Lynda Williams
Su Chang, The Immortal Woman
Toronto: House of Anansi, 2025. $24.99
Masterfully weaving together the stories of mother, Lemei, and daughter, Lin, The Immortal Woman is a novel that investigates a turbulent chapter in Chinese history while simultaneously exploring the harsh realities of the immigrant experience and the perils of attempting to assimilate into a different culture.
Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader and secret idealist, is now a disillusioned journalist at a Chinese state newspaper who is haunted by the violence of her past. Having lost faith in her own country, she places her hope for her daughter’s future in the promised land of America. Lin, the dutiful parentified daughter, earns a scholarship to study in California and the dream of becoming Western seems to be within reach until she arrives and is treated (or rather mistreated) as an outsider. Both her mental health and her beliefs are tested as this experience of othering pushes her to a breaking point. Lemei’s romanticization of American freedom also evaporates as she is confronted with the realities of racism, violence, and poverty on a visit to celebrate Lin’s graduation. Unlike Lin, who doubles down on her efforts to be accepted in America, Lemei adopts a formerly unthinkable Chinese nationalist position, one that threatens to unravel an already fraught relationship between mother and daughter.
One of the novel’s most significant accomplishments is the nuance it brings to the explorations of the merits of competing political systems and the disillusionment that accompanies immigration. Chang humanizes ideologies through her characters, deftly tracing the arc of their changing beliefs as the events in their lives alter the way they perceive the world around them. The aggressions (and microaggressions) layered upon Lemei and Lin create a sense of inevitability in their choices, as if circumstance is the master of their destinies. Chang delivers some of the finest prose in the book through her vivid and chilling account of the violence at the Tiananmen Square protests and through the scalding passive-aggression of the dialogue at Lin’s mommy group gatherings. Bemoaning the loss of their pre-baby bodies, a condition one imagines universal to motherhood, the other members casually dismiss Lin: “Ah, you’ve got nothing to worry about, with your tiny Asian frame.”
Among its other accomplishments, the book renders a convincing and complex portrait of mental illness. While traditional Western psychology might pathologize the individual, Chang’s narrative explores mental illness as an expression of intergenerational trauma and colonial mentality. As Lin grows to understand this we do, too, as the internal battles both she and her mother fight are not matters of personal tragedy; they are a natural response to a history that demands collective amnesia—history of violence that offers no hope of healing without first being acknowledged.
The timeline of the novel may present the greatest challenge to readers, occasionally requiring a returning glance to the markers at the beginning of each chapter. Ultimately, Chang manages to transport us across the Pacific Ocean and back at different points in time and from different perspectives while integrating digestible amounts of Chinese history without sacrificing pace.
The Immortal Woman offers readers the best of both worlds. Chang draws readers in with Lemei’s plot, beginning during the Chinese cultural revolution, but it is the crackling tension between mother and daughter, fuelled by their flaws and similarities, that propels the story forward. It’s a character-driven page-turner.
Chang delivers an urgent debut that deserves to be read and reread, first for the thrill of discovering what will happen to Lemei and Lin, and then to contemplate the unflinching questions it asks about what it means to be an immigrant in a colonial territory, the price of the (North) American Dream, the role of culture in our healing, and the strength of the bond between mothers and daughters.
LYNDA WILLIAMS
(she/her) is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. Her debut collection, The Beauty and the Hell of It & Other Stories is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in Fall 2025. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Grain, The New Quarterly, and The Humber Literary Review.