After college, Chang attended the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) Graduate Creative Writing program at the University of California at Irvine.
His first novel was The Fruit 'N Food (1996), winner of the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction, a story about a loner who finds employment in a New York grocery; major themes involve race relations and violence.
Other novels in the "Choice" trilogy are: Underkill (2003) and Fade To Clear (2004) (a USA Today Summer Reading Pick and a finalist for the Shamus Award).
His protagonists tend to be second generation Americans, often linked to a diverse landscape of characters and locations, including a clerk in a Korean grocery in Queens, a working-class white man in rural New Hampshire, or a sex-trafficked young woman in Los Angeles.
Chang's novels have been translated and published in multiple countries, and are regularly studied in literature, theology and sociology courses throughout the United States, Asia and Europe.
He has received "written by" credits on the Justified episodes: "Burned" (2015), "Sounding" (2015), "Wrong Roads" (2014), "Peace of Mind" (2013) and "The Hatchet Tour" (2013).