Gish Jen

• Born: August 12, 1955
• Birthplace: New York, New York

Biography

Lillian Jen was born in the suburbs of New York city in 1955, the second of five children of Norman and Agnes Jen. Her father, a hydraulics engineer, left China for the United States to work on a project preparing for a hypothetical invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1945. He was prohibited from returning to China after the Communists took control of the government there. He resented being classified as a refugee and did not become an American citizen, officially holding no national status for many years.

Jen’s mother had been sent abroad for her education, a typical pattern among moderately wealthy Chinese families. Jen grew up in Yonkers, New York, where her family were the only Chinese in the area; they were often taunted by local children. When the family moved to the more prosperous neighborhood of Scarsdale, Jen took advantage of the well-stocked local library to launch a personal program of avid reading which included every book in the building by the time she reached fifth grade.

Her family had a high regard for formal education, and her three older brothers attended Ivy League colleges before becoming successful businessmen, while her sister followed a pre-med curriculum. The family had expected Jen to pursue a similar course, but she was already writing poetry in junior high school, and on a National Science Foundation archeological dig she introduced herself as “Gish” Jen—an adaptation of the name of the famous actress Lillian Gish. It was also a characteristically idiosyncratic attempt to claim or establish an individual identity beyond traditional cultural expectations. Nonetheless, Jen entered Harvard University as a pre-law or pre-med major, until in a class with the noted classics scholar and translator Robert Fitzgerald she found herself fascinated by weekly assignments requiring the students to write poems. “I loved it,” Jen recalls, “I remember telling my roommate I loved writing and would do it for the rest of my life.”

When Jen graduated from Harvard in 1977, Fitzgerald suggested she might “consider doing something with words,” so she accepted his offer to help her find a job with Doubleday publishers. At Doubleday, she found herself in a kind of limbo, neither writing nor earning much money, so she entered an M.B.A. program at Stanford University (encouraged by her parents, who insisted “You need a meal ticket”) but divided her time between classes and writing workshops, passing her exams with the assistance of a fellow student, David O’Connor, her future husband, whose expert prepping substituted for full-scale study.

In 1979, Jen’s family visited China for the first time since her parents’ departure. There they discovered that they were regarded as “overseas Chinese,” a distinction which Jen recalls as a part of her growing awareness of the multiplicity of identities within outwardly homogenous ethnic groups. Jen returned to China in 1981 to teach in Shandong Province. On subsequent visits she realized that, for many Asians, identity “resided at least as much in tradition as much as blood.” She, especially during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of the early 2000’s, began to see herself as “acutely American” in her disdain for sharing a communal meal.

Jen’s parents were very displeased when she left Stanford to enroll in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1981. They refused to provide her with any financial assistance, and her mother did not speak to her for a year. Jen completed the M.F.A. program in 1983 and moved with O’Connor to California after they were married. They returned East to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985, where Jen was accepted as a fellow at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute. There, she began her first novel, Typical American, which was published in 1991 and listed as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award that year. At that time, Jen bristled “early on at being labeled an ‘Asian American writer,’” a label which she eventually accepted, to a degree, with the wry observation that “we live in a culture where if you’re not labelled you disappear.”

Her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996), followed the Chang family Jen introduced in Typical American through a series of expansions and revisions of identity. It was inspired initially by a meeting with a classmate from high school whose Jewish background led to the “birth” of Mona Chang, a convert to Judaism who “came spinning out” of the first chapter.

Jen collected the short fiction she had been publishing in Who’s Irish? (1999), a reference to her two children with O’Connor. One of the stories, “Birthmates,” was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in his anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999), while the story “In the American Society” was a kind of recapitulation and extension of the Changs at the turn of the twenty-first century, a story included in several prominent anthologies used in many universities. Jen received a Strauss Living Award (five years at $50,000 per year) in 2003 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2004 she published The Love Wife. This work carries the themes of ethnicity and identity further by focusing on a second-generation Chinese American family whose assumptions about their place in American society are disrupted by the arrival of a Mandarin-speaking relative from China, ostensibly a nanny sent to assist, who compels all of them to question everything about their moderately comfortable lives.

As Jen told Library Journal in an interview, “My children look exactly alike except that my son has straight black hair and my daughter has fine, light hair. And for whatever reason, that has caused them to be seen very differently by the world,” just like the children of Carnegie and Janie (Blondie) Wong in The Love Wife, who have adopted Asian daughters Wendy and Lizzie prior to the birth of their biological son, Bailey. As for her future plans, Jen tends to be cautiously reserved, replying to a question about what she was working on: “No. Too early, too early, too early!” and “Something or nothing, it’s hard to say.”

