About Gish Jen: A Profile

Gish Jen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, eight-year-old son, and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the hectic pace of her life is reflected in her rapid-fire speech. The celebrated author of two novels and a collection, Jen is known for her humor and brimming intelligence, her ready opinions and easy laugh, her charm, and, not least of all, her volubility. Even though she remembers herself as being shy and withdrawn as a kid, she admits she was constantly kicked out of class for talking.

Born in 1955 in New York, Jen grew up Chinese and Catholic in Queens and Yonkers, where the "library" at her school consisted of a single shelf of books. When her father, a professor of civil engineering, and her mother, an elementary school teacher, moved the family to the predominantly Jewish suburb of Scarsdale, Jen finally had access to a proper library. She made feverish use of it, reading every book in the building, going from
The Island Stallion to Camus's
The Stranger in the fifth grade. In junior high she wrote poetry, and in high school -- when she discarded her given name, Lillian, which was too fusty for her tastes, and took up Gish, after the actress Lillian Gish-she was the literary editor for the school magazine.

Still, writing was never more than a pleasant diversion for her. She was a child of immigrants from Shanghai, the second of five children, four of whom would attend Ivy League colleges. Her three brothers would become successful businessmen, her sister a doctor, and there were similar expectations for Jen. She dutifully attended Harvard, with law or medicine prescribed for her future. Her plans changed dramatically, however, when she took English 283, a prosody course taught by Robert Fitzgerald, who required a weekly assignment writing verse. "Right away I loved it," Jen says. "I remember telling my roommate I loved writing, and if I could do it for the rest of my life, I would. But -- I'm the daughter of immigrants -- it never even crossed my mind for one minute that I might become a poet." Fitzgerald begged to differ. "Why are you premed?" he asked her. "I suggest you consider doing something with words." Since she had just received a C in chemistry, she was open to suggestion. Fitzgerald advised that if
she wasn't going to be a poet, she should at least try publishing, and arranged a job for her at Doubleday.

She worked in New York City for a year, but wasn't quite happy. "I 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." Once again, she opted for something more practical. "I had already been premed and prelaw; that left the one thing I'd never had any interest in -- business school." She entered the M.B.A. program at Stanford, mainly because the university had a graduate writing program. As expected, she didn't have her heart in the business curriculum, entranced instead by the novels she was reading and the writing workshops she was taking on the side. Fortunately her business classes were pass/fail, and her husband-to-be, David O'Connor, prepped her the night before exams. "He would say, 'Okay, you need to know these three things,' and I would go and get a 66 and pass my exams. In the meantime I was taking really great writing courses across the street." The first week of her second year, she overslept every day and missed all
her classes. "It was clear that I was never going to set foot in the classroom again, so I finally took a leave of absence," she says. (Not too long ago, she ran into an economics professor who told her that she had been a frequent subject of faculty dining-room discussions, which usually concluded: "Let's never take someone like her again.")

Dropping out of Stanford didn't fly well with her parents, either. They cut her off financially, and her mother did not speak to her for a year. Jen taught English at a coal-mining institute in China, then enrolled in the M.F.A. program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Although her work was received well there, Jen was fully aware that she had a difficult road ahead of her. "Maybe some people could have seen that multiculturalism was around the corner," Jen says, "but it certainly wasn't apparent to me, or to any of the Asian-American writers that I knew. Things have changed so drastically. People often ask me where the comic outlook comes from. Among other things it comes from my experience. I have seen so much social change in such a short amount of time, it seems miraculous."

After Jen graduated from Iowa in 1983, she and O'Connor married and lived in California until 1985, when they moved to Cambridge, where she played housewife more than writer. A lack of confidence about her literary career reduced her to taking a typing test for a job at Harvard. "I remember vividly the moment at which the woman at the front of the room said, 'Ms. Jen?' and I thought, 'That's me,' and she said, 'You have typed ninety words a minute with no mistakes. I'm sure we can find you a job.' It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in about three years." Depressingly, it turned out they couldn't find her a job -- at least not right away. She waited and waited, thinking a secretarial position would save her, but something else did. She was awarded a fellowship at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute. "It was quite a wonderful moment. They finally found a job for me at some dean's office and called me, and I said, 'No thank you. I am no longer interested. I am now a fellow at the Bunting Institute.' "

During her fellowship, she worked on her first novel,
Typical American, which was eventually published by Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence in 1991. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book launched Jen into the literary limelight. The novel follows three Chinese immigrants, Ralph Chang, his wife, Helen, and his sister, Theresa, as they pursue the American Dream and struggle against the pressures of assimilation, greed, and self-interest. Both a comedy and a tragedy, the novel brilliantly turns the notion of what it means to be typical American on its head.

    "We are family," echoed Helen.

