Trigger warning for any daughter who has ever had a fraught relationship with their mother: Gish Jen\u2019s remarkable and heartbreaking latest book, \u201cBad Bad Girl,\u201d may prompt a flood of feelings not felt since adolescence. This marvel of a mash-up \u2014 part novel, part memoir, part effort to reconnect with a dead parent who never uttered an \u201cI love you\u201d \u2014 has as many pain points as life lessons. Quite a few of the latter \u2014 mostly delivered in the form of Chinese proverbs \u2014 are dropped by the author\u2019s parents, Chinese immigrants who met in New York as graduate students. Among the pearls of wisdom that stick with Jen, their eldest girl and a keen observer of her parents: \u201cWhen you drink the water, remember the spring.\u201d<\/p>\n
In this, Jen\u2019s 10th book, she wistfully, unsparingly commemorates that \u201cspring\u201d \u2014 a punishing mother she nevertheless credits for \u201cbiting my heel.\u201d A master of the art of withholding when it came to praise or affection, her mother had no compunctions about delivering ego-shattering put-downs and physical punishments to Jen for being \u201ctoo smart for her own good.\u201d And yet, Jen writes: \u201cI have thrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gish Jen has brilliantly structured \u201cBad Bad Girl\u201d so that invented exchanges with her mother keep returning us not only to the relationship between mother and daughter, but to the present. <\/p>\n
(Basso Cannarsa)<\/p>\n
Still, she is not at peace. Even after her mother\u2019s death in 2020 at 96, that censorious voice remained \u201cembedded in my most primitive responses, in my very limbic system.\u201d \u201cYou were a mystery Ma,\u201d Jen writes. \u201cWhy, why, why were you the way you were?\u201d The writer\u2019s instinct kicks in: \u201cIf I write about you, if I write to you, will I understand you better?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBad Bad Girl\u201d constitutes a heroic effort to do just that. But soon after Jen embarks on that quest, she realizes that while many mothers want their daughters to show interest in them and listen to their stories, \u201cthey were not my mother.\u201d Without much to go on in the way of shared memories or documentary evidence, Jen decides to recalibrate. Instead of writing a straight memoir, she\u2019ll chronicle what she can and construct a fictional narrative around the rest. The result is a heart-piercingly personal work that also imparts universal truths about the immigrant experience \u2014 and what it is to be a daughter, a mother and a woman in a world where men are the more valued of the sexes. If there is such a thing as an intimate epic, this is it.<\/p>\n
Jen\u2019s mother Agnes \u2014 Loo Shu-hsin, as she was originally named \u2014 was born in 1925 Shanghai to a wealthy and prominent banker and his much younger wife. In Part I, we are introduced to the lush beauty and extraordinary privilege Agnes was born into, sequestered in a mansion situated in the \u201cinternational\u201d section of Shanghai, staffed by maids, cooks, nursemaids, chauffeurs and bodyguards. \u201cProper though she may have been,\u201d Agnes\u2019 mother \u201cdid smoke opium.\u201d Apparently, it was good for cramps.<\/p>\n
Agnes was the firstborn child, a disappointment in her gender. As tradition dictated, her placenta was hurled into the Huangpu River; when it floated away, it was deemed that she too \u201cwould be raised and fed, only to drift away.\u201d Agnes\u2019 mother never bonded with her daughter and showed her little attention except to object to her daughter\u2019s clear intelligence and closeness with her nursemaid. (By age 6 and beginning to read, Agnes still hadn\u2019t been weaned.) By contrast, her father delighted in his daughter\u2019s zeal for learning. The prevailing view was that \u201cto educate a girl was like washing coal; it made no sense.\u201d Still, her father enrolled her in an elite Catholic school where she was nurtured by Mother Greenough, a nun with a doctorate. She praised Agnes for her intellect and encouraged her to be ambitious. After completing her undergraduate studies amid the Japanese invasion and World War II, in the fall of 1947, after peace had finally descended, Agnes declared her intention to leave for the United States to pursue a PhD. Her father embraced that decision, in part because the communist takeover loomed and he hoped at least his eldest child could escape what was to come. \u201cMy favorite daughter, so smart and brave,\u201d he pronounces, as the ship she boards sets sail for San Francisco.<\/p>\n