Jen has continued to publish her work in the 2010s. Her 2010 novel World and Town follows protagonist Hattie Kong as she moves to the New England town of Riverlake two years after losing her husband and best friend to cancer. Jen then turned to nonfiction, with Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Independent Self (2013), comprising her 2012 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University, and The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap (2017). Both works explore cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies in terms of their conceptions of the self.

Analysis

From the first settlements of European pioneers on the shores of the North American continent, issues of who would determine the dominant cultural conditions of the New World created a power struggle among competing nations seeking to establish colonial outposts. Testaments to this struggle, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), were an early and ongoing form in American letters, one reinvigorated by successive arrivals of immigrants from regions whose languages and mores differed, at least in appearance, from the English model which assumed ascendancy with the formation of the American republic. The interaction of an American Indian (Chingachgook), a European frontiersman (Natty Bumpo, or “Hawkeye”), and British officers in Cooper’s novel prefigure a clash and confluence of viewpoints which continues to the present day.

Jen’s novels and short stories are a manifestation of this genre, shifting the perspective from an Atlantic orientation toward a pan-Pacific one, reversing the direction of entry but still located in and around New York City, the dynamic center of the American Empire. As Jen told an interviewer in 2005, “We are seeing more and more families that fall outside of the Dick and Jane mold these days—mixed race families, blended families, adopted families, and so on—as is very much in keeping with the idea of America.” She sees this situation as “natural.” The plural, hybrid nation that she describes, however—as much as it might stand as an ideal vision—is still complicated. Jen notes, “for all its naturalness, how challenging this new phase of the American experiment” continues to be.

With the introduction of three Chinese immigrant characters in her debut novel, Typical American, critics immediately hailed Jen as the representative of the newest American ethnic community, a designation which she wanted to deny as limiting but which she realized was inevitable. As a student, her favorite authors had been the likes of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick. These writers’ settings were grounded in the experience of Jewish immigrants who brought a deep cultural legacy to the United States. Jen felt close to and very friendly toward the Jewish students she met in high school in Scarsdale, once commenting that “The Chinese were the new Jews.”

The humor inherent in this comment informs Jen’s account of the Changs in Mona in the Promised Land. It is also a crucial part of her view of American society in the late twentieth century, enabling her to treat Chinese culture with respect and understanding while avoiding a solemn reverence that would limit the sometimes startling changes that occur in her characters’ lives as their expectations collide with the energetic flux of life in the United States.

Rather than avoiding some of the stereotypes applied by outsiders to the Chinese American community, Jen has taken and twisted them to reveal the human need beneath a facade that acted as a defense against prejudice. The Changs think of themselves as a team, the “Chinese Yankees,” leading to the pleasure of watching and rooting for the New York Yankees at home on television, since the one time they went to Yankee Stadium, “people had called them names and told them to go back to the laundry.” Helen Chang seeks acceptance by assimilation, her husband, Ralph Chang, maintains a dignified distance while maneuvering quietly to overcome prejudice, their daughters Callie and Mona tend toward becoming ultra-Chinese or ultra-American—except when they are all acting in apparent contradiction to these tendencies.

Neither Jen nor her characters are confined by any single mode, and Jen is continually putting them in awkward or absurd situations where comic confusion inevitably results. Jen has cited the familiar image, in an interview with Carla Drysdale, of a world “where things can have the opposite attributes at the same time, like in food, sweet and sour. The world is at once yin and yang.” Jen’s distintive humor, a function of linguistic invention, unexpected and startling action, and brash flaunting of convention, has a singular quality. Jen, in response to a query in a BookBrowse conversation about how she managed “to make the character’s lives funny even as awful things happen to them,” maintained “I do not manage to make them funny—they simply turn funny at the most inappropriate times,” a working definition of comedy itself.

An important aspect of Jen’s comic vision is conveyed by her employment of the language which illuminates the psychology of her characters. Lan, arriving from China in The Love Wife, speaks Mandarin, which Jen renders in italics. The Changs in Typical American speak a blend of standard English and a vernacular influenced by a syntax anchored in Chinese languages, which gives their obvious intelligence an endearing informality. The title story of Who’s Irish? is told by a Chinese American woman, deftly presented in a kind of casually fractured English—which Jen says she could not have used earlier because editors would have advised her to resubmit her work when she had mastered English forms.

Commenting on the Irish Shea family, the Chinese woman acknowledges her good fortune in operating a successful restaurant, noting that she comes “from a country where the food is popular all over the world,” before wryly adding, “I understand it is not the Shea family’s fault they come from a country where everything is boiled.”

