A provocative and important study of the different ideas Easterners and Westerners have about the self and society and what this means for current debates in art, education, geopolitics, and business.
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Press:
WCVB • Chronicle • Profiles: Gish Jen
WGBH • Greater Boston • Cambridge Author Gish Jen Discusses the East-West Culture Gap
The Big Think • The Self in the World – Gish Jen – Think Again Podcast #88
Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. Novelist and essayist Gish Jen on how fundamental East-West differences in the sense of self play out in art, culture, business, education, and more.
WGBH • Boston Public Radio • A Chinese American author explores the East-West culture gap
Chinese gather near Baiyun Temple in Beijing to pray for good fortune on the fifth day of the Lunar New Year. • Jason Lee/Reuters
About Girl at the Baggage Claim:
A provocative and important study of the different ideas Easterners and Westerners have about the self and society and what this means for current debates in art, education, geopolitics, and business. Never have East and West come as close as they are today, yet we are still baffled by one another. Is our mantra “To thine own self be true”? Or do we believe we belong to something larger than ourselves—a family, a religion, a troop—that claims our first allegiance? Gish Jen—drawing on a treasure trove of stories and personal anecdotes, as well as cutting-edge research in cultural psychology—reveals how this difference shapes what we perceive and remember, what we say and do and make—how it shapes everything from our ideas about copying and talking in class to the difference between Apple and Alibaba. As engaging as it is illuminating, this is a book that stands to profoundly enrich our understanding of ourselves and of our world.
Praise and Reviews:
“Both timely and extremely important.”
“A deep psychological study of how place, habits, and identity mix in our world. Tremendous!”
“Subtle, erudite, and daring, The Girl at the Baggage Claim is a tour de force by one of the most insightful writers of our time.”
“Insightful, far-reaching and a joy to read, Gish Jen takes on the mystery of cultural difference, and succeeds in cracking the code. The Girl at the Baggage Claim answers questions I’ve been asking my whole life.”
“In her trademark lively and witty prose, Gish Jen not only limns non-Western views of the self but questions whether the Western self is really a natural way to be. A powerful, provocative work.”
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Science has revealed how our senses filter the world around us—making us focus on visual boundaries, musical repetition, and musky odors. With her novelist’s insights, Gish Jen shows us how differences in culture can filter our world as well. The Girl at the Baggage Claim is truly eye-opening and thought-provoking.”
“Misunderstanding East-West differences can cost us in every way we know how to measure: in money, friendship, education, in the balance of power, and the fate of the planet. The Girl at the Baggage Claim is remarkable and fluent but, most of all, essential.”
“A beautifully observed book with a perfect, light tone, The Girl at the Baggage Claim poignantly captures the personal tussle between independence and interdependence so many of us are caught in. A must read for anyone navigating the East-West divide.”
“This book gives special proof to the belief that our best novelists are also our best psychologists. With characteristic wit and unfailing insight, Gish Jen creates a genre all her own—uniquely universal, deeply serious, and unselfconsciously joyous.”
Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world.
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For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsider’s Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.
Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world.
In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.
“Gish Jen is the Great American Novelist we’re always hearing about, and in Tiger Writing she delivers a profound meditation on the divergent roles that storytelling, artmaking, and selfhood take on across the East–West divide. Penetrating, inspired, and, yes, indispensable.”
“A magnificent feat of integration … I am proud, proud, proud to share ancestors—and the novel and the world—with Gish Jen.”
“I loved it! Tiger Writing is both precise and intimate, a terrific contribution to our understanding of the artist’s lot in the East and in the West.”
“How to balance the competing claims of social order and self-determination? It’s a question that all novelists must grapple with, and Jen, drawing on extensive research in the social sciences as well as her own vividly-rendered biography, gives us an entirely new answer. The result is a strikingly original —and compellingly personal—account of the novel as a genre.”
