GISH JEN’S work has been included in The Best American Short Stories five times, including in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has received NEA, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, and a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award. Her short work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and many anthologies; she has taught at Harvard University, NYU Shanghai, and other universities.
Bad Bad Girl is her sixth novel; her other books include two collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction, including publication of her Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . . Gish’s mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid—far more loving to than her real mother—is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But even then he can only sigh, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-Pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain—“Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”—as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.
Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as immensely incisive as it is compassionate.
“What a f**king amazing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. BAD BAD GIRL spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything - except the voice of our parents.” —Junot Diaz
“A transcendent work of art.” — The Boston Globe
“A heart-piercingly personal work that also imparts universal truths… If there is such a thing as an intimate epic, this is it.” — The Los Angeles Times
“The story of what it means to be American in an era of sweeping demographic change enlarges Bad Bad Girl, sweetened by comic touches and a final note of grace. If memory is the mother of the muses, as the Greek poet Hesiod observed, then perhaps a difficult mother is just the right muse for a memorable tale.”—The Washington Post
“In forthright and profound ways, Jen sought the most difficult path: to understand… an extraordinary book.” — WBUR
“… As moving and healing as they come.” – NPR
“Heartbreaking and stunning.” - Library Journal ✪
“A great novelist distills the truth of her mother’s life, and her own.” —Kirkus Reviews ✪
“Really very good… Bad Bad Girl is shocking, illuminating and in places truly heartbreaking. When a book contains all of that, does it really matter which category it falls into?”—The London Times
