AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--JULY 2022--GISH JEN

Biographical information on this widely published, highly honored author is somewhat scarce. Lillian Jen was born in 1955 to Chinese immigrant parents. She grew up on the fringes of New York City, and in high school acquired the nickname “Gish” (after Lillian Gish, y’know), which she has adopted (at least professionally) ever since. She was educated at Harvard, Stanford Business School (!) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has somehow managed to keep her personal life off the top of the hit list on search engines, and that's so impressive that I chose to dig no further once I learned that she is married and has two children.

Jen can get very topical in her fiction, and her non-fiction articles frequently appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other journalistic outlets. Her latest collection of short fiction, entitled Thank You, Mr. Nixon, was published in February of 2022. Its stories have a common theme of US/China relations, and are often piercingly funny. In much of her work, her light style and humor help the underlying profundity slip into the reader’s system almost unnoticed, but do not minimize its therapeutic affects. As a visiting professor of English, she delivered this op-ed piece in the Harvard Crimson this spring. If you don’t fit in anything else for the challenge in July, you ought to spare a couple minutes to read it.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: Hi, I chose Typical American...can't get Link to Harvard Crimson op-ed to work...

>2 m.belljackson: Sorry about the bad link. Try it now. It was the goofy " " in the html.

>3 laytonwoman3rd: Thank you - Sending Hope for that "tidal wave of justice!"

Great link, thank you.

Nearly 20 years ago I read her short story collection Who's Irish and enjoyed it.
This month I will be reading Typical American.

I have 3 other Jen novels around here somewhere:
Mona in the Promised Land
The Love Wife (autographed!)
World and Town

which I won't get to this month, but hopefully will pick up during the rest of this year.

I will also be reading Typical American.

I finished The Love Wife by Gish Jen. I enjoyed it. She is a new to me author and I would read more.

I finished Typical American, Jen's first novel.

This is the story of Ralph Chang, who leaves China in 1947 to become an engineering student in America. After the Communists take over, Ralph cannot return to his parents; in New York he reunites with his older sister Theresa and marries her friend Helen. We follow their triumphs and tribulations to raise a family and become Americans through the early 1960s, sometimes "typical", sometimes not.

I enjoyed the first half of this book, but the Chang family's spiraling out of control in the last half dragged and lost my interest. Having just finished The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, the sparse, choppy writing here was quite different, but effective. By the end of the book the sentences and thoughts expanded. The writing was always good: sharp and perceptive. I had previously enjoyed Jen's short story collection Who's Irish?, and I think for me her writing works better in the shorter format.

Jen's next novel Mona in the Promised Land follows the Chang's younger daughter into her teens and twenties. At some future point, I may pick up this continuation of the Chang family story.

I'm reading the short story collection, Who's Irish, and enjoying the style very much. I don't read straight through such collections, just one or two a day, usually, so it takes a while. And unfortunately I sometimes forget the first ones by the time I'm finished with the whole book, which makes it hard to do a real review. But I love the wry humor and the way Jen pokes fun at family dynamics in many of these stories.

>9 laytonwoman3rd: I’m reading Who’s Irish? too! I’ve just read a few stories, but I’m really liking Jen’s writing and her humor. I also picked up a copy of Conversations With Gish Jen if I get to it.

Karen O

I gave a copy of that Conversations volume to a friend not too long ago....I should have hung onto it for a while first!

Typical American rated 2 stars on my Review - hope other books were better.

The August thread for Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is live now.