MELUS interview: Gish Jen - Asian Perspectives - Interview

Yuko Matsukawa

With the publication of her first book, Typical American, in 1991 and articles such as "Challenging the Asian Illusion" (New York Times 11 August 1991), Gish Jen is fast becoming a visible and vocal part of the contemporary American literary landscape. Born in New York City in 1955, Jen, who is a second-generation Chinese-American, grew up in Yonkers and Scarsdale, New York. It was during high school that she acquired the nickname "Gish" (after the actress with whom she happened to share a first name, Lillian Gish), which she later adopted as her pen name. Educated at Harvard and Stanford Business School, Gish Jen embarked upon her writing career while attending the Iowa Writer's Workshop and has been writing and publishing her stories in literary magazines now for over a decade (see Selected Bibliography). Size also has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants and has won awards for her short stories, many of which have been anthologized repeatedly.

Several of Gish Jen's short stories center on the Changs, an immigrant family from China. In captivating stories such as The White Umbrella," "The Water-Faucet Vision," and "What Means Switch," we witness how the daughters of the family, Callie and Mona, ingeniously and ingenuously attempt to navigate their way through the turbulent waters of childhood and adolescence, carefully mediating the overlapping relationships between cultures, between home and the outside world, and between their parents, their friends, and themselves. Through moments of revelation and their contemplative interpretations of events, Gish Jen charts the sisters's complicated, funny, and often heartbreaking process of growing up Chinese-American.

It is in the short story "In the American Society," however, that we get a glimpse of the dynamics of the Chang family. Ralph, here the successful proprietor of a pancake house who prefers his own society to the American society, and his wife, Helen, who has broader social aspirations, come into their own as characters through their interactions with family, neighbors, and employees. The life stories of Ralph, Helen, and Ralph's sister Theresa are further expanded and elaborated in Gish Jen's first novel, Typical American, which has garnered deservedly excellent reviews. The New York Times Book Review declares, "No paraphrase could capture the intelligence of Gish Jen's prose, its epigrammatic sweep and swiftness.... The author just keeps coming at you, line after stunning line. Even her incidental description seems new-minted - purely functional, bone clean yet lustrous." The New York Review of Books calls the novel "poised and unsentimental," and asserts that "Gish Jen sustains her complex pattern of duality even in her prose style, sophisticatedly choosing to tell her somber story wittily." Gish Jen starts her book with the line "It's an American story"; by guiding us through one Chinese immigrant family's experiences, she perceptively and brilliantly challenges readers to reexamine their definitions of home, family, the American dream, and, of course, what it is to be a "typical American."

This interview took place late in November 1991 at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, David O'Connor, and baby son, Luke. Sitting by the fireplace - the archetypal site for listening to and telling stories - Gish Jen animatedly answered my questions about her life and her work; our conversation was delightfully punctuated by laughter.

Interviewer: Has motherhood changed your writing schedule?

Jen: I have to say that it's very slow now. I used to basically write fulltime. Now I'm a mother fulltime and try to work my writing around that. But I'm hoping to start my son on twenty-hour-a-week day care soon.

Interviewer: Do you work at home?

Jen: No, I work in an office. I really admire people who work at home; they have a lot more discipline than I do. I think everyone has something which they have to reject in order to become a writer. After I rejected legitimate professions - I thought about going to med school, to law school, and I actually went to business school - I had to reject being a housewife, which was for me the last great temptation. I'm the kind of person who, if I stay home, will clean the house, for one thing. And I love catalogs - gardening catalogs are a serious threat to my career (laugh) - which is why I have to go to another environment where I have no distractions. I don't even keep books in my office. I have three choices when I'm in there: I can sleep, I can eat, or I can work. Generally, I just go and sit there until I'm so bored that it is less painful to write than to continue sitting.

Interviewer: Did you think that you would be a writer when you were growing up?

