Words Matter

Gish Jen: Interview by Rachel Lee

Gish Jen won the respect of a wide audience with her first novel, Typical American (1991), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. In this novel, as in her published short stories, Jen broadens the definition of Asian American literature by writing beyond its “typical” themes of cultural dislocation, generational conflict, and immigrant success . For instance, her short story “The Water-Faucet Vision”—reprinted in Best American Short Stories, 1988— probes the nuances of religious awakening. Though not strictly about race, it features Asian American protagonists whose ethnicity remains integral to the author’s long-term project of rendering Asian Americans a familiar part of America’s literary landscape. As part of that mission, Jen crafts unexotic, “everyday” characters such as the Changs, whose trials in Northeast suburban America provide the grist for several of the author’s published works (e.g., Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, “What Means Switch,” “The Water-Faucet Vision,” “The White Umbrella,” “Grover at the Wheel,” and 12 Gish Jen Interview by R A C H E L L E E “In the American Society”). Creating Asian American protagonists who are fallible, sympathetic, and even mundane remains one avenue through which Jen pursues her political goals. Another strategy involves writing about Asian Americans even in cases where ethnic identity is not crucial to the plot. The interview first took place by telephone on the evening of 9 September 1993; it was updated on the publication of Mona in the Promised Land. Early in our conversation, Jen talked about switching from a “practical” profession to a career in writing. As a matter of record, her choice to “throw everything to the wind” has resulted in numerous publications and has garnered for her several fellowships, among them a 1992 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a 1988 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. I also asked Jen about her relationship to Asian American literature. As a writer who grew up on the East Coast in the sixties and seventies, Jen seems particularly attuned to the location and historicity of Asian America. She remarks that, when she was younger, “there was no Asian America . . . it hadn’t been invented yet.” While acknowledging the overwhelmingly supportive aspects of discovering an Asian American literary community, Jen also admitted to resisting a “ghettoized” identity as ethnic writer. We talked about the tensions within the Asian American literary community, particularly the ongoing debate spearheaded by Frank Chin over whether Asian American men ought to be portrayed in a blanket , positive light in order to counter the negative stereotypes of them in popular culture. Setting herself apart from writers who would argue for artistic freedom, Jen finds the political context in which she writes crucial to what she eventually publishes. One makes ethical choices when one edits, Jen seems to say, and her personal ethics decry misogyny and racism. We also discussed her engagement with various communities , her commitment to social responsibility in writing, 216 Words Matter and her opinions on the serendipitous receptivity of current readers to her kind of satiric female voice. R L I saw from your résumé that you went to business school. Was writing on the back burner then? G J Business school was a particularly uninspired decision; the decision was just to go to professional school, meaning that, as an undergraduate, I had tried being premed and prelaw already. That left the one thing that I really had never had any interest in, which was business. A lot of that is being the daughter of immigrants. I did write poetry as an undergrad. I distinctly remember telling my roommate, “I love this, and, if I could, I would do this for the rest of my life.” But it never even occurred to me for one second to try to become a poet. I didn’t know anyone who was a poet. It just wasn’t something that someone like me did. I remember that, in a graduate seminar in prosody, Robert Fitzgerald, the translator, did ask, “Have you thought about doing something with words?” I told him I was premed. He said, “You should really think about writing.” I told him that I simply couldn’t imagine being a writer. So then he asked me, “Have you at least thought about publishing?” And, as professors at Harvard will, he got me a job in publishing. Once I was there...