Feelings to bury, darkness to traverse

The Hunger We Pass Down
by Jen Sookfong Lee

Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2025 
$26.00 / 9780771012853

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

*

I don’t love the smell of napalm in the morning, but I do love novels with intergenerational trauma and divorced mothers who don’t remotely miss their mediocre husbands. Jen Sookfong Lee has written just such a novel with The Hunger We Pass Down. It’s giving Charlize Theron in Tully and Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Lee admirably balances a roving third person narration with multiple timelines in Vancouver, Hong Kong, Capiz, and Singapore. The protagonist, Alice Chow, runs a business selling cloth diapers. Her new boyfriend, Jas, a bartender, is kinder and far more attentive than her ex-husband, Grant. Alice has a good relationship with her mother, a successful realtor who takes every opportunity to denigrate Grant. She is constantly lauded for her beauty. She’s a devoted mother to Luna and Luca.

Her outward appearance of competent bliss is more tenuous in reality. Or, in Alice’s own summation: “She had feelings to bury and children to protect.” Lately, though, she’s been experiencing inexplicable memory loss, with no remembrance of packaging online orders or cleaning the kitchen. Is it emblematic of alcohol consumption or something more enigmatic and haunting? Could Alice’s memory loss be related to the ghost of her great-grandmother, Gigi? Her daughter, Luna, is openly contemptuous of Alice’s desire to be perceived as competent, pretty, and perfect. Jas wants commitment, which Alice is reluctant to grant, ostensibly for her children’s sake, but also because of her own fear of abandonment.

Sookfong Lee describes Yaletown and socioeconomic divides in Vancouver with scathing precision:

She had never spent more than ten minutes inside his Yaletown loft condo, but she knew that the kids had to share a room, that Grant rented it from one of his golfing buddies, and that the deck, accessible through a rolling garage door in the living room, sat above the patio of a busy seafood restaurant, famous for only hiring young women, each of whom could have been the prettiest girl in whatever smaller city she had come from. In Vancouver, in Yaletown, they weren’t exceptional, just expected, a pretty human manifestation of a city that hid its ugliness in other, less visible neighbourhoods.

Luna, a teenager, is credibly self-centred and temperamental. She favours green eyeshadow and disdains her mother’s predilection for conventional attractiveness, as exemplified in this passage:

Luna hated it when her mother blamed her for her wrinkles or age spots or stretch marks. It was as if she believed that her children were the sole reason she no longer looked twenty-five, forgetting that she was, in fact, forty and that no one could stop the years from ticking along. Alice needed to be pretty, maybe even a little sexy (although this thought made Luna want to gouge her own eyes out). Luna didn’t see the point…. Every time Alice emerged for a night out with her friends in her studded stilettos, Luna wanted to ask, Who is this for? But she never did because she already knew the answer: men. And then she felt nauseous.

When Luna overhears her mother with Jas, she has the reaction most children (even adult children, possibly) have, which is disgust, rather than any consideration for her mother’s happiness. Luna takes her mother’s behaviour personally: “Everything about her mother was an insult, a deeply intimate jab at the soft parts that Luna was used to keeping secret…. Alice’s façade of happiness was pathetic, a fragile veneer that Luna was sure she could shatter just by coughing.”

Alice’s mother, Judy, consistently lights up the page with every appearance. Her dialogue is amusingly blunt, pragmatic, and with a touch of maternal martyrdom:

“I am very busy, as usual, I am getting a big house ready for showing this week. You know, one of those pink stucco things in Marpole. No one likes those kinds of houses anymore, but maybe we’ll get some new money people from mainland China or something. Those people have no taste.”
“Mom, I don’t think you can say things like that anymore. You’ll get cancelled.”
Judy snorted. “I am only talking to you, not the New York Times. Are you going to cancel me?”

Gigi, Alice’s great grandmother, was a comfort woman during the Second World War in Hong Kong. Her life is repetitious with scant hope for escape: “ …the only way she could even measure the passage of time was with the disintegration of these male bodies, the deterioration that was sometimes slow, sometimes lightning fast.” Her supernatural presence in Alice, Judy, and Luna’s lives makes it clear there’s unfinished business. Does she want to help her kin, who have all led better lives than her? Does she want to help or is she after revenge? Are family curses real or psychosomatic? Her warning to her daughter, Bette (Judy’s mother and Alice’s grandmother) is foreboding: “You never know if the evil will be the man who says he loves you, or the anger you feel inside, or the ghosts that come to you in the night.”

Lee doesn’t shy from acknowledging that Alice is privileged enough to receive weekly domestic assistance from Pinky, formerly a live-in nanny when Alice was still with her ex-husband, Grant. At the same time, privilege doesn’t exempt one from the vagaries of life’s miseries, nor does it provide protection from ancestral ghosts determined to insert themselves in the present. Alice’s conversations with Pinky straddle friendship and employer-employee categories, where she can’t be completely certain whether Pinky genuinely likes her company, or is simply humoring her because of the inherent power imbalance. Here’s one exchange between Alice and Pinky where Pinky extends no-nonsense advice:

“Don’t cry, Alice, he’s just a man.” Pinky pushed her mug aside and grasped Alice’s hand. “You know what you want, and you told him. He might not like it, but that’s okay. You can move on.”
“But what if it’s not what I want? What if I said I don’t want commitment because I’m scared or mean or too much of a drunk?”
“Well, only you can figure that out. But what I’m trying to tell you is that men are never the answer. They don’t magically fix our lives. Only we can do that.”

Continuously, I was stricken with the rarity of encountering a novel that truly traverses darkness and stays with it. Although there are moments of humour—especially from Judy—reading this novel made me livid in the best possible way. The supernatural aspects of the novel are, arguably, the least frightening; normalized human cruelty and deep-seated male entitlement are infinitely more terrifying. Prepare to flinch.

Jessica Poon is a writer in East Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Jessica interviewed Sheung-King, and reviewed recent books by Bal Khabra, Léa Taranto, Martin West, Terry Berryman, Ian and Will Ferguson, Christine Stringer, Faye Arcand, Liann Zhang, Sarah Leavitt, Jeff Dupuis and A.G. Pasquella, Angela Douglas, Zazie Todd, Holly Brickley, Alastair McAlpine, and Jack Wang for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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