CHAPTER 1
Understanding Gish Jen
Gish Jen is an American writer. She also happens to be an Asian American writer, and specifically she is an American writer of Chinese descent. While it might be tempting to pigeonhole her work as Chinese American, Asian American, or ethnic American literature, Jenâs writing exceeds the bounds of those categories even as it provides exemplary literary representations of Chinese American, Asian American, and ethnic American life. As Jen said in an interview with fellow contemporary American and Asian American writer Don Lee, âI have hoped to define myself as an American writer.â1
Lillian Jen was born on Long Island, New York, on 12 August 1955, the second of five children, three boys and two girls. Her parents were Chinese immigrants from Shanghai, and in the United States her father, Norman, worked as a civil engineer while her mother, Agnes, taught elementary school. The Jen family moved from Long Island to Queens and then to Yonkers, where Jen attended a Catholic school with a library that contained only a single shelf of books. Despite the paucity of reading material at her school, Jen developed a love of both reading and writing. In the fifth grade Jen had her first story published in the classâs literary magazine; it was a tale âabout a maid who had stolen some gold. She had hidden it inside this hat, but when she picked up the hat, the gold fell out!â2 Even in this first literary offering, Jenâs trademark wit and comic sensibility are in evidence. Among Jenâs earliest literary influences, Louisa May Alcottâs Little Women and Jane Austenâs Pride and Prejudice, one can see how these novels of female domestic life left their mark on Jen, as her own work would tackle similar small family dramas that reveal larger social, political, gender, and in Jenâs case racial and ethnic dynamics.
It was also while she was in the fifth grade that Jenâs family moved once again, this time to the more affluent community of Scarsdale, New York, which Jen would come to fictionalize as Scarshill in her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996). Like Yonkers, Scarsdale did not have a sizable Chinese or Asian American presence, but it did have a Jewish community, which would come to influence her fictional world making in Mona. No longer having to make do with a single library shelf, Jen indulged her reading passions by checking out two books a day from her new school library and expanding her literary tastes with texts such as Albert Camusâs The Stranger. While in high school Jen continued her writerly ambitions by becoming the literary editor of the school magazine. Most notably, it was while she was in high school that Lillian Jen became Gish Jen, a nickname bestowed on her by friends inspired by the silent movie actress Lillian Gish. Describing the rationale for changing her name, Jen explained, âMy friends thought Gish Jen was a better name because it had more of an impact. It sounds strong because of the spondee âGish Jenâ: like âbang, bang.â I always associate âLillianâ with a shyer self, a received self.â3 Here we can see another literary theme that Jen would take up in her writing: the ability to rename and remake yourself into an identity that you choose versus one bestowed on you from birth.
After graduating from high school, Jen made her way north to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she attended Harvard University. Citing pressure from her parents, Jen began her scholarly life with a focus on medicine, but during the semester that she was enrolled in English 283, a legendary prosody course taught by Robert Fitzgerald, she switched majors when Fitzgerald helpfully observed, âWhy are you premed? . . . I suggest you consider doing something with words.â4 After switching her premed major (in which she was getting a C in chemistry) to prelaw, Jen eventually graduated with a B.A. in English literature in 1977 and with Fitzgeraldâs assistance acquired a job at Doubleday Publishing in New York City.
Although working at Doubleday enabled her to do âsomething with words,â her year at the publishing house did not leave her feeling fulfilled professionally or financially: âI realized I had found myself in some middle ground. I was neither doing what I really wanted to do, nor was I making any money.â5 Realizing that she was more interested in spending her days talking about the latest New Yorker short story and other matters of fiction with her coworkers, Jen decided to take a practical approach to changing careers by applying to universities that had M.B.A. programs and that were also strong in creative writing. In 1979 she matriculated into Stanford University, where she would meet her future husband, David OâConnor, during orientation. While her classmates spent their days on business case studies, Jen immersed herself in taking writing classes and reading novels: âI think itâs safe to say that I was the only first-year business school student who read a hundred novels while she was at business school.â6 Although she passed her first year (which Jen credits as coming solely through the coaching of her husband the night before exams), Jen dropped out of the M.B.A. program at the beginning of her second year after she continually overslept and missed attending her classes.
