Whether it took days or months or years, I would come for him. And I would savour the moment.
PLOT SUMMARY:
It’s the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.
Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family’s meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.
But when tragedy strikes, Ronny’s world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.
GRADE: A+
REVIEW:
This past autumn, a publicist emailed me insisting I had to read What Hunger, saying it was totally up my alley, and even sent me an early ARC. I decided to give it a try—and once I finally picked it up, I devoured it in just two days. I couldn’t believe how spot-on this total stranger was about my reading taste!
Catherine Dang’s What Hunger is a powerful and poignant exploration of identity, family, and the deep emotional struggles that define our lives. Through lyrical prose, Dang crafts a narrative that navigates the complexities of cultural displacement, particularly the immigrant experience, while also diving into personal and societal expectations.
The novel follows Ronny, a young woman torn between her Asian heritage and the pressures of assimilation into a Western society while she’s trying to navigate her grief over the loss of her older brother. Dang’s depiction of hunger—both literal and metaphorical—becomes a central theme. It reflects the protagonist’s yearning for connection, understanding, and acceptance, while also highlighting the pain of not feeling “enough” in any space. It also centers her rage, as she leans into it in ways that we as women don’t always allow ourselves to do at times.
Dang’s writing is striking in its intimacy, offering a raw look at the inner turmoil of its characters. Each chapter feels like peeling back another layer of self-awareness, with Ronny’s desires and fears laid bare for the reader. The narrative unfolds slowly but steadily, building a sense of tension and urgency that keeps you engaged until the last page.
What Hunger is a book that stays with you long after finishing it, its exploration of hunger not just as a physical need, but as an emotional and existential longing, deeply resonating in today’s complex world.
If you love books that explore female rage and grief, then this may be a book that you too will devour as easily as I did.
*Thank you so much to NetGalley & Simon & Schuster for a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
Short Q & A with Author:
You mentioned that your mother’s cannibal story was the inspiration behind What Hunger. Is the story based on true events or is it more like a folktale?
Originally, I thought the story was an urban legend. My mom first heard the rumors of a Vietnamese refugee-turned-cannibal at her refugee camp in the Philippines. Fleeing Vietnam was incredibly dangerous at the time, so it made sense that people would share wild stories with each other. I figured the tale was a culmination of multiple stories fused together: of people surviving boat wrecks, others washing up onto deserted islands in the Philippines, and other survivors getting returned back to the Vietnamese Communist government. But I assumed the cannibalism part was pure fiction.
But as I was writing What Hunger, I was shocked to find real news reports of cannibalism among Vietnamese boat people. These incidents almost always took place out at sea when survivors were desperately trapped in a boat, deliberately not rescued, and out of resources.
In one 1988 article, The Washington Post reported multiple incidents, including one where 15 people ate the body of a dead refugee. Another incident involved the forced drowning of a man, woman, and 11-year-old child, so the other refugees could eat them.
Recently, though, I discovered a 1989 article that seemed uncannily similar to my mom’s urban legend. The Los Angeles Times reported on a Vietnamese man who admitted to helping kill and eat a refugee on his boat of over 110 people. However, the man claimed that 10 other survivors had also willingly planned and killed for the purposes of cannibalism, but had made him the scapegoat. This man was later ostracized in his refugee camp in the Philippines.
What’s especially unsettling is what the man implored in his interview: “I am a Christian. I killed this man on the boat to help the living. Personally, I think it’s wrong, but so many people needed to eat.”
In total, five people had been eaten on this boat: two people who’d been killed to be eaten, and three others who had already passed away. Interestingly, the rest of the 52 survivors did not want to talk about their time on the boat.
When people were put in these hopelessly dire situations, they adapted in the most brutal of ways.
I’ve always believed our urban legends are borne out of a hint of truth. Writing What Hunger has completely cemented this belief for me.
I truly loved Ronny and the fact that she wouldn’t simply “get over” what was done to her. I saw her new appetite as a means to view her assaulter as “meat” just like he had viewed her. Is that the theme you were going for?
Your interpretation is a good one! Maybe I’m weird, but I’ve noticed that in American English, our euphemisms involving human genitalia are so often… meaty. The penis is likened to a hotdog “wiener.” A gathering of mostly men is called a “sausage fest.” The act of a man’s masturbation can be violently referred to as “beating his meat.” Then we have some very graphic euphemisms to describe the appearance of vulva, like “meat curtains” or “roast beef.”
