Available October 21st!
“What an amazing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything—except the voices of our parents. Intergenerational mother-daughter mayhem of the absolute best smartest most moving kind.” —Junot Diaz
EARLY REACTIONS
“A great novelist distills the truth of her mother’s life, and her own… as moving as they come.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Astute and revelatory.” — Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Heartbreaking and stunning.” - Library Journal (starred review)
“Unsentimental, insightful, and brutally honest.” - Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“A tender, poignant family history, laced with sharp insight and quiet humour. Bad Bad Girl is not just the story of women who journeyed from the old world to the new, but also of the luminous, deeply personal world they carried within.” —Yan Ge, author of Elsewhere
”Reading Bad Bad Girl, I felt a deep ache for mothers and daughters divided by culture and silence. Gish Jen writes tenderly about a woman carrying old China in her bones while raising a child in America. This story shows how quiet courage can be, and how a “bad girl” is often just a woman who refuses to vanish. Many will find comfort and recognition in these pages.”—Xinran Xue, author of The Good Women of China
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Gish’s mother –Loo Shu-hsin–is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid is closer to her than her real mother, yet she is summarily fired even as Shu-hsin is constantly reprimanded: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name–Agnes–but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But even then he can only sigh, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looks, she sets sail–never to return.
In New York, she marries and successfully establishes a new American life. By the time Gish is born, though, the plight of her family in China is haunting her; her marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain, “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” as she recapitulates the harshness of her own upbringing. Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written—an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.
Gish and a friend doing research.