While Jen never regretted leaving Stanford, her decision was not without consequences. Four of the five Jen children attended Ivy League schools; Jenâs three brothers would become successful businessmen, and her sister became the doctor of her parentsâ dreams. Disappointed in Jenâs career choice, her parents cut her off financially and emotionally: they no longer paid her bills, and her mother stopped talking to her for a year and a half. In need of an income and with a desire to visit her parentsâ homeland, Jen found a position teaching English at the Shandong Mining College in Jinan, China. Her time in China enabled her to learn Mandarin, although by her own admission, âI donât speak very well and I donât understand that well anymore these days. Iâve never been very good at itâ; and it inspired her short story âDuncan in China,â an original composition published in her short story collection Whoâs Irish? (1999).7 China is also where Jenâs understanding about her ethnicity and her parentsâ heritage became pronounced: âI really began to understand that certain strains of thoughts in my parents and in myself were Chinese. In some ways, I didnât even know what my conflicts were until I went to Chinaâwhat it means to be Chinese; what it means to be American; what it means to be Chinese American.â8
In 1981 Jen entered the famed Iowa Writersâ Workshop at the University of Iowa. When asked about her time there, she cited the positive influence of the instructors Bharati Mukherjee and James Alan McPherson: âWriting school often focuses on technique, which is important, but I feel lucky that I met a couple of people who also cared about content.â9 While she said that she did not feel ostracized due to her racial or ethnic difference, she noted that âin my year there were a lot of cowboys. So I did feel like an outsider, but interestingly it wasnât SO much because I was an Asian-American.10 I felt like an outsider because I was from the east, and I had gone to Harvard and that was not cool the year I was there.â11 After earning her M.F.A. in 1983, Jen married David OâConnor and moved to California, where OâConnor was working at Apple Computers. When his next job took him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jen found herself in 1985 applying for secretarial positions at her alma mater since she was not sure if her literary career would ever take off. Lucky for Jen, she was also applying for fellowships at the same time, and the day she received a phone call from Harvard offering her a position as a typist, she also received a letter informing her that she would be a 1986 Radcliffe Bunting Fellow. This fellowship would confirm her literary prowess and become the first of her many notable literary accomplishments.
In 1986 Jenâs short story âIn the American Societyâ was published by the Southern Review. This was a significant milestone since it was in this story that readers were introduced to the Chang family and that the seeds for her first novel, Typical American, were sown. In 1987 the Chang family made another appearance in âThe Water Faucet Vision,â published in the literary journal Nimrod. It would go on to be selected by the guest editor Mark Helprin for Houghton-Mifflinâs Best American Short Stories 1988, the first of three stories by Jen that would be bestowed this honor. With her credentials firmly established in the short fiction realm, Jen would see the publication of her first novel, Typical American, in 1991 with Houghton-Mifflin. This novel takes place in the mid- to late twentieth century and concentrates on three Chinese immigrants who find themselves becoming American: Ralph, Theresa, and Helen. In the world of Jenâs fiction, Typical American is the novel that has the most âhistoricâ setting, in terms of not taking place in the contemporary moment of when Jen was writing. However, despite its setting in the recent past, its attention to Chinese American / Asian American characters is a theme that Jen would return to in future stories and novels. As Jen has explained, âI did feel it was important that there be Asian American representation in literature. I didnât see that it limited my subject matter in any way. Thereâs nothing I couldnât write about using Asian American characters.â12 Typical American launched Jenâs literary career: it was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book.