Jen: If you had asked me at any point along the way, the answer would have been "no." But looking back, I can see that one of the biggest experiences of my young life was when I was in fifth grade and we had a literary magazine. Everybody was supposed to contribute something to it and most people did. I was the only one, though, who contributed enough to fill up fifteen of these magazines myself. There were all these different categories and I brought things in for all of them. I also wrote my first story for that magazine, which was the longest thing included five pages. You can imagine how in a class magazine for twenty-six kids, having five pages was a major thing. The story was about a maid who had stolen some gold. She had hidden it inside this hat but when she picked up the hat, the gold fell out! (laugh). And so she was caught. I read a lot as a child, I was very influenced by Little Women back then, and I'm sure it made an impression on me that Jo became a writer. Originally, I went to school in Yonkers, New York, to a Catholic school which had almost no library. When my family moved to Scarsdale, though, I took out two books a day from the school library there. Of course, I read all these books quite indiscriminately. I read The Island Stallion Races Put I also read The Stranger by Camus, which I particularly remember because I remember coming across the phrase "an execrable cry of pain" and thinking "What does this mean, 'execrable'?" - I thought it had something to do with excrement, you know (laugh).

Interviewer: What other writers did you admire?

Jen: You mean growing up? I think the next writer to have a really big influence on me was Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice was one of the books that I read backwards and forwards. I really wanted to be Elizabeth Bennett. Of course today, there are people who would say "Oh, that's so Anglo"; they think I should have been more influenced by Chinese opera or something (laugh). But this is not what should have happened this is what did happen. I do think that it's unfortunate that all the Austen novels end in marriage, but to me, they still show us what the power of the novel can be. I think that many people lived by those books.

They showed us how to live - they were moral books. Which is what fiction is for, it seems to me. I know this is probably not the most critically sophisticated view but I'm not so interested in experimental writing unless it speaks to the limits of human knowledge, say - unless its concern is more human than formal. And of course, included in the category of books that show us how to live are book:s that show us how we do live. Those are moral too: they contrast the human chaos with some notion of civilization, even if it's implied.

Interviewer: So, whom do you admire now?

Jen: I still tend to admire people who are very moral.

Interviewer: What do you mean by moral?

Jen: What I mean by moral is that they are concerned with values and the human condition. I'm not talking about upholding morals like the Moral Majority, I'm talking about morals in the sense of a concern with the manner in which life is lived, which is not necessarily according to the accepted rules of society: in fact, I'm most influenced by people who are naughty.

Interviewer: What's naughty?

Jen: Naughty means not nice.- You know, people who write things as they really are, without sentimentalizing everything. I'm talking about people like Alice Munro and Jamaica Kincaid, whom I admire very much.

Interviewer: You've been reviewed in many newspapers and magazines lately along with other Asian American writers - how do you feel about that?

Jen: There are a few people who keep on recurring in the same article over and over and over again. You know, we're like "the Gang of Four" (laugh). A friend of mine said - and I think there is a lot of truth in this - that either you're categorized or else you're ignored. I guess what I understand is that in modern society, people are bombarded with so much information that this categorizing is necessary. Still, it's irritating to have people rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the same article over and over and over again and have it based on race, especially since this has lead to distortions in the way my book has been read. Some people told me that they thought it was a book about preserving one's heritage; I felt like saying "That wasn't what I wanted to say at all!" You know it's this knee-jerk reaction on their part: you're anethnic writer, so you must be writing about "people striving to preserve their heritage.- I'm not saying that on some level there isn't some kind of tug about what to retain and what to take on but that wasn't what the book was all about.

Interviewer: Why the title Typical American?

Jen: Well, I should say to begin with that the person who came up with this title was not me, it was my agent. My working title was originally "In the American Society," which was the name of the short story from which this whole novel grew. I do understand why she didn't like the title because the story once got cited as nonfiction by accident. As for the present title, there's this irony within the book which has to do with the phrase "typical American." "Typical American" is a phrase that the Changs use to describe people who are not them, and yet by the end of the book, of course, they become "typical Americans" themselves.

Also I liked it because it was a phrase that was used not only by my family but by other immigrants and their children. For instance, at one point before the book was published, I was talking to somebody who asked me what the title of my book was, and when I said, "Typical American" and explained, she said, "We say that in my family all the time!" And it turned out that she was Irish! Her family had just come over and that's what they said all the time and I thought, "Ha! This is true."

