Episode
The Immortal Woman with Su Chang (House of Anansi Press, 2025)
- Podcast
- New Books Network
- Published
- Sep 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2322
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://newbooksnetwork.com
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-network-529292/episodes/the-immortal-woman-with-su-chang-house-of-anansi-press-2025/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-network-529292/the-immortal-woman-with-su-chang-house-of-anansi-press-2025.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Su Chang, author of The Immortal Woman (House of Anansi, 2025). A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind. Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin. Their final confrontation results in tragic consequences, but ultimately, offers hope for a better future. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman reminds us to hold tight to our humanity at any cost. SU CHANG is a Chinese Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, among others. Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebe…