Jen, Gish, 1956-

novelist
 

Education:

Harvard '77, B'87
 

Awards:

received a 1999 Lannan Literary Award for fiction. The Lannan Literary Awards were established in 1989, in the amount of $75,000 each, to honor writers for work of exceptional quality.
 

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A second-generation Chinese American, Jen was raised in the large Jewish community of Scarsdale, New York. She received a degree in English from Harvard University, and published her first novel, In the American Society, in 1986. The quirky Chang family first appeared in her novel Typical American (1991), and again in the sequel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996). Her novels and short stories frequently revisit the American dream, and her characters puzzle out their ethnic identity in touching, comic ways (like the title character in Mona in the Promised Land, who decides to convert to Judaism to her family's dismay). One of the short stories from Who's Irish? (1999) also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her family.

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To varying degrees, Gish Jen's writings reflect her experiences growing up in Scarsdale, New York, a city located just north of New York City. "The biggest influence on my work has come from Jewish-American writers," Jen says. "It's partly Scarsdale, and partly the sympathy I see between the Jewish and Chinese cultures."

An American-born daughter (1956- ) of immigrant Chinese parents, Jen remembers her family feeling the need to fit in--to be absorbed into the main culture. "We were almost the only Asian-American family in town," she recalls. "People threw things at us and called us names. We thought it was normal--it was only much later that I realized it had been hard." Jen says these experiences did not make her childhood unhappy, and she refuses to give them any special attention. In fact, in Jen's novels Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land, her wry sense of humor is interwoven with her insights into the Chinese-American experience.

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Gish Jen (b. 1956) grew up in Scarsdale, New York. Educated at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, she has taught writing at such institutions as Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts. Jen is known for her humorous yet incisive short stories and novels about Chinese American life. In two of her novels, Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Jen follows the trials and tribulations of the same fictional Chinese American family, the Changs.

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Voices from the Gaps

Gish Jen, American  (from Harvard Gazette)

New York State Writers Institute  (Gish Jen)

Culturally Speaking

Gish Jen '77, B'87 on the American Experience

by Lilli Leggio
 
 
 "Nobody's having more fun with American diversity than Gish Jen," a book reviewer for The Boston Globe declared when Jen's most recent book, Who's Irish? (Knopf, 2000), was published.

The collection of short stories, like Jen's two novels--Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land--is a literary traffic study, a collection of eyewitness accounts about the intersection of American and immigrant cultures.

Jen, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a fellow this year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she's working on her next novel. Despite juggling work, historical commission meetings, other interviews, colleagues' lectures, and childcare, the overbooked author found time to sit down with the Radcliffe News.

Is it fair to say that growing up Asian American is a primary influence on your work?
I do write about other things--religion and what it means to be an artist, for example--but issues of identity are the dominant concern, especially what it means to be an American.

The roots of this do lie, of course, in my growing up the child of immigrants, which has given rise not only to my subject matter but also my tone. How could I not be alert to irony, growing up the way I did? Take, for example, the matter of my language. My parents immigrated from China, so their first language was Chinese, and probably they would have preferred to bring us up bilingual. But because my older brother had a very hard time with bilingualism, my parents decided--and this was progressive for the time--to raise me and my younger siblings speaking English. It was my parents' way of accepting that there had been a revolution in China, and that they were really stuck here. My mother told me that once they had made up their minds that America was going to be their home, they also decided they wanted their kids to speak English so well no one would be able to tell their parents were Chinese. And what was the result? One of my boyfriends in college once made everyone in the room close their eyes, listen to me talk, and tell him what they heard. And, of course, they all said, "New York Jew!"

Dealing with new languages and new cultures creates stressful conditions for immigrants. How does this affect their expectations of their children?
Of course, there are huge expectations for the children. Often the parents have had to work tremendously hard to send a child to college, for example. How can the children then go and fritter their time away? They are the family's great hope. In some American households, the kids go home at Thanksgiving and everyone nods and says, Oh yes, I loved history of science too, and isn't medieval architecture fascinating. In immi-grant households, the kids need to make the case for liberal education. What's it for? Where's it going to get him or her? How is it going to help the family? Sometimes too the parents feel they have a right to pressure the child into doing something practical--which, honestly, might not be such a bad idea, given the kid's home context. But, of course, the messages from college are about finding yourself and doing what you love--ideas the family does not imagine it can afford--with the result that the parents flip out, partly because they're worried and partly because immigration in general has made them feel helpless and stripped of their rightful parental power.

The Harvard Immigration Project conducted a study (now archived at the Murray Research Center) which found that immigrants' children tend to equate success with education and helping their families and communities, while white American children tend to measure success more in individual terms. Does this surprise you, and what do you think causes it?
I don't know about other groups, but, in the case of Asian Americans, you're talking about a home culture that is, among other things, predominantly collectivistic rather than individualistic. So, of course, people in the first or second generation especially tend to define success in nonindividualistic terms. Of course, over time, the family becomes Americanized, and its ideas about success change. This is a slow and painful process.

It's interesting that you should bring this up, because just last week I was talking to my mother about one of my brothers, who is off mountain climbing. We kids all thought he was great because he had just climbed a very difficult mountain near Everest. Not only was his the first team to summit this season, but immediately after summiting my brother had to go back up the mountain on a rescue mission. This was within 12 hours; they had to leave in the middle of the night to bring down a man who had had a stroke on the mountain. Isn't that incredible? They saved the man's life. To us kids, my brother was a hero. But my mother's view of my brother was completely different. As far as she was concerned, he should have been home, he was needed at home. He was in the Himalayas, she said, for his own glory.

You were at Stanford working toward your MBA when you decided to focus instead on writing. How did your parents react? Do the pragmatic concerns of immigrant parents undermine the artistic aspirations of their children or do they further motivate them?
My parents were completely opposed to my dropping out of business school. They could not have been more opposed or made their opposition more plain.

Whether parental pressure helps or hinders really depends on the personality of the child involved. It's like watering flowers. Some do better without water; in fact, too much water will kill them. Others just need water. It's generally true, though, I think, that there's a kind of confidence that comes with having opposed your parents and won--a sense that you proved yourself in an important way.

Most children want to fit in and avoid being singled out. With your children, Paloma and Luke, who are biracial, have you experienced any instances where they were made to feel like outsiders?
There were a few incidents with Luke when he was little--one at the Cambridge Common and another at the Science Museum--where little boys called him "Chinese, Chinese, Chinese." I'm just glad my child is at least Chinese American; I don't know what I would have told him if he were, say, Korean American or Japanese American.

In both instances, Luke was so young that it wasn't the words so much as the aggression that took him aback. He completely understood that it was hostile. Luckily, he's now going to a school with a lot of Asians and Asian Americans. Some are biracial, some are adopted, some have parents from Taiwan--you name it. This has been very normalizing; there hasn't been even the slightest whiff of anything uncomfortable. There are so many Asian and Asian American kids in this school that nobody even calls me to do Chinese New Year. It used to be that every year doing a little something was my job.

I don't know what my daughter's issues are going to be. Where Luke has black hair, she has light hair. Where Luke is usually identified as an Asian American, Paloma is not. In fact, people sometimes think I'm her nanny.

I am trying to bring both of them up knowing a little Chinese. I'd like to bring them to China, too, so they will understand a little of what it is. I don't want their experiences to be confined to Chinatown or a Chinese culture club.

We've talked about people who feel like outsiders. Do you think there are people in America who don't feel like outsiders?
I think the number is smaller than you'd think. My observation has been that many people, male and female, feel themselves not quite at home in their town or office or whatever. We are a country, it seems, of misfits.

I often try to emphasize this when I speak with Asian Americans and people who consider themselves people of color--that feelings of alienation are pretty general. But it's also true that for some groups it's an internal phenomenon and for other groups there's an external factor--and that makes a huge difference. The world intrudes more on you. I was once in the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, about to buy a little cup, and as I fiddled with my change, the lady behind the counter reached across and took my hand and started arranging the coins on it. Then she explained, "That's 50 cents right there. It's two of the big coins."

What were you doing in the Cowboy Hall of Fame?
I couldn't resist! Would you go to Oklahoma City and not go to the Cowboy Hall of Fame?

What do you think of anti-Arab sentiments resulting from the September 11th terrorist attacks?
My heart completely goes out to Arab Americans. I don't want to say that I feel their pain, but I can certainly relate to what they're going through. In the wake of the Wen Ho Lee incident, for example, there were people talking about boycotting Chinese restaurants. Not that Chinese restaurants had anything to do with Wen Ho Lee; but people will do these things. When the Japanese auto industry was the bogeyman, Chinese American people got killed; there's a wonderful movie about this phenomenon called Who Killed Vincent Chin?

During the Gulf War, too, I was mistaken for an Arab American--amazing, no? And yet true. A gas station owner on Concord Avenue started screaming at me, even as I tried to scream back that I was Chinese American. So I'm very aware of the way that these things spill over, and my heart breaks when I hear about Arab Americans having their cars vandalized, and so on. I know some of them feel that having survived living here during the Gulf War, they can survive anything. Still, these times are going to be very difficult.

 

 
Author Gish Jen explores America's immigrant experience
By ERICA NOONAN
Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Gish Jen's cast of internationally minded characters don't slide into the great American melting pot without some trial and trouble.

And it's the friction of assimilation that fuels her latest short-story collection, ''Who's Irish?,'' which explores the idiosyncrasies of Chinese and Irish culture.

In the collection's title story, an elderly Chinese woman is comically bewildered by the attitudes of her Americanized daughter, Natalie, and her chronically unemployed Irish-American son-in-law, John Shea.

''Beautiful wife, beautiful daughter, beautiful house, oven can clean itself automatically. ... If John lived in China, he would be very happy. But he is not happy. Even at the gym things go wrong. One day, he pull a muscle. Another day, weight room too crowded. Always something.''

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Author Gish Jen holds her daughter, Paloma Jen O'Connor, 9 months, at her home in Cambridge, Mass. Jen's latest short story collection explores the idiosyncrasies of Chinese and Irish culture.

The Associated Press
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Another story, ''Duncan in China,'' follows an aimless, 30-ish Chinese-American who moves to China to escape the shadow of his BMW-driving, import-export tycoon brother.

Duncan longs for the mythical China of ''nobility and restraint,'' But he's mortified to find his Western sensibilities thoroughly ruffled by the poverty and political oppression he finds in modern-day Shandong.

After spending time with a relative scarred by the Cultural Revolution, Duncan comes to the iconoclastic realization that ''the China of the early 1980s had more to do with eating melon seeds around a coal heater the size of a bread box than about Sung dynasty porcelain.''

Jen, 43, is no stranger to cultural mix-and-match. The child of immigrant parents who came to America to study but were prevented from returning by the Communist revolution, Jen was raised in affluent Scarsdale, N.Y.

During an arty phase in her teen-age years, she changed her first name from Lillian to Gish, after the silent-screen actress of the same name.

When she finished high school, Jen went to Harvard University where she graduated with a degree in English. Although she loved to write, she spent an aimless semester in business school at Stanford University before committing to a career as a novelist.

A stint in 1985 at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute helped create an ''atmosphere of expectation'' that allowed her to write professionally, Jen said.

During a recent interview in the kitchen of her Cambridge home, about a mile from the Harvard campus, Jen said her own life is a hodgepodge of work, travel and time spent with family -- her third-generation Irish-American husband, their young son and infant daughter.

She said a desire to stir up the cultural cauldron and see what bubbled to the top helped drive her 1996 breakthrough novel, ''Mona in the Promised Land.''

A comedic tale of a Chinese-American teen-ager's quest to convert to Judaism, the book could have rubbed the politically correct crowd -- both Jewish and Chinese -- the wrong way, Jen acknowledged.

''I was kind of nervous,'' she admitted. ''But it's less a matter of political correctness than political sensitivity. If you are slightly insensitive, you will get nailed. You have to do your homework.''

As it turned out, ''Mona'' received raves from reviewers, but more important, was embraced by critics like Cynthia Ozick, who often writes about Jewish culture.

That affirmation, Jen said, gave her the confidence to tackle more serious social issues, like domestic violence, in ''Who's Irish?''

