Review: What Hunger by Catherine Dang

Rating: 9/10

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.

What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny’s Vietnamese lineage and her mother’s emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.

“What Hunger,” by Catherine Dang is a bloody, melt-in-the-mouth morsel of a book that reads like butter and tastes like iron. A brutal and addictive cut, marbled with grief, frustration and indeed, hunger- Dang’s latest is rare, glistening and feels all too easy to consume, before staining your fingers and settling heavy in your stomach. It’s stuck in my teeth. Gorgeously written and paced in a way that makes it nearly irresistible, “What Hunger,” is a novel that I read…hungrily… cover to cover within the confines of a Tuesday afternoon- my appetite for it was voracious- I wolfed it down, and if you’re into the weird, the unflinching and the carnivorous, then I imagine you will too. 

We follow Veronica (Ronnie) Nguyen, whose life is about to shift monumentally. She’s about to start high school and in turn, her older brother Tommy, her best friend and partner in crime, is about to leave for college. One last summer of childhood as she knows it…

That summer ends abruptly and violently though, with Veronica’s life changing even more startlingly and monumentally than anyone could have anticipated. A random and inevitable cruelty. Things get worse for Veronica still though, when, whilst at her first party, she is assaulted by a classmate. She claws and scratches and bites, and rather satisfyingly, draws blood… and she likes the taste of it. 

Ah cannibalism. Most would assume that a 14 year old girl who starts to long for human flesh after being hit by tragedy after tragedy is a descent into madness, understandable perhaps, but a descent nonetheless. And maybe it is that. But it also serves as a catalyst for coming of age, of refusing to be small and meek and swallow the narratives pushed by her peers, parents and wider society. Ronnie is, from her perspective, an outsider in every way, not yet old enough to work, and all too American for her Vietnamese family. Something had to give. Veronica is tired of being consumed, by grief, by alienation, by hurt, by the horror of girlhood, and in turn, by fury, and so, decides to bite back.

I’m well aware that teenage angst and cannibalism seem like a grisly recipe for an absolute disaster, a bloody stew of hormones and horror that should by all rights result in a high-octane, violent mess, and yes alright- there’s a little bit of that. The bulk of the novel though is a domestic one. The Nguyen family and their relationships- their heated arguments, their clashing grieving methods, but also the meals they share, the care and generosity passed between them. Dang seats us at their kitchen table, and because of this despite everything about its concept and themes, the rollercoaster we’re taken on, it’s a strangely warming novel. I don’t love the use of the word tender, but in a novel that features meat so prominently, I feel it’s warranted here. It’s a tender book. Frankly, I am disarmed- beyond my adoration of it, I’m not all too sure how I feel.

The writing is nothing short of breath-taking- I’m not even trying to make a clever little pun when I say that “What Hunger,” is so… consumable. Nourishing in its brutality, Dang’s second novel is something that feels meant to be savoured, and yet, one can’t help but devour it entirely and then lick the plate clean.