Something goes terribly wrong for one family in Grace Chao’s short story “Family Travel.” A train hits a couple’s small blue car — stopped on the train tracks going from Taipei to the Taiwanese port city Kaohsiung — leaving their orphaned newborn to the care of grandparents.
Chao’s story focuses not on the family at the heart of this tragedy, however, but on a Taiwanese American family on the train, who, like everyone else in the stuffy compartment, have not been told what’s happened. Although this family is ostensibly at the periphery of the misfortune, the next several hours on the halted train prove calamitous. One daughter’s violin cracks in the heat, setting off the father’s rage. Years later, the violinist and her sister look back on this scene as the traumatic genesis of the anger visited on them by their father from then on.
But for the father, Chao writes, the moment conjures a different memory: of the man sitting next to him, holding a bonsai tree. He is moved “that one could love a barely living thing so much.”
“I’m interested in how one very small event alters the trajectory of someone’s life, even if they don’t know it,” says Chao. “How differently members of the same family can look back on that event, and how that creates friction.”
“Family Travel” is one story in a collection Chao has been working on as a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She will be reading from her work on Friday, March 8 in a showcase with writer Jack Eley and visual arts fellows Micha Patiniott and Zeinab Shahidi Marnani.
Chao says her stories are often preoccupied with the idea of family — in particular, how time and memory can modulate and distort an individual’s perception of her family legacy.
In her story “The Year I Became My Mother,” which won Sewanee Review’s 2022 fiction contest, a daughter grieving the recent loss of her mother to cancer recalls a road trip in which her father abandoned the family for an hour in their broken-down car. Stirred by this memory, she resolves to dedicate her 25th year to living the life of independence that her mother never had. In the end, the legacy of her mother’s life is altered.
Many of the moments that inspire Chao’s stories are drawn from her life, she says, such as the train collision in “Family Travel.”
“I remember learning afterward that we had hit a car,” she says. “It was strange, because to us it felt like a very slow collision — we didn’t know why we had stopped until later when we reached the station.”
That moment was less momentous for Chao than it was for her characters, but it sparked intrigue and mystery: how could such a violent end to life be almost imperceptible to those on board the train?
Some of the moments in her tales are passed down to Chao from her ancestors, who “told very grand stories,” she says. While both of her parents were born in Taiwan, their roots on the island grew in much different places. “My mom’s family had been in Taiwan for many generations, but my dad’s father came over from China after fighting in the Civil War,” she says. “His side lost, and he fled to Taiwan, leaving his first family behind.”
Chao grew up in Cupertino, Calif., an hour south of San Francisco. She attended Stanford University, where she studied English before receiving an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Oregon.
The stories in Chao’s collection all come from the same world: she writes about Taiwanese American families living in the Bay Area who often don’t have much in the way of community. “They are often quite isolated in themselves,” she says. Many stories trace the lineage of one family, starting with life in Taiwan under prewar occupation to the present-day tech boom of San Francisco. Her stories are written in different voices: one inhabits the mind of a woman coming of age alongside social media; another captures the moment her mother first arrived in California from Taiwan.
Chao is interested in how immigration fragments intergenerational memory. “I think it’s amplified when children have grown up in a different place than their parents,” she says. “Parents obviously make sacrifices when they leave everything behind to move to a new country, but future generations sacrifice as well, even though those generations can’t see clearly what has been given or taken.”
In that sense, another theme emerges in Chao’s work — of faith and the loss of it. For many immigrant communities struggling through dislocation, church can be a place to find one’s footing, Chao says. But for the second generation of immigrants, it isn’t always essential. “Sometimes, the second generation doesn’t immediately need that same sense of community,” she says. “And it becomes not just the loss of religious faith but the faith in how much your parents can do for you.”
Chao has embarked on another project at FAWC: she is in the early stages of writing a novel, a multi-perspective family saga that takes place on the night of the older daughter’s prom. “It’s about how this family collapses on itself over the course of one night,” she says.
“It’s important to me that my fiction always has the immigrant experience in the background,” says Chao. “But I want to focus more on the second generation.” While her narrators go through the same “American” rites of passage as their peers around them, “being second generation always suffuses that experience.”
At Oregon, she says, a fiction professor gave Chao sage advice for ratcheting up the dramatic tension in those moments in her stories drawn from her life: “Just make it worse.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 7, incorrectly reported some details about Grace Chao’s family history. It was her father’s father, not grandfather, who fought in the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan. The Japanese occupation referred to in the article occurred in prewar, not postwar, Taiwan.
Family Tree
The event: A showcase with FAWC fellows Grace Chao, Jack Eley, Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, and Micha Patiniott
The time: Friday, March 8, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free
