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Although Gish Jen writes short stories and novels that offer an Asian-American perspective on life in the U.S., she differs in tone, approach, and style from such other Asian-American authors as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Jen is often praised for illuminating the humor in otherwise serious, even tragic situations. Critics also single Jen out for her three-dimensional, non-stereotypical depictions of Asian-American life.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Childhood Love of Stories

Jen was born Lillian Jen in 1955 in Long Island, New York, to Chinese immigrants from Shanghai. She grew up in the New York City suburbs of Yonkers and Scarsdale, where not many Asian-American families lived. When Jen was small, her reading was limited to the selections in a small school library, but in Scarsdale, Jen discovered a public library with plentiful resources. She devoured books ranging from Walter Farley’s The Island Stallion (1948) to Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1943). Her love of stories inspired her to begin writing poetry in junior high, and in high school she became editor of the literary magazine, at about the time she took the nickname Gish, after the silent film actress Lillian Gish.

From Med School to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

But Jen’s interest in writing could not compete with familial duty and parental expectations for her personal success. Her parents pushed their five children to achieve: her three brothers would become successful businessmen, and her sister would become a doctor. Jen attended Harvard University, but her plans for medical school veered off course when she took a prosody course taught by poet and journalist Robert Fitzgerald, who inspired her with his weekly assignment of writing verse. Jen eventually graduated with a BA in English literature in 1977 and then accepted a job in the nonfiction department of Doubleday Publishing. Though she enrolled in Stanford University business school in 1979, she could not abandon her passion for fiction writing and dropped out of the program in her second year, much to the dismay of her parents. Uncertain of her direction, she looked toward her Chinese roots and decided to take a temporary job in China as an English-language instructor at a coal-mining institute. This trip inspired much of her first novel Typical American (1991). When she returned to the United States, she was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She earned an MFA in creative writing in 1983 and was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1988.

First Novel

Jen married David O’Connor, a graduate of Harvard and Stanford Business School. When O’Connor took a job with Apple Computer, Inc., she moved with him to the Silicon Valley of California. In 1985, the couple relocated again to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Jen was awarded a fellowship at Radcliffe University’s Bunting Institute. The fellowship was one of several grants, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, that Jen received to support her craft. With the fellowship at the Bunting Institute, Jen began writing Typical American (1991). The novel was named ”Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award.

A Continuing Success with Novels

In 1996, Jen published her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, which was also named one of the ”Notable Books of the Year” by The New York Times. A few years later, Jen’s Who’s Irish? (1999), a collection of eight short stories— most of which were published previously—won the Lannan Award for Fiction. Jen was also honored for this collection in 2003, with the Strauss ”Living” Award from the American Academy for Arts and Letters.

Jen’s most recent novel, The Love Wife, appeared in 2004. Jen currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, her son Luke, and her daughter Paloma.

Works in Literary Context

Throughout Jen’s work runs the theme of travel, as filtered through the Asian-American culture and its history of migration and displacement. Jen’s fiction redefines travel to encompass different modes of transport, different means of mobility, and different markers of home.

The Theme of Home and Family

In Jen’s work, home is defined by family; the idea of families moving from one country to the next, distancing themselves from their native nation, does not generate conflict. Instead, a person who moves away from his family creates the fictional tension. Jen frequently illustrates the theme of the home’s disintegration by having certain characters leave their families—literally and figuratively—and by illustrating how this move from the family center creates an imbalance in the family structure and even cracks cultural foundations. The novel Mona in the Promised Land, for example, focuses on Chinese American teenager Mona, who denies her Chinese identity by becoming assimilated into the Jewish culture of the upscale New York suburb where her family relocates. The conflict in Jen’s short story ”Duncan in China” derives from a Chinese immigrant matriarch who is ousted from her daughter’s home and must deal with the harsh consequences.

A Balance of Humor and Gravity

Jen’s work is often characterized as exposing the lighthearted elements in otherwise grave situations. The title story of the collection Who’s Irish? draws humor from the narrator’s Irish-American son-in-law, whose quips about the ”hyphenated American identity” allow for levity with what could be cause for serious cultural conflict. In ”House House Home,” unconventional art professor Sven Anderson encourages his wife, aspiring Chinese-American painter Pammi, to worship at the altar of Art, and to rebel against all things domestic. In “Birthmates,” Art Woo, a middle-aged computer salesman attending a trade conference, mistakenly books himself a room in a welfare hotel, with a wooden plaque above the checkout desk claiming ”Fewest Customer Injuries, 1972-1973.” One Entertainment Weekly reviewer praised Jen for shading ”the Chinese-American experience with tart realism and sometimes guffaw-inducing humor.”

Works in Critical Context

Jen’s work is regarded alongside the writing of prominent Asian-American writers of the late twentieth century, most notably Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Critics praise Jen’s unique and complex depiction of the immigrant experience. Many critics, including Yuko Matsukawa, believe Jen ”brilliantly challenges readers to reexamine their definitions of home, family, the American dream, and, of course, what it is to be a ‘typical American.”’ Scholar Zhou Xiaojing suggests that Jen departs from previous Chinese American fiction in location and literary strategies and depicts immigrant characters as individuals rather than ”as ethnic cultural signs.” Other reviewers of her novel Mona in the Promised Land also recognize Jen’s exploration of individual identity in multicultural America. However, some of Jen’s readers have criticized her for weak characterization.

Mona in the Promised Land

Jen received wide praise for Mona in the Promised Land. For example, Marina Heung suggested that Jen shattered ”accepted notions of identity boundaries” and proposed that ”identities are willfully chosen, not made.” In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Richard Eder praised Jen’s treatment of identity: ”It is a kind of joyful irony that, among other things, makes Mona a kind of shining example of a multicultural message delivered with the wit and bite of art.”

Who’s Irish?

The collection Who’s Irish? also garnered much praise from the press. Jean Thompson in the New York Times Book Review seems to sum up the general opinion:

Jen’s gift is for comedy that resonates, and sadnesses that arise with perfect timing from absurdities. Her subject matter is so appealing, it almost obscures the power and suppleness of her language. Who’s Irish?, at its considerable best, finds words for all the high and low notes of the raucous American anthem.

References

Lee, Rachel. The Americas of Asian-American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche. Edited by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Eder, Richard. ”A WASP-Free America.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (May 26, 1996): 2.
Lee, Rachel. ”Who’s Chinese?” Women’s Review of Books 19:5 (February 2002): 13-14.
Lin, Erika T. ”Mona on the Phone: The Performative Body and Racial Identity in Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS 28:2 (Summer 2003): 47-57.
Matsukawa, Yuko. ”MELUS Interview: Gish Jen.” MELUS 18:4 (Winter 1993): 111-120.
Miner, Valerie. ”Asian-American Pancake.” Nation 262: 24 (June 17, 1996): 35-36.
Snell, Marilyn. ”Gish Jen: The Intimate Outsider.” New Perspectives Quarterly 8:3 (1991): 56-60.
Thompson, Jean. Review of “Who’s Irish?.” New York Times. (July 27, 1999): 13.
Zierler, Wendy. ”Laughter with a Twist.” Far Eastern Economic Review 163:5 (February 2000): 36-37.