A continuing source of irritation for Jen has been the frequent critical judgment that she is not writing about “real Americans.” She called Mona in the Promised Land “a book about a very big America,” a land where “from the beginning, it has been about fluidity of identity.” Rather than a denial of heritage, Jen has insisted “This is my country; this is what I know. And, in this book, I lay claim to that.” Refusing to concentrate on what she calls “my assigned subjects,” writing as a “middle minority-something,” Jen has worked toward a complete revision of the melting-pot metaphor, which she interpreted as everyone turned into Barbie and Ken. In its place, she proposes an idea of America as “an invented nation based on shared ideals rather than blood and inheritance . . . full of families brought together on a similar principle—by choice, rather than by circumstance and biology.”

Typical American

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Three Chinese immigrants to the United States after World War II establish, through comic confusion and harsh confrontation, their own sense of family in a multiethnic society.

Jen’s first novel, Typical American, follows Ralph (born Yfeng) Chang from his boyhood in China to a turbulent but ultimately successful adjustment to life in the United States in the decades following World War II. With Ralph’s sister Theresa, and eventually, Theresa’s friend Helen (born Hailan; “Sea Blue”), whom Ralph marries, the Changs gradually reconstitute a new family (as in the chapter “The House Holds”) in a country whose social patterns they find strange and confusing, but eventually curiously comfortable, recapitulating a journey familiar to many generations of new Americans, here told from the less familiar perspective of an Asian cultural matrix.

The title of the novel is indicative of Jen’s realistic but archly comic presentation of the Changs’ efforts to reconcile their sense of a Chinese identity with the demands and challenges of life in the United States. The Changs use the phrase “typical American” at first to dismiss behavior they disdain, then gradually begin to describe themselves that way as they learn how to negotiate the complex culture that offers opportunity but is rife with bigotry and social barriers.

Ralph’s initial awkwardness in everything, his need to retain a sense of dignity as the traditional head of the family, and his feelings of depression at various failures are forcefully evoked. Jen’s comic sensibility casts the Changs’ journey in an optimistic aura, while the overall tone is tinged with melancholy registering the sense of loss inevitable as “China” recedes. Even Ralph’s “American” name, given to him casually by a young woman he romanticizes beyond her bland personality, has been chosen by Jen because of the commonplace belief that no Asians can pronounce “r and l” properly.

The exuberance of her comic stance is an aspect of Jen’s deep affection for her characters. The first part of Typical American introduces the Changs as they grow up in China. Throughout the novel, their Chinese background operates as a daunting standard, gradually diminishing in essence as the practical matter of living in America takes precedence. The straightforward goals of their early days—a graduate degree and then tenure for Ralph, a home of their own for Helen and their two young daughters, a degree of independence for Theresa—are replaced by a desire for material wealth and social status, rampant acquisition supplanting spiritual unity.

Jen does not understate their anger and embarrassment, but tension is tempered by the firm bonds of a close family (a major Chinese value) and the energizing wackiness of their negotiations with their new American environment. When Grover Ding, a successful Chinese American hustler, betrays their friendship by seducing Helen, the Changs work their way through the crisis with a mixture of disappointment, forgiveness, and self-strengthening humor, culminating with the purchase of a mongrel they name “Grover” in a strategy of comic deflection. By the end of the novel, the Changs are as American as they are Chinese, although neither term is completely adequate as a definition of their human presence, their lives in the years to come both limitless and undefined.

Mona in the Promised Land

First published: 1996

Type of work: Novel

Jen’s second novel takes the Chang family further along their journey of adjustment to life in the United States.

With the narrative focus shifting from Ralph and Helen Chang to their daughters Mona and Callie, an antic ethos replaces the mood of melancholy that informed Typical American. Living now in the prosperous New York suburb of Scarshill (based on Jen’s childhood home, Scarsdale), the Changs are initially delighted with all of the cultural and social elements of a multiethnic community.

Mona’s unexpected infatuation with Judaism is presented with a high-spirited satirical style which sweeps over everything the Changs encounter. This is Jen’s way of dealing with the serious issues of the 1960s and 1970s—the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War. Without being didactic, Jen addresses the racial, religious, and aesthetic questions that her characters encounter as an aspect of cross-cultural transformations.

Seth Mandel, Mona’s Jewish boyfriend, wears a dashiki to show his commitment to Black Pride. Callie studies Mandarin at Harvard and eats rice with everything, while her parents prefer organic and health food. Ralph discovers that the black and Mexican employees he regards as unimaginative can contribute significantly to the operation of his restaurant. When the Changs become concerned that Mona is losing her heritage, the local rabbi suggests paradoxically, “the more Jewish you become, the more Chinese you’ll be.” Compounding the ethnic mix is a Japanese student (who Mona at first assumes is Chinese) undergoing continuous identity alterations which confound everyone’s expectations.