“Blending family memoir, cultural criticism, and reflections on her own life as a writer, Gish Jen makes a compelling case for the novel as a meeting-ground of typically American themes of independence with classically Asian ideals of interdependence. Tiger Writing is a rare case of a book on writing that itself is a joy to read.”
In this thick, satisfying sprawl of a read… Jen gracefully introduces some of the great issues of our time: how the shock of 9/11 reverberated from city to town; how lost souls can cling meanly to fundamentalism; how it feels when a chain store bulldozes into a mom-and-pop community, or a family farm finally collapses.
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Winner, 2011 Massachusetts Book Prize
Nominee, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Hattie Kong—the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China—has, in her fiftieth year of living in the United States, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. It is an utterly devastating loss, and also heartbreakingly absurd: a little, she thinks, “like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium.”
But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run from their inner-city troubles, as well as—quite unexpectedly—by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians.
What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what “worlds” we make of the world.
“It’s a big subject, America, but Gish Jen once again provest an exemplary national pulse-taker”
“What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen…Jen knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes.”
“In this thick, satisfying sprawl of a read… Jen gracefully introduces some of the great issues of our time: how the shock of 9/11 reverberated from city to town; how lost souls can cling meanly to fundamentalism; how it feels when a chain store bulldozes into a mom-and-pop community, or a family farm finally collapses.”
“Sharply funny and wisely compassionate, Jen’s richly stippled novel slyly questions every assumption about existence and meaning even as it celebrates generosity, friendship, and love.”
Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a witty, sharp-eyed, compassionate, and a hugely satisfying work.
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The Wongs describe themselves as a “half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie’s Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie’s WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children.
Into this new American family comes a volatile new member. Lanlan is Carnegie’s Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie’s mother’s will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl?
What happens as Carnegie and Blondie try to incorporate the ambiguous new arrival into their already complicated family is touchingly, brilliantly, intricately told. Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a witty, sharp-eyed, compassionate, and a hugely satisfying work.
“A big story about families and identity and race and the American Dream. . . Jen’s most ambitious and emotionally ample work yet.”
“The Love Wife shares all the wonderful attributes of Jen’s other books but is deeper, richer, darker, far more complex and mature. . . by far the most satisfying and enjoyable novel I have read this year.”
“It’s hard to find a novel that seems, at once, so funny and so touching that one really is dumbstruck with admiration…I read the book in three sittings and plan to start it all over again soon…”
“Gish Jen’s characters are so alive that one can hardly call them ‘characters’… Here is a novel so insightful, so satisfying, that it ought never to have ended.””
In eight wonderfully alive stories, Jen chronicles Chinese and other Americans as they exuberantly win, lose, love, hate, overachieve, underachieve, and generally take on America—with sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking results.
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With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen—author of the highly acclaimed novels Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land—looks at ambition and compromise at century’s end and finds that much of the action is as familiar—and as strange—as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.
In eight wonderfully alive stories, Jen chronicles Chinese and other Americans as they exuberantly win, lose, love, hate, overachieve, underachieve, and generally take on America—with sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking results.
Life not is not what it was a generation ago, but it is any easier? A Chinese-American woman attempts to discipline her Chinese-Irish-American grandchild, only to come up against her daughter’s state-of-the-art parenting. A grown man flees to China to escape his disapproving mother, “who called him everyday lest he forget she was not speaking to him.” A computer expert accidentally books himself into a welfare hotel.
The stories in Who’s Irish? prove once again that Gish Jen is an essential writer for our time—a writer who moves and entertains us as she updates the American Dream.
“The product of a true craftswoman whose gifts transcend all cultural and ethnic labels.”
“Jen’s performance isn’t a series of one-liners, but an elaborate balancing act: Chinese and American, painful and funny…The result: an esthetic whole even greater than the sum of its entertaining parts.””
“Her subject matter is so appealing, it almost obscures the power and suppleness of her language… finds words for all the high and low notes of the raucous American anthem.”