And finally, of course?, I wanted to challenge ideas of what a "typical American" looks like, to put forward the idea that the Changs are not any less American than anyone else. There are people who, when they choose to read ethnic writing, want comfortably exotic stuff that makes them feel like they're traveling in some foreign country. The Changs, though, are not a foreign country. They wonder about their identity: they ask themselves who they are, who they're becoming. And therefore, they are American.

Interviewer: So do you think you're writing against or responding to a stereotype or a tradition or other writers?

Jen: Was I talking back to people or books? It's hard for me to say. I think I wasn't so much writing against a certain person as against public demand. I was writing against the public's expectation as I understood it. I was damned if I was going to give them the exotic nonsense they thought they wanted; instead, I wanted my book to succeed on character. I followed my own interests. Even though I had written other stories unrelated to this family, I had come back to them again and again - this family, I knew, meant something to me. Of course, people will always say, "Oh it must be your family," but in fact it's not my family I wrote about. The idea of writing about a family, though, was very appealing to me.

Interviewer: I understand that your pen name, Gish, comes from a nickname you acquired during high school. What interests me is that in your first two stories - "Bellying Up" and "The Small Concerns of Sparrows" - you use your legal name, Lillian. What precipitated the change from Lillian" to "Gish"? From your publication chronology, it looks like you started using "Gish" with the stories about the Chang family - is there a relationship between the birth of this fictional family and the emergence of the writer Gish Jen?

Jen: I'm not aware of a connection between the two but I need to review this chronologically for myself. As I recall, those first two stories were accepted for publication before the summer between my first and second year at Iowa, the summer of 1982. At the time, being in print seemed so final and important that I used my legal name "Lillian Jen." But then later I realized, "Well no, I can be whoever I want - I am Gish Jen!" I think my changing my name marks the point at which I discovered writing to be liberating; I discovered that just as I could create stories, I could create this self, Gish Jen. Besides, a friend of mine said to me, "Gish, that's what you call yourself!" My friends thought Gish Jen was a better name because it had more impact. It sounds strong because of the spondee: "Gish Jen," like "bang bang." I always associate "Lillian" with a shyer self, a received self. My family calls me "Lillian," or rather, "Lil." My parents still go around explaining to their friends, "Yes, Gish Jen's our daughter, she has this book, out but that's not her name really, she just calls herself Gish, her real name's Lillian," and so on.

Interviewer: It's a great name also because people can't tell whether you're male or female-you keep them guessing.

Jen: (Laugh.) That's another reason I like it.

Interviewer: I'm interested in how your short stories and Typical American intersect. You mentioned that though you wrote many other short stories, you kept coming back to the Changs. What is the relationship between the Chang family short stories and your novel? For instance, you incorporated the story "The Water-Faucet Vision" into Typical American.

Jen: Yes, I put it in the book. It was really, I think, a very transparent attempt to save that story; I thought that if I could work it into my novel it would really be much better. So I tried to work it in and I think I did manage. It was probably the only thing that I knew about my novel: that at a certain point I wanted to put the story in so I wouldn't have to throw it out. The funny thing is that it's bad enough when you have an incident like that in a story; when it also occurs in your novel, people think that this really happened to you in real life. I'm happy to say my father never threw my mother out the window. They had normal adult fights where they yelled at each other and maybe one of them walked out of the room.

Interviewer: How about What Means Switch"? We encounter a Mona who seems older than the Mona in Typical American. Does the existence of this older Mona mean that there win be a sequel to Typical American?

Jen: It's a terrible thing - everybody wants you to write your last book over and over and over and do whatever you did again, But the nature of being a writer is always to want to forge on and do something else, so we're at odds.

Interviewer: Some people I know who have read your recent stories said to me, "Ask her if she's really Mona."