The narrative structure of the novel tends toward the episodic, but Seth and Mona’s relationship, which distresses Helen, is a controlling thread, leading to a marriage ceremony which concludes the novel on a very positive note, resulting in a reconciliation of opposing viewpoints epitomized by Mona suggesting Changowitz as a surname emblematic of their new Chinese/Jewish fusion. Nonetheless, the future is open-ended and uncertain. Callie now seems more “Chinese” than her parents; Mona might not be as committed to her new identity as she seems; and Ralph and Helen continue to try to balance their increasing material prosperity with a lingering concern about their responsibilities to their Asian heritage. Jen’s continuing investigation of the determinants of individual identity is designed to resist any kind of preconception about a person, regardless of his or her place of origin, appearance, or current life pattern.

Who’s Irish?

First published: 1999

Type of work: Short stories

These short stories take on subjects of cultural heritage and evolving individual identity.

Combining a wary respect for the traditional ways of being, which her parents tried to maintain, with a delight in the emerging new identity that second-and third-generation Chinese Americans were developing, Jen’s work examines the ways in which her characters attempt to retain aspects of their Asian heritage while joining and refashioning American society, which for them is a puzzle, a treat, a threat, and ultimately their home ground.

“In the American Society,” published in 1986, is an introduction to the Chang family. Its hilarious conclusion involves the usually reserved Ralph Chang exploding with justified anger—to the delight of his daughters. This offbeat triumph is characteristic of the ways in which Jen’s Chinese Americans retain their dignity in the face of boorish and bigoted oafs. “The Water-Faucet Vision” (1988) offers an earlier version of Callie Chang as a Catholic-school student, mixing a youthful desire for the miraculous with a reflective meditation on the role of religion to provide solace in times of stress.

“Birthmates,” which John Updike included in his collection of The Best American Short Stories of the Century, proceeds from the perspective of omniscient narration, progressively unfolding the layers of Art Woo’s soul, gradually revealing the sources of his sadness. “Chin,” another compressed narrative, is an unusually grim story about a young boy, an outcast at home and in school, who epitomizes the plight of violent rejection which racism engenders.

Two of the stories in the collection are novellas. “Duncan in China,” fifty pages in length, follows a Chinese American man teaching in China in a search for some nebulous idea of “heritage.” He discovers that both he and his idea of a “classic” China are more complicated, interesting, and troubling than he had imagined. “House, House, Home,” more than seventy pages, is like a proto-novel that might either be divided and compressed, or expanded, a mini-family saga somewhat paralleling the narrative structure of Jen’s novels.

The title story is one of Jen’s best, the sustained complaint of an elderly grandmother very displeased with the nontraditional approach to the child-rearing of her daughter and her Irish American son-in-law. Consumed by an almost inchoate anger expressed in an expertly rendered linguistic melange of syntactical distortions, she eventually finds solace in conversation with her Irish counterpart. The collection is strikingly imaginative, informed throughout by Jen’s craft and wit, and—even in what might be regarded as a lesser effort (at least by comparison), “Just Wait”—entertaining and original.

Summary

Gish Jen’s explorations of a multivalent American identity are a part of a literary mode including Louise Erdrich’s (German/American/Indian) The Master Butchers Singing Club (2004) and Ishmael Reed’s (African/American/Indian) Japanese by Spring (1993), which challenge the exclusive and limiting terms previously applied to American ethnic communities.

Bibliography

“About Gish Jen.” Ploughshares 26, no. 2/3 (2000): 217–222. Profile of Jen.

Brody, Rebecca. Review of The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, by Gish Jen. Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, pp. 87–93. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=121497057&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.

Gonzalez, Begona Simal. “The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-Making in Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (2001): 225–242. Examines the question of choice of “ethnic” identity and the differences between ritual and ceremony in Jen’s novel.

Jen, Gish. “The Intimate Outsider.” Interview by Marilyn B. Snell. New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1991): 56–60. Focuses on Typical American and Jen’s depiction of the immigrant experience.

Jen, Gish. “MELUS Interview: Gish Jen.” Interview by Yoko Matsukawa. MELUS 18 (Winter, 1993): 111–120. An excellent examination of Jen as both a person and a writer, which discusses Jen’s development and concerns as a writer. Jen provides a substantial analysis of Typical American. The article includes a bibliography of her works, including those under her given name, Lillian.

Samarth, Manini. “Affirmations: Speaking the Self into Being.” Parnassus 17, no. 1 (1991): 88–102. Discusses the use of tropes in Jen’s stories and the way she turns them into satire.

Storace, Patricia. “Seeing Double.” The New York Review of Books 38 (August 15, 1991): 9–12. A review of Typical American focusing on the novel’s theme of duality. Includes a synopsis and an exploration of duality in both the joining of opposites and the coexistence of parallels.

Yang, Wesley. “Many Selves.” Review of Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, by Gish Jen. The New York Times Sunday Book Review, 26 Apr. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/books/review/tiger-writing-by-gish-jen.html. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.