Vancouver-born writer Jen Sookfong Lee's unnerving fourth novel, The Hunger We Pass Down, examines terrifying generational trauma passed from mothers to daughters in a Chinese Canadian family. Lee opens in 1938, when 13-year-old Gigi is a Hong Kong student fascinated by the stories of Nam Koo Terrace, a famous mansion with ghostly secrets she sees daily on the way to school. A year later, she's entrapped there, interminably raped as a comfort woman for occupying Japanese soldiers. Gigi will never escape Nam Koo, but her baby, Bette, raised by strangers, will begin the journey west, transporting Gigi's brutal legacy to the other side of the world.
In 2024 Vancouver, 40-year-old Alice is a single mother to recalcitrant teen daughter Luna and technologically prodigious son Luca. Her diaper business isn't quite successful enough to hire help, she's not ready to commit to her adoring lover, and she can't get through the day without alcohol. When her life is inexplicably tidied overnight--her house, her business orders--she accepts that her drunken self could be on highly efficient autopilot. The truth proves paranormal, however, and helpful quickly turns heinous.
In a note included with advance editions of the book, Lee divulges that Nam Koo is real--the building and its reported horrors. Her fiction, she admits is "sort of," alluding to her own family's intergenerational misogyny. She reveals how mothers withhold, control, and abuse daughters to ensure they're "prepared and strong when the world is trying to destroy us." Intertwining this dysfunctional family saga with cruel historical reality and spectral revenge, Lee chillingly exposes the monstrous price of women's survival. --Terry Hong