    "Team," said Ralph. "We should have name. The Chinese Yankees. Call Chang-kees for short."

    "Chang-kees!" Everyone laughed.

    Ball games became even more fun. . . . "Let's go Chang-kees!" This was in the privacy of their apartment, in front of their newly bought used Zenith TV; the one time they went to an actual game, people had called them names and told them to go back to their laundry. They in turn had sat impassive as the scoreboard. Rooting in their hearts, they said later. Anyway, they preferred to stay home and watch. "More comfortable." "More convenient." "Can see better," they agreed.

As successful as
Typical American was, Jen sometimes resented critics who quickly labeled -- and diminished -- her as an Asian-American writer. Her reaction was to complicate what that meant via her second novel,
Mona in the Promised Land, which came out in 1996 through Knopf. It surprised everyone. A sequel of sorts, the novel focuses on Ralph and Helen Chang's daughters, Mona and Callie, as they grow up in a Jewish suburb of New York called Scarshill. Mona Chang joins a temple youth group and then, to her parents' dismay, converts, and is thereafter referred to as "Changowitz." Ironically, Mona learns that her rabbi is right in telling her, "The more Jewish you become, the more Chinese you'll be." With the backdrop of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, the novel is a riotous, provocative collision of social, ethnic, and racial issues, populated by a mishmash of characters who are Chinese, Jewish, black, Wasp, and Japanese -- a dizzying sendup that challenged readers to redefine ethnicity, and prompted one very confused journalist to headline her review of the novel "Matzo-Ball Sushi."

Mona in the Promised Land grew out of a short story, "What Means Switch?," that Jen wrote while trying to finish
Typical American. She had lost her first pregnancy, and didn't know if she'd be able to see her way to the end of the novel. Then she ran into an old high-school acquaintance and was inspired to revisit her teen years in Scarsdale in a short story. "You could feel the intense liberation," she says. At the same time, she jotted down some ideas for a new book in a binder of index cards. "A year or two later," she says, "I looked at one of the cards, and it said, 'Mona turns Jewish.' And I thought, 'Oy! Can't write that,' and I laughed. Then I paid attention. The uncomfortable laughter told me that I'd hit a nerve."

Jen's next book,
Who's Irish?, a collection of stories published in 1999 by Knopf, confirmed her mastery of the short form as well. The stories originally appeared in publications such as
The New Yorker. Two stories were selected for the anthology
Best American Short Stories, and one that was originally published in
Ploughshares, "Birthmates," was chosen by John Updike for
The Best American Short Stories of the Century.

Perhaps the most daring piece in
Who's Irish? is the title story, which is narrated in pidgin English by a Chinese woman. Her daughter is married to an Irish American, and the woman possesses a few stereotypes of her own:

I just happen to mention about the Shea family, an interesting fact: four brothers in the family, and not one of them work. The mother, Bess, have a job before she got sick, she was executive secretary in a big company. She is handle everything for a big shot, you would be surprised how complicated her job is, not just type this, type that. Now she is a nice woman with a clean house. But her boys, every one of them is on welfare, or so-called severance pay, or so-called disability pay. Something. They say they cannot find work, this is not the economy of the fifties, but I say, Even the black people doing better these days, some of them live so fancy, you'd be surprised. Why the Shea family have so much trouble? They are white people, they speak English. But my husband and I own our restaurant before he die. Free and clear, no mortgage. Of course, I understand I am just lucky, come from a country where the food is popular all over the world. I understand it is not the Shea family's fault they come from a
country where everything is boiled.

Jen says, "I could not have written this story early on in my career in dialect, using that voice, because if I had sent it out, the assumption would have been that I didn't speak English. I'm sure some editor would have sent it back to me, saying, 'Oh, well, you know, when your English is a bit better . . .' "

All along the way, Jen has danced an elaborate dance with the times. She has chosen, she says, to avail herself of what freedom she could find rather than play assigned roles: of China expert, say, or of professional victim. "I have hoped to define myself as an American writer." And yet the world has continued to try to define her otherwise. In an interview on NPR, a journalist asked Jen why
Mona in the Promised Land had "no real Americans in it." And
Kirkus Reviews described
Who's Irish? as "a sharp-eyed debut collection of eight tales examining America as it is seen by foreigners."

Nonetheless, Jen has pushed onward. Another story in
Who's Irish?, a novella called "House, House, Home," shows her going in a more complex narrative direction. She hopes to carry over this impulse to experiment to her next novel, which she is working on, when she can steal the time, in an office away from house and children and husband. "This is the way, maybe, in which I am still the daughter of immigrants," she says. "It was a very long time before I was able to hear my own voice, and even to this day I need to be in a quiet place and feel I'm away from my parents, my editor, my agent, even my audience, in order to hear what it is I really have to say."