Bad Mom Memoir<\/a>, Jen\u2019s captivating effort (she calls it a novel but it reads like nonfiction), brims with hard-won insights about her upbringing.<\/p>\nBorn to wealth in Shanghai in 1924, Jen\u2019s mother was Loo Shu-hsin, whose English name was Agnes. She grew up with servants and a beloved nursemaid. Agnes\u2019 mother smoked chef-prepared opium. Her father was a banker. <\/p>\n
Jen\u2019s maternal grandmother assured Agnes that it was too bad she was born a girl, as only sons had real value. Agnes talked too much. \u201cWith a tongue like yours,\u201d her mother said, \u201cno one will ever marry you.\u201d A harsh sentiment that Agnes passed along, years later, to Gish.<\/p>\n
An excellent student at a Catholic school in China, Agnes moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree. She never returned to her turbulent homeland, which survived Japanese occupation, devastating famine and then the Communist takeover that stripped her family of its wealth and prestige.<\/p>\n
All of which seemed increasingly distant as Agnes moved to New York City and married a Chinese engineer, Jen Chao-pe (who received his degree from the University of Minnesota). The two moved into a tiny, roach-infested apartment. Hard-working Agnes learned to \u201cforget everything\u201d about China, pinch pennies, and love American baseball and TV. The couple had five children, including second-born Gish, described by her mother from the start as \u201ca pain in the neck.\u201d<\/p>\n
To stop Gish\u2019s crying, her mother slapped her, starting at age 3. \u201cUsually she hit me on my back or arm \u2014 not so hard as to leave a bruise but hard enough,\u201d writes the narrator, who responded by muttering \u201cWho cares?\u201d under her breath. Her brother, number-one son Reuben, never got hit, but faced racist taunts and regular beatings from bullies. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First, you get stuck with a crappy mom. Then she lives to be 95. That\u2019s nearly a century…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":300653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-300652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115368442379635336","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}