Jen's success has much to do with talent. But she is also the beneficiary of happy timing -- bringing her stories forth when audiences are ready and willing to hear them.

Her first book, ''Typical American,'' emerged in 1991, just as Chinese-American novelists like Amy Tan and Gus Lee were writing best sellers and readers of all ethnic backgrounds were showing unprecedented interest in multicultural fiction.

Jen's hard-luck story of immigrants Ralph and Helen Chang, and their struggle to find security and happiness in 1950s America, struck a nerve.

It was just as Chinese-Americans as a group were coming into their own as a minority population eager to explore their ancient and modern heritage, Jen said.

''There was an openness and receptivity on the part of the audience,'' she said.

The novel was meant to consider the evolution of the American Dream from the purely economic goals of the newly arrived immigrant to the pursuit of life's less tangible pots of gold: love, social status, spiritual peace.

''It's a long way from Horatio Alger,'' she said. ''I wanted to made the reader reconsider what a 'typical American' really is. The second generation (of immigrants) have a very different set of problems.''

And ''Who's Irish?'' arrived on bookshelves this summer, just as the short story form enjoys a popular revival. The book keeps company with new collections by fiction powerhouses such as Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Annie Proulx and Alice Hoffman.

Jen said she admires other contemporary short-story writers, while also drawing inspiration from enduring women authors like Grace Paley and Jane Austin.

Ozick and Jamaica Kincaid also rate highly for their daring, unconventional approaches to prose.

''They are fearlessly bad,'' she chuckled. ''I'm fearfully bad.''

Jen said she is still deciding whether to produce another novel or more short stories.

There are potential projects ''simmering,'' she said, politely declining to reveal more.

''I'm having a great time being a mom right now,'' she said. ''I am very, very lucky.''
 

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Gish Jen is a novelist and short story writer. Her most recent publication is Who's Irish?: And Other Stories (1999, Knopf), which Kirkus Reviews describes as a "sharp-eyed debut collection of eight stories examining American life from a foreigner's perspective." Her first novel Typical American (1991, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-54689-3), follows a trio of young Chinese immigrants who slowly transform into everything they once criticized in the "typical American," was a New York Times notable book of the year, and a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle award. Reviewers praised the novel and ranked Jen with such established Asian-American writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.

In Mona in the Promised Land (1996), her second novel and also a New York Times notable book, Jen continues to explore notions of cultural diversity and ethic identity as Chinese-American Mona Chang decides to convert to Judaism. The Los Angles Times termed it "a shining example of a multicultural message delivered with the wit and bit of art. . ." and named it one of the ten best books of 1996.

Jen's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, as well as in numerous textbooks and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other sources, and has published two novels.

In the October 5th edition of The New York Times it was announced that Gish Jen received a 1999 Lannan Literary Award for fiction. The Lannan Literary Awards were established in 1989, in the amount of $75,000 each, to honor writers for work of exceptional quality.

A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Jen lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children.

Gish Jen visited the NYS Writers Institute on October 12, 1999.
 
 
 

Gish Jen, American:
Writer reads from upcoming novel at Radcliffe
By Beth Potier
Gazette Staff

As the audience questions escalated from softball ("How did you start writing?") to hardball ("How do you manage multiple points of view in your narrative?") to curveball ("Why is there a disproportionate representation of Asian Americans among novelists all of a sudden?"), novelist Gish Jen '77 responded thoughtfully, respectfully, insightfully.

But when a question probed her use of humor, pondering whether it was a shield behind which she hid to dig deep into difficult emotions, Jen was almost curt.

"I think I am just funny," she replied.

Jen, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, read from the yet-unnamed novel she is writing to a packed Cronkhite Graduate Center Living Room last Wednesday (Jan. 16). The audience's frequent laughter gave credence to her self-assessment; their hushed attention and sympathetic sighs indicated that her writing raises far more than a chuckle.

The author of the novels "Typical American" (1991) and "Mona in the Promised Land" (1996) and of the short story collection "Who's Irish?" (1999), Jen is celebrated for her poignant chronicling of the American immigrant experience and ethnic identity. Among her many honors and achievements, her story "Birthmates," from "Who's Irish?," was selected by John Updike to be included in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century."
 