“Gish Jen’s stories are keenly observed moments in time, in which the characters’ foibles predominate just long enough for an odd equilibrium to be established between their yearning and their movement toward small, unexpected moments of grace. In many of the stories, the characters seem to be trying their lives on for size: discomfiting to observe, though at the time, offering readers a sadness convincingly tinged with humor.”
“A light-hearted novel of radiant charm and human warmth, Gish Jen’s funny, headlong, and completely delightful narrative of high-achieving Chinese and Jewish suburbanites is indelibly American and could unfold nowhere else.”
Margaret Atwood: The book that made me laugh out loud: Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land – “generational and cultural conflicts with 1,000 twists!”
It is 1968, the dawn of the age of ethnicity: African Americans are turning Chinese, Jews are turning black, and though some nice Chinese girls are turning more Chinese, teenaged Mona Chang is turning Jewish, much to her parents’ chagrin.
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It is 1968, the dawn of the age of ethnicity: African Americans are turning Chinese, Jews are turning black, and though some nice Chinese girls are turning more Chinese, teenaged Mona Chang is turning Jewish, much to her parents’ chagrin.
The Chang family has just moved to posh Scarshill, New York, where the rhododendrons are as big as the Chang family’s old bathroom, and no one trims the forsythia into little can shapes. This takes some getting used to, especially since there’s also a new social landscape, with a hot line, a mystery caller, and a Temple Youth Group full of radical ideas.
Mona quickly bleaches her bell-bottoms. Then it’s off with her friends to reform race relations. They find a cause in Alfred, the handsome black number-two cook at Mona’s parents’ pancake house, and pretty soon there is a mansion hideout with an underground railroad and a utopia called Camp Gugelstein.
Certain love affairs run into trouble, though. And by their end, for better or for worse, certain unforeseen truths of contemporary American have been memorably revealed.
“We might want to run Gish Jen for President… This brilliant writer fractures the melting pot and re-sets the literary table right before our very eyes.”
“What I love about this story is that while it is written in the nineties by an American woman, the author seems to relish every politically incorrect moment …a warm and witty exploration of racial and religious divides.”
“What a good laughing out loud book this is.”
“A light-hearted novel of radiant charm and human warmth, Gish Jen’s funny, headlong, and completely delightful narrative of high-achieving Chinese and Jewish suburbanites is indelibly American and could unfold nowhere else.”
“Can a novel be both hilariously funny and seriously important? Yes, in the case of Mona in the Promised Land”
Gish Jen reinvents the American immigrant story through the Chang family, who come to the United States with no intention of staying.
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“No paraphrase could capture the intelligence of Gish Jen’s prose, its epigrammatic sweep and swiftness . . . The author just keeps coming at you line after stunning line.”
“The brilliance of Gish Jen’s novel is that it operates so deeply, yet so entertainingly, and at so many levels at once . . . She has created that rarest achievement in literature, the profoundly comic novel. ”
“Gish Jen has done more than tell an immigrant story…She has done it more and in some ways better than it has ever been done before.”
“Gish Jen has secured her place in American literature with this touching tale.”
“Gish Jen’s immensely intelligent, thunderously funny, truly heartbreaking novel is perhaps the best story of contemporary immigrant experience ever to grace our literature.”
Gish Jen reinvents the American immigrant story through the Chang family, who come to the United States with no intention of staying. When the Communists assume control of China in 1949, though, Ralph Chang, his sister Theresa, and his wife Helen, find themselves in a crisis.
At first, they cling to their old-world ideas of themselves. But as they begin to dream the American dream of self-invention, they move poignantly and ironically from people who disparage all that is “typical American” to people who might be seen as typically American themselves.
With droll humor and a deep empathy for her characters, Gish Jen creates here a superbly engrossing story that resonates with wit and wisdom even as it challenges the reader to reconsider what a typical American might be today.
This is the story of a family coming together and coming apart, of personal history colliding with world history. It is the story of a smooth-talking con man who promises to make their most heartfelt dreams come true. It is the story of many miracles, real and imagined. But most of all, it is the story of three human beings who come to understand what really matters.