Jen: (Laugh.) People always think that, you know. And the answer is, I think, that Mona is the person I would have liked to have been. When I was in junior high school, I was quiet and kind of traumatized by everything. Or at least that's how I felt, even as I was getting thrown out of class all the time for talking (laugh). But Mona's together in a way that I was not.

Before "What Means Switch," by the way, everybody thought I was Callie. And people who only read the book often think I must be Theresa, though every now and then somebody thinks that I must be Ralph! Can you imagine?

Interviewer: Well, why did you choose a male protagonist? Since I read your short stories before Typical American came out, I was expecting that the novel would be written from the point of view of the daughters.

Jen: In fact, because of the way it evolved, for a long time I was thinking about writing it from the point of view of the children. But gradually it became clear to me that I had a lot of energy around the older generation and then the children's point of view became a problem because there was so much happening that they couldn't know. As for why Ralph became the protagonist, at the time it just seemed like the most natural thing and I don't really know why. Maybe because Ralph threw that shirt into the pool in the story "In the American Society": from the beginning, he was a person who did a lot of things; he acted out, if you will.

Interviewer: It's interesting to hear you say that because a lot of novels by Asian American women writers do have female protagonists.

Jen: And they seem to make it go. I don't know what happened. I'm not against women or anything (laugh). I think the truth of the matter is that having never written a novel before, I wanted to make, it as easy as possible, and that I realized that in that generation men were more likely to make things happen, and to range over large parts of society. And I wanted that, to write a book that included all kinds of things - an expandable book in which I could write whatever I liked.

Interviewer: Men had more latitude perhaps but the women of Ralph's generation - Janis, Helen, and Theresa - illustrate some of the options available for women, don't they?

Jen: Yes. Even though Ralph fueled the story, I wanted the women to be developed characters, not just secondary figures. And they do make things happen too - many more things than I could have predicted. Really the book is about all of them. I have this affection for Helen, you know, and I think Janis is a good egg. As for Theresa, she was a late addition to the formulation of the story but it's clear to me now that she could have been the one to carry the whole novel - that she could have borne the burden of my interests. She's adventuresome enough and not so bound by her gender. Though she's of that older generation, her experience could have been made almost as broad as my own.

Interviewer: What triggered your decision to become a fiction writer?

Jen: We didn't get pat fifth grade, did we, when we started this before? (laugh). A couple of things. In college I was an English major, which is probably not too surprising given how much I read. And this will sound stupid, but I took a prosody course taught by Robert Fitzgerald because I really didn't get it about poetry. I felt like asking, "Why does it have to be written like that? I couldn't see the point of all those little lines. And so I thought I'd take this nuts-and-bolts course. Which sounded easy enough until Fitzgerald said there was going to be a weekly assignment. And then it turned out that lie meant an assignment in verse. It had never occurred to me to try to write poetry before. But because I liked this class so much, I thought, "Well, I'll give it a try,' so I wrote this thing in Catullan hendecasyllables which Fitzgerald xeroxed and handed out to the class - I still don't know if he did that because he liked it or because it had a mistake in every line. But anyway, I wrote these things and later he was very encouraging. He was the one who told me I should be doing something to do with literature and should give up being pre-med. And in fact he helped me get a job in publishing.

So there I was, at Doubleday, and working supposedly in non-fiction. But every week this colleague of mine and I would wait for The New Yorker and when it come we'd read it immediately and discuss the fiction all the next morning when we were supposed to be working, at our desks. It was then that I started to write some fiction too. But I thought, "What should I do?" I couldn't decide; I knew I didn't want to be in publishing but should I do something more practical or less? I decided that if I couldn't decide, I might as well try being more practical first. And so I went to business school but made sure I went somewhere where there was a good writing program, i.e. Stanford. And sure enough, what happened was that the moment I got to Stanford I knew I was in the wrong place. I mean I just knew immediately. I spent the whole year writing novels and taking writing courses at every opportunity. And the second year I dropped out.

Interviewer: Why fiction? Would you have become a poet?

Jen: I don't know if I could have been a poet. I don't think I have the sensitivity to be one. I remember I loved Robert Fitzgerald's class but I'm glad I'm not a poet, even today. It's hard enough being a fiction writer; being a poet is, you know (throws hands up). Maybe that's my immigrant parents still taking, I don't know. But if I had to write in a different genre, I think I'd move to drama.

