Interview: Jade Chang’s Wangs Vs the World tells a different immigrant story

Like thousands, if not millions, of other aspiring novelists, Jade Chang toiled over her first manuscript (make that manuscripts) for years and years. And then more years.

The Los Angeles-based journalist spent her days editing a magazine and her nights hunched over her laptop, as she tap­ped away in cafés and even the lobby of a hip hotel.

“Often I was there working so late that the lobby turned into a nightclub,” she says. “Sometimes I would keep work­ing – it was like, ‘Who’s that girl on her laptop?’ – or I would pack up my pages and join the party. I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s time.”

So imagine her disappointment when her first novel, which she had worked on for half a decade, failed to impress. When she sent it to agents, she received “very encouraging nos, but they were nos nonetheless”.

“I sent it out in 2008, right after the great recession began, and it was a terrible time. The general response was, ‘We like it, but we don’t even know if there’s going to be a publishing industry any more’,” she says.

Chang could have scurried back to her day job – at luxury magazine Angeleno – and filed her first manuscript in the drawer marked “broken dreams”. But her obsession with writing – creating indelible characters, complex personal histories and intricate worlds – was sturdier than that. So she fired up her laptop again and did what any determined novelist-in-training would do – wrote another story.

After five more years of hunched shoulders and tapping fingers, Chang emerged with The Wangs Vs the World, which follows a once-mega-rich-suddenly-poor Chinese-American family who take a wild road trip.