The Wongs and the Baileys

Her new novel also explores traffic patterns at the cultural crossroads. In it, Carnegie Wong, a successful second-generation Chinese American, marries the WASP-y Janie Bailey, dubbed "Blondie" by Carnegie's meddling mother, Mama Wong. They parent adopted and biological children, including Lizzie, a foundling Asian baby who joins their family prior to marriage.

Narration of the story shifts between Carnegie and Janie. "It's kind of like family therapy, without the therapy," said Jen. In the excerpt, Mama Wong's voice - rendered in the dead-on halting English of a Chinese immigrant - is also prominent, as she wields her financial and persuasive power to encourage the couple to call off their wedding. "You break up engagement now, I give you one million dollars. Cash," she bribes her son just before the rehearsal dinner.

Carnegie turns down his mother's enticement and the wedding proceeds, with Mama Wong driving up to the Baileys' down-at-its-heels Maine retreat in a chauffeured Mercedes. While Mama Wong behaves well, and even enjoys herself, at the wedding, she "does not give up on sabotaging the marriage," Jen promised the audience.
 

A return to Radcliffe

Jen, who lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, credits her writing inspiration and a good measure of her success to Harvard and Radcliffe. Although she wrote her first story in the fifth grade, "in truth, I really did not think of myself as a writer," she said. She was pre-med as an undergraduate when English 283, a poetry course taught by the late Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Robert Fitzgerald, reawakened her interest in writing.

"The first time I wrote anything serious was for Professor Fitzgerald's class," she said, describing her initial horror when she discovered that the regular writing exercises would be poems, not papers. Her fear quickly vanished. "I wrote my first poem and I said to my roommate, 'I love this. If I could, I'd do this for the rest of my life.'"

Still feeling pressure from her parents, themselves Chinese immigrants, to succeed in a traditional field, Jen entered Stanford's business school but was drawn more toward writing workshops than courses required for her M.B.A. She left Stanford for the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received the M.F.A. Although Fitzgerald had questioned her career path and encouraged her to "do something with words," said Jen, "it took me years to realize he was right."

Jen returned to Radcliffe in 1987, using her time as a Bunting Institute Fellow to write "Typical American," a novel about the Changs, three Chinese immigrants pursuing the American dream. "Mona in the Promised Land" continues the Chang saga from the perspective of their teenage daughter Mona, who converts to Judaism.

'An Asian-American writer is an American writer'

While Chinese Americans take center stage in most of her work, Jen bristles at being hastily categorized as an Asian-American writer. "An Asian-American writer is an American writer," she said.

"I've tried to be someone who really thought about the American project, and what it means, what this nation is," she said. "I try to use my vantage point from the margins to kind of illuminate the larger questions." Her books are now as likely to be taught in courses about the American dream, she reported with satisfaction, as in Asian-American literature courses.

Dismissing an audience member's observation that Asian Americans are writers in "disproportionately" large numbers, Jen acknowledged that "Typical American" rode a wave of Asian Americans coming to prominence as fiction writers.

"When I went to graduate school, from '81 to '83, it was very well accepted that Asian-American writers would never be published in a mainstream publication. It was really clear to us that nobody was interested in us," she said. "But then along came multiculturalism and suddenly, there was an audience."
 

Familiar, but not autobiographical

Jen insisted that her work is not autobiographical, sharing her mother's relief upon reading the galleys to "Typical American" and finding her family absent from the story. Still, she writes of familiar emotional landscapes. "It's a distillation of attitudes that, I have to say, are probably representative of a generation," she said. Finding Mama Wong's voice came easily, she said, because "I grew up with that sentence structure. I know exactly how it sounds."

Estimating that she was halfway through her new novel, which she expects will come out in a few years, Jen shared her writing process with the audience. "I do not know what's going to happen at the end," she admitted. "I've always been somebody who's been a very intuitive sort of worker. ... I write something, I see whether there's something there that speaks to me. I try to see if there's a nerve there. If there's a nerve, I go back and try to understand the nature of the nerve."