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.
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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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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Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a witty, sharp-eyed, compassionate, and a hugely satisfying work.
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Read MoreIn 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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Read MoreMargaret 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!”
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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.
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Read MoreGish Jen reinvents the American immigrant story through the Chang family, who come to the United States with no intention of staying.