Gish Jen (born Lillian Jen; () August 12, 1955) is a contemporary American writer and speaker.Matsukawa, Yuko
"MELUS interview: Gish Jen"
''

MELUS Melus (also ''Milus'' or ''Meles'', ''Melo'' in Italian) (died 1020) was a Lombard nobleman from the Apulian town of Bari, whose ambition to carve for himself an autonomous territory from the Byzantine catapanate of Italy in the early elev ...

'', Vol. 18, 1993

Early life and education

Gish Jen is a second-generation Chinese American. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s; her mother was from Shanghai and her father was from Yixing. Born in Long Island, New York, she grew up in

Queens Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

, then

Yonkers Yonkers () is a city in Westchester County, New York, United States. Developed along the Hudson River, it is the third most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City and Buffalo. The population of Yonkers was 211,569 as enu ...

, then Scarsdale. Her birth name is Lillian, but during her high school years she acquired the nickname Gish, named for actress

Lillian Gish Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893February 27, 1993) was an American actress, director, and screenwriter. Her film-acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent film shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the "First Lady of American Cinema" ...

. She graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 1977Ganguli, Ishani
"Novelist Gish Jen Finds Literary Voice Outside Harvard Identity"
''

The Harvard Crimson ''The Harvard Crimson'' is the student newspaper of Harvard University and was founded in 1873. Run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates, it served for many years as the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beginning in the f ...

'', Tuesday, June 4, 2002 with a BA in English, and later attended Stanford Business School (1979–1980), but dropped out in favor of the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized into 12 coll ...

Writers' Workshop, where she earned her MFA in fiction in 1983.

Fiction

Five of her short stories have been reprinted in ''

The Best American Short Stories The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of '' The Best American Series'' published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in ...

''. Her piece "Birthmates", was selected as one of ''The Best American Short Stories of The Century'' by

John Updike John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth ...

. Her works include five novels: ''Typical American'', ''Mona in the Promised Land'', ''The Love Wife'', ''

World and Town ''World and Town'' is a novel by Gish Jen that follows a Chinese American widow and her friendship with a family of Cambodian immigrants. The novel describes the difficulties encountered in the lives of characters as they embrace immigration, rati ...

'' and ''The Resisters''. She has also written two collections of short fiction, ''

Who's Irish? ''Who's Irish?'' is a short story collection written on June 4, 1999 by Gish Jen.Jamie James"'Who's Irish?': In her first collection of stories, Chinese-American novelist Gish Jen turns stereotypes on their heads."''Salon Salon may refer to: C ...

'', and ''Thank You, Mr. Nixon''. Her first novel, ''Typical American,'' was nominated for a National Books Critics' Circle Award. Her second novel, ''Mona in the Promised Land,'' features a Chinese-American adolescent who converts to Judaism. ''The Love Wife'', her third novel, portrays an Asian American family with interracial parents and both biological and adopted children. Her fourth novel, ''World and Town,'' portrays a fragile America, its small towns challenged by globalization, development, fundamentalism, and immigration, as well as the ripples sent out by 9/11. There is a MAGA vs. The Elite tension in this small Vermont town (6 years before MAGA). Andersen, Beth E.
"Review: World and Town"
''Library Journal'', October 1, 2010 ''World and Town'' won the 2011 Massachusetts Book Prize in fiction and was nominated for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her fifth novel, ''The Resisters'', was released in February 2020 and is a post-automation, feminist baseball dystopia. Set in the not-so-distant future. most jobs are now automated, much seacoast land is under water due to climate change, and the Internet and various social apps have been replaced by one all-seeing Alexa-like sentient Internet. The story centers around a "surplus" family with a prodigy pitching daughter where baseball becomes their field of resistance to an autocratic America. A related short story ("Tell Me Everything") was commissioned by ''The New York Times'' as part of their Privacy Project and published 1-5-2020. Audible commissioned a novella spin-off called "I, Autohouse" as part of its Audible Originals series. Jen's second story collection, ''Thank You, Mr. Nixon'', was published by Knopf February 1st, 2022. It consists of eleven interconnected stories that span the 50 years since Nixon's historic visit to China and meeting with Chairman Mao. The 10th story in the collection, "No More Maybe", was published in the March 19th, 2018 edition of ''The New Yorker'', and the final story in the collection, "Detective Dog", was published in the November 22nd, 2021 edition of ''The New Yorker'', and takes place in the Covid-ravaged New York City. "Detective Dog" was selected for the "Best American Short Stories of 2022".

Nonfiction

In 2013 Jen published her first non-fiction book, entitled ''Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self''. Based on the Massey Lectures that Jen delivered at Harvard in 2012, ''Tiger Writing'' explores East–West differences in self construction, and how these affect art and especially literature. Jen's second work of non-fiction is "The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap," published in February 2017. This is a provocative 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 stories and personal anecdotes, as well as recent research in cultural psychology, Jen reveals how this difference shapes what we perceive, remember, say, do, and make – in short, how it shapes everything from our ideas about copying and talking in class to the difference between Apple and Alibaba. Jen has also published numerous pieces in ''The New York Times'', ''The New Yorker'', ''The Washington Post'', and ''The New Republic'', among others. In response to the

2021 Atlanta spa shootings On March 16, 2021, a shooting spree occurred at three spas or massage parlors in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Eight people were killed, six of whom were women of Asian descent, and one other person was wounded. A su ...

, Jen penned an op-ed for the ''Times''.

Honors and awards

In 2009, Princeton's

Elaine Showalter Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynoc ...

devoted much attention to Jen in her survey of American women writers, "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From

Anne Bradstreet Anne Bradstreet (née Dudley; March 8, 1612 – September 16, 1672) was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in ...

to Annie Proulx." In an article in ''The Guardian'', Showalter elaborated, including Jen in a list of eight top authors, and pointing out that Jen's "vision of a multicultural America goes well beyond the angry rants or despairing projections of Roth, DeLillo, McCarthy or other finalists in the

Great American Novel The Great American Novel (sometimes abbreviated as GAN) is a Western Canon, canonical novel that is thought to embody the essence of United States, America, generally written by an American and dealing in some way with the question of America' ...

competition." In 2012, Junot Diaz concurred, calling Jen "the Great American Novelist we're always hearing about." And in 2000, in a millennial edition of ''The Times Magazine'' in the UK, in which figures were asked to name their successors in the 21st century, John Updike picked Jen.Updike Remembered, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/updike-remembered *2019 Honorary Fellow, Modern Languages Association *2017 Legacy Award, Museum of Chinese in America, New York *2015 Honorary PhD, Williams College *2013 Named Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence, Baruch-CUNY *2013 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of 2013 *2012 Delivered the Massey Lectures at Harvard University (an annual lecture series sponsored by the American Studies program) *2011 Winner of the Massachusetts Book Prize *2011 Nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award *2009 Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences *2006 Featured in a PBS American Masters Program on the American Novel *2004 Honorary PhD, Emerson College *2003 Received a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters *2003 Received a Fulbright Fellowship to the People's Republic of China *2001 Received a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship *1999 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century *1999 Received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction *1995 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of 1995 *1992 Received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship *1991 Finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award *1988 Received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship *1988 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of 1988 *1986 Received a Radcliffe College Bunting Institute Fellowship

References

External links