or confirm our claims to home and fears of exclusion from certain spaces. Unsurprisingly, Asian American authors and scholars of Asian American literature have long been concerned with food; the edited volume Eating Asian America and its sequel offer recent examples of diverse critical approaches to this.
Unlike many of her mainstream contemporaries, Catherine Dang does not draw inspiration for her writing of food from the tired Asian American “lunchbox moment” trope. She instead turns toward something far more disturbing than lunchtime bullying or an oversimplification of diaspora blues: stories from her mother about Vietnamese refugees who resorted to cannibalism for survival. I may have outgrown my aversion to nem chua, but never have I had the eerie revelation that Dang’s narrator Ronny experiences. As she seizes the nem chua to hush her pestering relatives and begins chewing, Ronny immediately notices its uncanny resemblance to human flesh:
“The piece of meat was small and lumpy on my tongue. It was only slightly bigger than an earlobe.
Only a few hours earlier, I’d had an earlobe in my mouth, blood leaking out of it. I’d spit it out on the bed before I could chew it. I’d missed my chance. I hadn’t known the full sensation of an earlobe between my teeth, the full taste of its flesh—I’d only tasted the salty outside.
My mind knew it was a revolting experience. It was unnatural. But my body didn’t seem to care. As Michael screamed, his earlobe gone in my mouth, I had felt no urge to puke. I hadn’t gagged.
I hadn’t disliked the taste.
It was actually kind of good.”
Cannibalism is so in right now. The last ten years alone have bore witness to a pronounced fascination with cannibalism across media genres. However, the days of bone-chilling serial killers like Hannibal Lecter are long gone. Cannibals are lovers, daughters, best friends, neighbors, local teens, and just about everyone else in between. Once you get past the body horror, the sympathetic and sometimes romanticized treatments of cannibals in Luca Guadagnino’s 2022 film adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’s Bones and All (2015), Julia Ducournau’s Raw [Grave] (2016), Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh [Cadáver exquisito] (2017), and Showtime’s hit series Yellowjackets (2021–) reveal universal human emotions of grief, loneliness, powerlessness, and hopelessness underneath every unassuming character’s hunger for human flesh. In works like these, cannibalism has been a particularly useful lens for broader commentary on sexual and/or capitalistic exploitation. Consider, too, reevaluations of the contentious horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body (2009) in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which have not only turned the box-office flop into a cult classic now deemed worthy for the Criterion Collection, but have held Megan Fox’s succubus character up as a queer and feminist reclamation of power after devastating sexual violence.
Welcome the newest addition to the cannibal canon, What Hunger’s Ronny (Veronica) Nguyen. When her older brother Tommy, idolized by all, is suddenly killed in a car accident, Ronny finds herself navigating not only her grief, but also the challenges of her freshman year of high school all alone. Ronny is used to her Vietnamese parents’ usual avoidance of uncomfortable topics, especially as they relate to the trauma of war and refugee displacement, but Tommy’s absence shrouds their home in an isolating silence. Ba drowns his sorrow in alcohol. Mẹ rarely leaves the house. Life without Tommy eventually brightens with the arrival of Ba’s loquacious and outspoken sister Cô Mỹ. Raucous dinners and nhậu with Cô Mỹ reveal new sides of Ba and Mẹ, as the family slowly starts to heal and Ronny gets to learn more about her parents’ past. However, the excitement of Cô Mỹ’s interruptions of the Nguyen family’s doldrums still do not assuage Ronny’s growing pains without the guidance of her older brother. Things take a turn for the worse when a classmate sexually assaults Ronny at her first high school party where, as you may have already guessed, she bites off her aggressor’s earlobe in retaliation.
As alone as this violation makes Ronny feel, the taste of raw flesh in her mouth and the ensuing rush from fighting back give her a thirst for power in a world that seems set on keeping her down. Ronny’s insatiable craving for raw meat turns her into a gutsy teen who must fend for herself with no Tommy to the rescue. Ronny’s newfound power drives her toward vengeance against not only Michael, but anyone else who has made her feel small. One-sided rumors spread about the events of the party and the possibility of counsel from her parents feels increasingly distant. Yet, Ronny is invigorated by her ability to now intimidate others who once intimidated her, finding the gall to even rebel against adult authority figures and challenge traditional norms.
What Hunger slowly builds to its shocking end, making us wonder with each turn of the page what Ronny will crave next. From her fascination with raw eggroll filling to her devouring of raw filet mignon in the woods (a scene so intimate that I almost felt like a voyeur), some parts left me picking up my jaw from the ground. Even beyond the flesh-eating scenes, Dang deftly captures all the anxiety, tension, and discomfort of adolescence with just enough detail to make your skin crawl.
In addition to Dang’s skillful handling of What Hunger’s macabre elements, the novel also triumphs in balancing universal appeal yet undeniable Vietnameseness. Dang does not exoticize Vietnamese foods or the Vietnamese refugee experience, as widely celebrated diasporic fiction has been wont to do. While she peppers the novel with Vietnamese cultural references, especially elaborate descriptions of food, she does not extrapolate a poetics from Vietnamese phrases, dwell too much on the sensorial particularities or exotic ingredients of Vietnamese delicacies, nor feign attributing a unique outlook on suffering inherent to Vietnamese mindsets.
Rather, Dang situates the tragedies and traumas of Ronny’s family among everyday cruel injustices in the world, such that the aftermath of Tommy’s passing allegorizes a more general mourning of the end of childhood and the difficulty of piecing back together a family left broken in their bereavement. Part of growing up, Ronny discovers, is having to confront “smaller, everyday evils.” She continues:
“I would find them down the road, at the mall, in the cafeteria. They were pernicious, easy to overlook. And the real evil was that there would be people who would never stop suffering—the evil they endured was part of their routine, like brushing teeth or fixing hair. It boggled my mind that the world could be continually cruel like that. It seemed inhumane. And I realized I would never stop learning about the ways people fail each other.”
As Ronny faces these sobering realities about the world, she additionally unearths important truths about her own family once she finally learns to humanize her parents, and even Tommy, beyond the roles that they fulfill in her life. This could universally register across experiences of the transition to adulthood. It particularly resonates, though, for Vietnamese young adults—often raised in families where filial duty, the unspeakability of certain taboo topics, and indebtedness for sacrifice are commonly accepted givens. Having learned so much not only about herself, but her parents and brother in just a few short months, Ronny asks herself for the very first time toward the novel’s close, “had I ever considered my parents’ full lives before me?” In her short-lived quest for retribution, Ronny also uncovers secrets that Tommy had intentionally kept hidden. While I wish Dang had explored this aspect of the novel more deeply, I also acknowledge that maintaining the mystery of Tommy’s life before his untimely death reflects Ronny’s own acceptance of this unknowability by the end of the novel.
What Hunger is a sickly coming-of-age binge. More than an exploration of run-of-the-mill adolescent angst, though, Catherine Dang offers a beautiful rumination on grief, resilience, and the boundless love that a family can have for each other, even when left unsaid. Inspired by her family’s stories recounted over homecooked meals to write What Hunger, Dang leaves readers with a powerful testament to the importance of sharing each other’s joys and sorrows (as the Vietnamese say, chia buồn).
Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in refugitude aesthetics, memory, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. He previously received his BA at Hamilton College and taught high school English in the Occitanie region of France. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation, and published in L’Esprit Créateur. Born and raised in the Seattle area, he loves steaming hot noodle soups and coffee (in the rain, of course).
