Book Talk: Gish Jen — Bad Bad Girl - with Melissa Block

Watch author Gish Jen's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .

Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves--never to return.

Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents' marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!"

Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace.

Gish Jen is the author of five novels, two book of stories, and two works of nonfiction. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University. She and her husband split their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Jen is in conversation with Melissa Block, a longtime NPR host and correspondent whose reporting over the decades earned journalism's highest honors. As a daily host of All Things Considered, interviewing world leaders, authors, musicians, thinkers, and the not-so-famous, she became one of NPR's most familiar and beloved voices. Melissa lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, writer Stefan Fatsis.

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