While Typical American earned many distinctions, it was also a book that reviewers often lumped together with other Asian American books published that same year. One Publishers Weekly article, âSpringâs Five Fictional Encounters of the Chinese American Kind,â discussed Jenâs novel alongside four other Chinese American narratives (Frank Chinâs Donald Duk, Gus Leeâs China Boy, David Wong Louieâs The Pangs of Love, and Amy Tanâs The Kitchen Godâs Wife) that also came out in 1991. Jonathan Yardley, writing for the Washington Post Book World, similarly observed that the other Chinese American novels published in the same year as Typical American are âgood books all dealing, in their different ways, with much the same subject.â13 To an outsider, one unfamiliar with the variety and vastness of Asian ethnicities in the United States or the regional and temporal differences of Chinese immigrants arriving in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, Jenâs novel may well seem to deal with the same subject matter as Frank Chinâs magical realist novel about a fifth-generation Chinese American boy traveling back in time to the building of the transcontinental railroad or Gus Leeâs coming-of-age story of a young boy growing up in the postwar United States in the African American neighborhood of the San Francisco panhandle. But as Jen has trenchantly observed, âWhen people look at a picture by Cezanne, no oneâs really interested in the apples. Theyâre interested in the way in which he has transformed those apples. But if youâre an Asian American writer, people are not interested in the quality of artistic transformation; theyâre interested in your material. Thereâs a sense in which weâre all writing immigrant autobiographies. The work is not valued as art; itâs valued as what is called âsocial documentary.â I find that very frustrating.â14
It is significant that Jen calls herself an Asian American writer rather than a Chinese American writer; this invocation signals her recognition of race and the ways that writers of Asian ancestry, regardless of their ethnic specificity or length of time living in the United States, are subject to certain assumptions, for example that they all come from immigrant families. Besides countering these kinds of stereotypes, Jen, like other Asian American and nonwhite contemporary American writers, is often asked if she is (or is assumed to be) writing veiled autobiography: âpeople will always say, âOh it must be your family,â but in fact itâs not my family I wrote about.â15 Yet she has continually emphasized that the Changs are an entirely fictional creation and has often related, in interviews, how her mother read her first novel and was glad to see that there was no one she recognized in any of the characters in Typical American: âMy mom got to the end of Typical American in galleys, and she said, âAhhh! So well written!â And then she said, âAnd itâs not about anybody!ââ16 Her motherâs comment, which Jen says is among her favorite reviews, signals that Jenâs inspiration was drawn from her imagination; it is her craft as an artist and not her ethnic identity that Typical American affirms.
Jen has also elaborated on her frustration with the ways in which she and other Asian American writers are pigeonholed into writing about ethnographic concerns or expected to provide a glimpse into the world of an Orientalist Asia. She recounted a letter she received from the Paris Review rejecting her writing about Asian Americans with the explanation, âWe prefer your more exotic work.â17 But Jen did not capitulate to these critiques: âI was writing against the publicâs expectation as I understood it. I was damned if I was going to give them the exotic nonsense they thought they wanted; instead, I wanted my book to succeed on character. I followed my own interests.â18 Her writing interests, as amply demonstrated from her considerable fictional output, have been concerned with all things American (identities, histories, families, experiences, immigration, politics, race, gender, class), but she has also reacted to the ways in which she is seen as somehow less than a true or typical American: âThereâs not a sense that Saul Bellowâs characters are less American than John Updikeâs. But there is a perception that my characters are less American than Updikeâs. And thatâs the kind of thing Iâm questioning. How is it that Bellow is writing about America, and Iâm writing about the Asian American experience?â19
Indeed first and foremost Jen is an American writer par excellence, one who shares the distinction of being included among the best of short fiction writers. Her story âBirthmates,â originally published in Ploughshares, was selected by the guest editor Jane Smiley for The Best American Short Stories 1995. It was further honored by having John Updike include it in The Best American Short Stories of the Century alongside the likes of such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro. In many ways her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996), announces its American roots most clearly through its subject matter and through Jenâs intention to, in fellow writer Don Leeâs words, âcomplicateâ what it means for her to be an Asian American writer by focusing on the second generation of the Chang family, particularly the youngest daughter, Mona, and her newly formed identity as a Chinese Jewish American girl growing up in suburban New York of the 1970s.20 Like her first novel, Mona in the Promised Land grew out of a short story, âWhat Means Switch?â (originally published in 1990 in the Atlantic Monthly), and while it continues to engage with the Chang family, it departs from Typical American by keeping the central focus on Monaâs teenage adventures and identity explorations. Although Mona was met with mixed reactions from some reviewers, who seemed confused that Jen would be writing about a Chinese American girlâs conversion to Judaism against a backdrop of civil rights activism and comic undertones, it was named a New York Times Notable Book and solidified Jenâs credentials as a uniquely American writer.
Jenâs short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Yale Review, Fiction, Ploughshares, and the Iowa Review, to name just a sampling of literary venues. Therefore it was no surprise that she would follow her two novels by publishing a collection of short stories, Whoâs Irish? Stories (1999), which feature...