Interviewer: Why?

Jen: Well because dialogue comes easily to me and also plot and structure.

Interviewer: Which playwrights did you read - Shakespeare, perhaps or...?

Jen: I do love Shakespeare.

Interviewer: Which plays?

Jen: The tragedies more than comedies. King Lear, especially. Dramatic form and structure definitely influenced my writing. For instance, I think it is no coincidence that my book is in five parts. Not that I was modeling it on Lear, but you could say that Typical American was informed by it.

Interviewer: How does comedy function in your book? Is it a source of inspiration as tragedy is?

Jen: I think we are talking about two different things here: comedy as in comedic form and comedy as a sort of lightheartedness. Comedic form suggests that by the end of the play, against all odds, everything gets resolved happily, which is not the case in my novel. But I do think the tone is sometimes comic - maybe a better way to put it is that it's tragic-comic. I've been interested in complexity of tone, even though some people have found it "problematic." It"s made some people uncomfortable; they've been disturbed by the indeterminacy of it. Contrary to what they thought, though, I have always considered this complexity of tone one of my strengths. I think it has to do with the fact that I come from a culture where things can have opposite attributes at the same time, like in food, sweet and sour. The world is at once yin and yang.

Interviewer: How do you come up with subject matter?

Jen: I start with a feeling: in the short story "The White Umbrella," I started with the feeling of waiting on the doorsteps for your mother to come pick you up. Then you start accumulating around that feeling and the story evolves. It's like deciding what you like to eat. It just so happens that you eat certain things more often than other things. you don't sit down and say, "Well, I think I like garlic.' Over the years you discover that you like garlic - it happens, you don't plan it.

Interviewer: Now that you have a son, would you write a children's book?

Jen: Maybe. Let me put it this way, there's only one person in the world for whom I would write and that would be my son. From what I hear, there are few books out there to help him with being biracial - he's Eurasian - so I would write for him if there were books he needed that had not been written. Also I can imagine doing some for fun.

Interviewer: What's your next project? I know you've been speaking at colleges this fall (1991)...

Jen: Yes, at Williams and at Yale but these things invariably take up a lot of my time; they do require preparation. Also these little articles for The New York Times and The Boston Globe have taken time. I like having things coming out in a sort of steady little flow. But I have got to get back to my own writing again which means there'll be a long silence while I try to write something more serious.

Selected Bibliography (chronologically arranged)

Jen, Lillian. "Bellying-Up." The Iowa Review 12.4 (1981): 93-94. Jen, Lillian C. "The Small Concerns of Sparrows." Fiction International 14 (1982):47-55. Jen, Gish. "The White Umbrella." The Yale Review 73 (1984): 401-9; rpt. in Home to

Stay: Asian American Women's Fiction. Ed. Sylvia Watanabe and Carol

Bruchac (New York: Greenfield Review P, 1990) and in My Mother's

Daughter: Stories by Women. Ed. Irene Zahava (Freedom, CA: Crossing P,

1991). _____."Eating Crazy." The Yale Review 74 (1985): 425-33. _____."In the American Society." The Southern Review 22 (1986): 606-19; rpt. in

New Worlds of Literature. Ed. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter (New York:

Norton, 1989); The Nezv Generation: Fiction for Our Time from America's

Writing Programs. Ed. Alan Kaufman (New York: Anchor P, 1987); and

Imagining America: Stories from the Promise Land. Eds. Wesley Brown and

Amy Ling (New York: Persea Books, 1991). _____."The Water-Faucet Vision." Nimrod 31.1 (1987): 25-33; rpt. in Best

American Short Stories 1988. Eds. Mark Halperin and Shannon Ravenel

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). _____.What Means Switch." The Atlantic Monthly 265.5 (May 1990): 76-84. _____."Grover at the Wheel." The New Yorker 66.46 (Dec. 31, 1990): 32-37. _____.Typical American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

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