When it comes to sexual assault, the victims are routinely viewed as objects of sexual pleasure. It wasn’t hard, then, to use meat as a metaphor for these unfeeling sexual objects. As “meat,” the victims have been “conquered” and prepped to be “consumed” by another. The metaphor is so brutal and animalistic, yet it’s as apt as the violence itself.
But I’m a grim optimist. At the end of the day, we’re all vulnerable sacks of human flesh. If you reduce your fellow human being down to an unfeeling object, then you’re also condemning yourself to be an object. In a warped way, I wanted Ronny’s assaulter to know what it was like to be treated like a piece of “meat”: as something to be consumed and tossed aside. But Ronny takes it quite literally, doesn’t she?
Asian horror seems to tap into a more psychological, almost ancestral aspect of an individual. Do you feel that what occurs in the past generations finds a way to haunt someone in the present?
Absolutely. The concept of “generational trauma” has grown mainstream for a reason. Who hasn’t been a bit scarred by the way their parents raised them? Our parents raised us based on their own experiences and what they knew from their parents. And their parents learned from their parents and so on.
So much of our behaviors, our habits, and our coping mechanisms have been passed down from previous generations. Even when we try to course correct (e.g. refusing to spank our kids), we’re still reacting to what had happened in the past (like previous generations of parents spanking their kids).
Physically, the human body is itself a record of past events. We know of inherited diseases like sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis getting passed down through generations, but we can also recognize family histories of mental illness and addiction.
I guess I’m fascinated by how these inherited diseases had originated. What had happened to Patient Zero in the family line? Had they simply been born with the disease and passed it on? Had it randomly developed one day and then been passed down among generations?
Or had something traumatic happened—something so traumatic that their own cells had been changed by it, which forever altered the genetic makeup of their descendants?
Though this last idea sounds crazy, there are studies being done on epigenetics, the science of how our environment and behaviors can affect the way our genes work, and whether these epigenetic changes can be inherited. For instance, some pregnant women developed PTSD from being near the collapse of the Twin Towers during 9/11. The babies they delivered were later shown to be smaller than average and had lower cortisol levels. While we can’t say for sure that the babies were directly traumatized by 9/11, there does seem to be a correlation between the mothers’ downswing in health and the poorer health outcomes for their babies.
As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, I’ve always had a vested interest in generational trauma and how it can manifest itself in a person. I see my own history of anxiety and depression in my relatives, both young and old. But the question remains: are these simply hereditary diseases that have always existed within my family lineage? Or are these illnesses that my ancestors have picked up in response to the trauma around them (like colonialism, war, rape, poverty, etc.)?
I wanted to explore generational trauma in a book one day, but I figured I would write about it when I was older, wiser, and more established in my career. I never thought I’d do so in a book about a teenage cannibal, but here we are!
Female rage is often downplayed or not taken seriously – and I absolutely love how Ronny leans into this rage. Do you think that women have finally reached a moment in their lives where they’re finally leaning into this rage rather than repressing it like in the past?
Hell yes! I think female rage has always lurked in our cultural landscape, but I was never fully cognizant of it until Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl blew up. I had never seen a female character like Amy Dunne before, a woman who was so wholly unhinged, enraged, and open about it. The character fascinated me as much as she made me uncomfortable.
But more than anything, I felt this weird sense of companionship. It was crazy to hear all these women taking Amy Dunne’s side and arguing that the husband got what he deserved. And it was even crazier to hear women openly talking about how they, too, were pissed off. That cultural moment made me realize that wow, maybe I wasn’t alone for feeling so awfully resentful sometimes. Maybe I wasn’t psychotic. Maybe it was a perfectly normal part of being a woman—walking around with all this pent-up rage that we were told not to express.
As a young creative, I also appreciated how Gillian Flynn had brought such a nasty, vengeful woman character into the mainstream. I think it inspired a lot of female creatives to be more open and honest in their work. Why censor the ugliness of womanhood when we could lean into it instead? And let it inspire us.
Now I think female rage is the norm in our pop culture: books, movies, music, you name it. Women are pissed, and we have the urge to express it, no matter how bloody or nasty or gross it may be.
Are you working on anything new at the moment?
Yes. I don’t want to jinx myself, so that’s all I’ll say!
WHAT HUNGER comes out AUGUST 12!
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