Gish Jen has been publishing novels and short stories since 1991, when her debut, “Typical American,” was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. But as Jen points out in the “Author’s Note” to her tenth book, “Bad Bad Girl,” she has never written about her mother.
Her mother, Agnes, was born in China, where she endured a culture that short-shrifted girls and a mother who treated her precociousness with disdain. The story of Agnes’ family life there, amidst war and upheaval and her journey to America is one part of “Bad Bad Girl,” but the other part is how as an adult herself Agnes mistreated and physically abused Gish while showering love and affection on Gish’s siblings.
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
Throughout the book, Gish gives her mother a chance to explain herself and her world in more detail. When Agnes speaks, she’s often interrupting her daughter, occasionally to offer keen insights but also to complain or criticize – the title is one of Agnes’ favorite phrases to describe her daughter.
But it’s not really Agnes speaking in the book at all: She died several years ago and this is Gish imagining what her mother would be saying to her. While largely true, this story, as she makes clear in her “Author’s Note,” is actually a novel, and those sections are a writerly conceit.
Jen, 70, spoke recently by video about the book and her mother. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Did you start writing from anger or from an attempt to gain insight into your mother’s life and why she treated you so badly?
I wanted to understand my mother. From her point of view, as I imagine it, anger must be why I’m writing the book. That’s probably the only narrative that she could probably imagine. And, of course, at some level, you can’t be abused like that and not have some anger.
But I was not writing from anger. This is not some act of revenge. This is not “Mommy Dearest.” I hope that shows in the book. I would not want to write something that I did not feel was finally constructive.
Q. You note upfront that this is a book that ultimately forgives her. Did you know you’d come to that place, or did it come out of the writing? Would you have abandoned it otherwise?
That’s something that came out of the writing. An honest writer does not know what’s going to happen. But I could have told you back then that I would not have published a book where I did not come to a place of understanding and forgiveness. Let me just sort of say there’s forgiveness … and there’s forgiveness.
She was out of control. She was very hard on me, and I did not even really understand how hard she had been on me until I was a mother myself. That was the reality check.
I did not want her to be dehumanized. I like to think that any human who really, really gets to know another human would always respond with sympathy, although there might be a couple of exceptions. I like to think we could get to a point where you understand the other person.
Q. Did writing the book change your perceptions of China and its culture or America and its culture?
I’ve been thinking about, writing about and going to China for decades. But I don’t think I had thought so much about the texture of Chinese family life, the really intimate experience – I only knew about it from the outside. It’s different once you start imagining it from the point of view of a girl who’s actually growing up in it. And my mother grew up in this culture that is in some ways so loving and so close, but in some ways so harsh.
I brought my kids to live in China a couple of times. And the first phrase they learned was, “Bùduì,” meaning “wrong.” Actually, when my daughter was in a fancy progressive nursery school in Beijing, the first phrase she learned was “Don’t move.” That was in a Montessori school. So it’s a very different culture. And in terms of forgiving my mother, I tried to really imagine her as a gifted girl, really smart, in 1930s China. That was part of her problem.
Q. She’s lucky she had the father she had, who broke with the customs and encouraged her to read and to learn to think for herself and who got her out of China.
Absolutely. And that was interesting because, like her, I had a mother who was very hard on me, but I also had a father who was very supportive. I was both very unlucky, but also very lucky.
Q. Was it challenging to figure out how much to explain the history of China and its revolution to American readers, especially since you’re telling your mother’s story?
It was tricky. It’s a lot of information, and as a writer you want to get it all across and bring home exactly what was happening, but you don’t want your whole narrative to collapse under the weight of it because this is finally not a novel about the Chinese Revolution.
I’m trying to stay true to my mother’s experience – she understood what happened with the Japanese because she’d been there and saw the guys with the bayonets and saw the bombings and saw Shanghai on fire. I tried to render the larger historical context in what it meant for this one particular family.
Q. At the end of the book, there are moments where your adult kids make clear they appreciate how you strived not to pass the trauma on to another generation. Were those real or fictionalized?
Those were real. Trauma can be important, but it’s not determinative. It’s important to have a story where you can have a lot of terrible things happen to you when you are younger and it doesn’t determine your life. And it certainly doesn’t determine the lives of your children.
Don’t worry, I’m still a very flawed mother. Every parent is flawed. I don’t want to give myself a big A-plus, but this is an important story. I’m pretty proud of myself that I stopped this as a parent – there was really a lot to stop and it’s not easy. I feel it’s the great achievement of my life.
And that’s important to realize for anybody who’s in the middle of this. There are people who had tough childhoods and don’t want to have children because they’re afraid they’ll do the same and won’t be able to help it. And so I’m here to say, “Well, actually, you can stop it.” And I will also say that the satisfaction of having stopped it is like nothing else. You really feel like you did something.