The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee

The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee is a haunting story of the ghosts that women of the Asian diaspora carry with them when they migrate out of their home countries. This book intricately, yet ferociously, delves into the violence that clings to women’s bodies passed from mother to daughter. I love the elements of folklore from different Asian cultures, from China to the Philippines, and how these ghost stories follow the characters. It’s arresting, the kind of story you can’t look away from, and it’s become one of my favorite stories about generational trauma. It made me want to look back to the women of my own family line to learn of the lives that came before mine.

We follow Alice Chow in the present day, a single mother who can’t seem to keep her head above water with her unexpectedly successful business, her two children, and the housework needing her constant attention. She’s become accustomed to time always slipping out of her grasp, until one morning, she wakes to see that everything on her to-do list has mysteriously been done. She tries not to question this gift she’s been given, but when the secrets of her family’s past start seeping into her life, she has no choice but to confront it. We also get glimpses back in time, following Alice’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as well as briefly following several characters surrounding Alice.

I love how the author takes the time to build up the characters, slowly exposing their most frequent nightmares and their oldest guilts. I greatly appreciate the multiple timelines and perspective changes in this story. The reader gets a truly comprehensive view of this family, how the women and circumstances change with each generation, yet showing so effectively how something lingers. Daughters are always impacted by their mothers, who were shaped by their relationships with their mothers, and in this way old wounds can be passed along. It’s a heartbreaking, yet fascinating cycle, and Jen Sookfong Lee prods the beasts of mother-daughter relationships until they flash their teeth.

The eerie atmosphere persists through every timeline, whether it’s the foreboding walls of Nam Koo in Hong Kong during World War II, where young girls were kidnapped off the streets and forced to be comfort women to Japanese soldiers, or the present day gentrified village in Vancouver where Alice, her children, and her mother live. A sense of unease and uncertainty always seems to hang between the words. The conversations and depictions of immigration and the hardships surrounding that experience is something I really enjoy about this book as well, and the impact that a family history of traumas and migration continuously has on its members.

This book is such a thoughtful, beautifully written examination of the fears and beliefs that are passed down through generations, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The author writes about generational rage as a fluid, perpetually moving thing: each daughter born into the family a fresh scale appearing on the back of a snake slithering through time. Their rage is their own, yet something born long before they were, an echo of a scream unleashed from further back in the line of ancestors.