Background

Gish Jen was born as Lillian Jen on August 12, 1955, in Long Island, New York, United States. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who came to the United States in the 1940s. She was the second of five children. She grew up in Queens, Yonkers, and Scarsdale. As a kid, she was withdrawn and shy.

Education

At school, Gish Jen was constantly kicked out of class for talking. In junior high school, she wrote poetry. While studying in high school, she changed her name on Gish after an actress Lillian Gish and was the literary editor for the school magazine. After high school, she studied at Harvard University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1977. In 1979-1980 she attended Stanford Business School but dropped out in favor of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop where she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction in 1983.

Career

Gish Jen is the author whose work explores not only themes of alienation and identity, but also artistic expression and the self, as she challenges us to ask how the cultures we are steeped in influence the stories we tell. She published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies, and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Her first novel, Typical American, was published in 1991. The book launched Jen into the literary limelight. The novel follows three Chinese immigrants, Ralph Chang, his wife, Helen, and his sister, Theresa, as they pursue the American Dream and struggle against the pressures of assimilation, greed, and self-interest. Both a comedy and a tragedy, the novel brilliantly turns the notion of what it means to be a typical American on its head.

In the ebullient and inventive novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Gish Jen restores multiculturalism from high concept to a fact of life. Mona in the Promised Land grew out of a short story, "What Means Switch?," that Jen wrote while trying to finish Typical American. The next book was Who's Irish?, a collection of stories published in 1999, confirmed her mastery of the short form as well. The book continues Jen's experimentation with tense, with some stories told in the first person - including the voice of a young, presumably white, boy - and one even told partially in the second person. In Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self (2010), she draws on a wealth of personal and familial experiences to expose and explain cultural differences in the narrative.

In her nonfiction book The Girl at the Baggage Claim (2017), Jen offers a provocative and essential look at the different ideas Eastern and Western cultures have about self and society. Jen’s recent novel, The Resisters, out in February 2020, invites the reader into a not-so-distant dystopian future.

Gish Jen is also known as a speaker. In her talks, she explores the themes that animate her work: cultural difference, artistic expression, dystopia, writing, the American Dream, and feminism. She lectured fiction writing at Tufts University, was a visiting writer at the University of Massachusetts and delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University as well.

Achievements

• Gish Jen is a highly-acclaimed award-winning author. Her honors include 1999 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, 2003 Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2010 Massachusetts Book Prize, and 2017 MOCA Legacy Award from the Museum of Chinese in America. She was awarded Radcliffe College Bunting Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship to the People's Republic of China, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
  
  Jen's first novel, Typical American, was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, was listed as one of the ten best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. In addition, both novels made the New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" list. Her work, a collection of short stories entitled Who's Irish, was also largely acclaimed putting Jen's name once again on the New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" list while one of the short stories in the collection, Birthmates, was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Who's Irish?

    (The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immig...)

    1999
  • Mona in the Promised Land

    (In these pages, Gish Jen portrays the day-to-day of Ameri...)

    1996
  • World and Town

    (Hattie Kong - the spirited offspring of a descendant of C...)

    2010
  • Typical American

    (Gish Jen reinvents the American immigrant story through t...)

    1991
  • Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self

    (For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant pa...)

    2010
  • The Love Wife

    (The Love Wife is barbed, moving, and a stylistically dazz...)

    2004
  • The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap

    (Never have East and West come as close as they are today,...)

    2017
  • The Resisters

    (The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. T...)

    2020

Membership

Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personality

Gish Jen is known for her humor and brimming intelligence, her ready opinions, easy laugh, her charm, and, not least of all, her volubility. Her speech is rapid-fire.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Gish Jen is the Great American Novelist we’re always hearing about." - Junot Diaz
  
  "We might want to run Gish Jen for president." - Jayne Anne Phillips
  
  "Funny, surprising, and observant, Gish Jen is a brilliant chronicler."

Connections

Gish Jen is married to David C. O'Connor. The marriage produced two children, a son and a daughter.

husband:

David O'Connor