Split And Run

JADE CHANG puts the Wangs on the road as they take on the world. But as STEPHEN MCCARTY discovers, they’re already home

- Jade Chang

PULL OVER, JACK KEROUAC. Take the slow lane, Mark Twain. On your tandem, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. There’s a new road trip in town – make that towns – on which Hollywood has its beady eye.

With wildly varying levels of gravity, novels On the Road and Roughing It; and comedy-adventure movies including The Road to Hong Kong, Road to Singapore and Road to Bali have long been assured of their places in the paper and celluloid history of epiphany and self-discovery (and ad-libbed gags in the case of Hope and Crosby. And, yes, we’re pushing the road “novel” into another artistic dimension entirely here. But hey, let’s live a little).

The Wangs vs. the World, by “resting” journalist Jade Chang, was published last year and is still reverberating through the literary-fiction sphere. No matter how intellectually robust, road novels have several common denominators, not least that they should be American and explore what Americans might claim to be a rite of passage exclusive to them. The Wangs is a different type of “road work”.

It issues a ticket to ride with a family of Chinese- Americans, whose children, having encountered some severe setbacks, are grappling with tough questions of identity and belonging. Andrew, the son, is as funny as a cockroach at the bottom of your bowl of soup noodles, yet aspires desperately, despite tanking on stage, to be a stand-up comedian. Daughter Grace is a pampered, prepschool princess who blogs about fashion and puts the “urgh” into surly. Eldest child Saina at least enjoyed success as an artist before her tainted, ill-fated star fell from the firmament. Her inherited riskmanagement strategies established her as a low-rung celebrity but proved to be no protection from assassination-by-critic.