Jen has brilliantly structured \u201cBad Bad Girl\u201d so that invented exchanges with her mother \u2014 post-death, printed in bold type and interspersed throughout \u2014 keep returning us not only to the relationship between mother and daughter, but to the present. That dialogue is conversational and often funny, in contrast to the unfolding chronicle of Agnes\u2019 journey as a stranger in a strange land. She finds her new countrymen puzzling in nearly every way. For example, \u201cThat was how lonely Americans were,\u201d she observes, \u201cthat they should not only feed their dogs but walk them every day, rain or shine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Initially, Agnes\u2019 spirits are bolstered by her privilege and her parents\u2019 checks. Soon after arriving in New York City to begin graduate school, though, the money stops coming. The communist takeover is complete and, as she gradually discovers through their letters, now they seek financial support from her. Agnes, who\u2019s never boiled an egg, sets to work typing and translating for her still-rich Chinese classmates. She meets and marries fellow student Jen Chao-Pe, and together they move into a dilapidated walk-up in Washington Heights, where Agnes learns to scrimp and save and paint her own walls. Her husband teaches her to cook. When she gets pregnant with her son, Reuben, she is laid low and takes a temporary leave of absence from school. Soon she is pregnant with Lillian, later nicknamed \u201cGish\u201d for the silent film actor, and motherhood overwhelms her. Three more children come. Of the five, Gish is her least favorite, a girl every bit as clever as she was \u2014 a reminder of what she\u2019s permanently put on the back burner. Whatever maternal feelings she has for her other children are missing when it comes to Gish, who becomes her mother\u2019s scapegoat and punching bag.<\/p>\n
Miraculously, Gish appears to have been mostly a happy child who excels socially and academically. After being accepted to every university she applies to, she chooses Harvard. She attends graduate school at Stanford and begins to pursue a writing career. She meets her husband, David, to whom she\u2019s been married ever since \u2014 for 42 years. They have a son, Luke, and a daughter, Paloma. Jen\u2019s children know how difficult their grandmother has been, and Paloma offers this to her mother by way of consolation: \u201cThe effects of trauma can\u2019t be washed away in a generation,\u201d something she\u2019s read in a book. \u201cYou can\u2019t get rid of it all, but you did a good job,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
How rich this book is, and how humane. Unlike, for example, Molly Jong-Fast\u2019s merciless \u201cHow to Lose Your Mother,\u201d \u201cBad Bad Girl\u201d doesn\u2019t read like a hit job. It\u2019s suffused with love and a desire to finally understand. \u201cYou shut me out the way you shut your mother out. \u2026 What was my crime?\u201d Jen challenges her mother in one of their imagined exchanges. \u201cYou were a pain in the neck,\u201d Agnes observes, in another.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe does not say \u2018I love you\u2019 back; she never has,\u201d Jen writes. She doesn\u2019t put those words in Agnes\u2019 mouth here, even when she has the chance. But Jen does venture this about her mother: \u201cI like to think (she) would finally agree both that this book is a novel and that there might be some truth to it.\u201d And then in their final imagined exchange: \u201cBad, bad girl! Who says you can write a book like that?\u201d Jen laughs. \u201cThat\u2019s more like it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah\u2019s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Bad Bad Girl By Gish JenKnopf: 352 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[77277,77275,359,7715,77276,18,117,18601,32254,77273,301,19,17,12440,77274,968,77279,77278,1387,17712],"class_list":{"0":"post-127969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-10th-book","9":"tag-bad-bad-girl","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-daughter","12":"tag-dead-parent","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-exchange","16":"tag-father","17":"tag-gish-jen","18":"tag-graduate-school","19":"tag-ie","20":"tag-ireland","21":"tag-mother","22":"tag-mother-agnes","23":"tag-new-york","24":"tag-nursemaid","25":"tag-part-effort","26":"tag-son","27":"tag-way"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}