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September 27 - October 3, 1996

American As Apple Pie

In her second novel, Gish Jen constructs her own definition of American

BETWEEN WORLDS: "I lived during a time when matters of ethnicity as a great theme of literature were not on anybody's list to being at the top of everybody's list." photo by Marion Ettlinger

By Julie Shiroishi

A few minutes of conversation is enough to glean that the author holds some very definite opinions about writing, politics, and culture-all of which she is quick to voice and defend. It's quite easy picturing Jen as the classroom troublemaker, a role she heartily confessed to.

However, the more difficult task is figuring out how she translates her weighty ideas about race and class-and everything else in America-into what is regarded as her sometimes slapstick, witty prose.

While Jen is reluctant to examine the mechanics of her writing ("I'm reminded of Dorothy Parker saying, 'The goose that laid the golden egg died looking up its crotch,'" she joked), she is happy to discuss what fuels her writing and what it is she hopes to convey.

In Mona in the Promised Land, eponymous Mona is the now-teenage daughter of protagonists Ralph and Helen Chang from Jen's much-lauded 1991 debut, Typical American. Jen's latest novel, which was released last spring, is therefore something of a sequel. But Mona does not depend upon its predecessor for context. Rather, it possesses an exuberant humor that Jen previously only hinted at.

When asked if she had consciously planned to write a Chang family saga, Jen explained: "What happened was I was about three-quarters of the way through Typical American and I was quite stuck. [Then] I happened to go down to Soho [in New York] for a reading and saw someone from my high school, and that person just jogged my memory-and the first chapter of Mona came spinning out. Maybe if I hadn't been in the middle of Typical American it wouldn't have been Mona. But, somehow, the world came to me very quickly, and a story had to take place in that world."

The evocative world Jen refers to is the placid, predominantly Jewish New York suburb of Scarshill, which is the locale of Mona's Judaic enlightenment and a seemingly endless assortment of cross-cultural mishaps. The Changs have overcome the personal and financial difficulties which threatened to tear them apart at the end of Typical American, and a few years of prosperity have passed. Now, firmly ensconced in the lower upper-middle class, the Changs have attained that socioeconomic strata's American dream-good public schools.

Jen, who based Scarshill on her adolescent hometown of Scarsdale, is familiar with the landscape and has populated it with a multi-ethnic (Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, black, WASP) cast of characters who are continually and hilariously undergoing cultural consciousness-raising. Mona and her Scarshill cohorts may be painted in broad, comedic strokes, but the novel's driving force is rooted in Jen's real-life observations.

"It's interesting," she said, "as a middle minority-somebody somehow in between this great black/white rift-Asian Americans are in a fabulous position to understand a lot of what's going on because we have entree to high WASP society and there's no radical black meeting that could be too radical for us. That's not to say that we could make a home in either one of those, but you can be there as a fly on the wall. That's not true of every minority in America, and it's a wonderful vantage point from which to comment on."

Jen very deliberately chose not to limit her writings to stories centered on Chinese and Chinese Americans. "It's particularly the concern of a writer [to ask], 'What is my rightful territory? Do I accept limitations placed on me by the mainstream? Do I accept my assigned subjects?' The answer is 'I do not.' This book is about a very big America and, yet, one which is not about a WASP America."

Jen, like Mona, is the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrant parents. The second of five children, all of whom attended Ivy League colleges, she was meant to follow her undergraduate English degree from Harvard to its natural end: an MBA.

"You could say that [my parents'] desire for me to go to business school was a result of their assimilation, their heritage, their experience as immigrants," Jen said. "The answer is all of the above. You can't say, 'Oh they're Chinese so it's in their blood to want me to go to business school,' because there's a great deal that has to do with their experiences with upheaval at an early, impressionable age." In fact, Jen tried to suppress her desire to write and dutifully attended Stanford University's business school.

"I had internalized their voices," she continued, mimicking, "'What's going to become of you? You need a meal ticket.' Only after many years was I able to realize that I had to be a writer, or die. There was just something in me that was so strong. ... I would have had a nervous breakdown."

Jen could not have picked a tougher career. When the 41-year-old Jen was attending school, publishing opportunities for APA writers were minimal. Her worries over economic self-sufficiency were very real phantoms. Fortunately for Jen, and readers of every ethnicity, she chose to attend the University of Iowa's prestigious Writer's Workshop and was lucky enough to begin her career as the market expanded exponentially.

"I lived to see multi-culturalism rise up just when I began writing," Jen recalled. "I was just a year behind [short-story writer] David Wong Louie at Iowa and, I haven't talked to David about this but I'm sure he would concur, it was generally accepted among us Asian American writers that we would never be published in the mainstream. That was just a fact of life."

By nature of a generous disposition and a healthy taste of success, Jen can now reminisce about what, at the time, were very demoralizing circumstances.

"I got [rejection] letters that would blow your mind. I got a letter from the Paris Review saying, 'We would prefer to see more exotic work.' No one would dare write a letter like that today. This was about a [subsequently printed] story whose 'theme' is now named 'being between worlds.' But, when I [first] sent it around, I got letters from all kinds of people saying 'Brilliant writing, but it doesn't seem to be about anything.' It's as if they had a shopping list of things stories could be about that they'd gotten in graduate school: man versus nature, or coming of age. ... I lived during a time when matters of ethnicity as a great theme of literature were not on anybody's list to being at the top of everybody's list."

The evolution of multi-culturalism in writing is not the only thing that Jen has witnessed. As a college student in the 1970s, Jen saw the civil rights movement take shape. The experience affected her deeply. Mona, in particular, resonates with Jen's profound political beliefs.

"Today, of course, we regard it with a kind of inevitability that we are Asian Americans, and yet that's not at all apparent to the immigrant generation [because] it's not something that comes down to us straight from our heritage ... from Confucianism or something," she explained. "Asian American is actually something you learn to be in this country and it is actually a species of assimilation. It's instructive to remember what an American construction and what a recent construction it is, and not one which would have arisen had it not been for racism in this country.

"There would be no such thing as Asian Americans if there hadn't been black Americans and Jewish Americans ahead of us," Jen emphasized. "I set this book at the dawn of ethnicity because I remember the time when ethnicity as we know it was suddenly being invented. Through the late '60s and early '70s, we were still 'Orientals.' But then there was this new politically active, very different model that rose up and I definitely think that it was, ironically, a way of embracing our heritage that was very much borrowed from, and a product of, our assimilation. ... It showed us to be as [much] American as Asian."

Writing Mona prodded Jen into synthesizing the experiences of her early youth. She cited her desire to write fiction as evidence itself of the assimilation process.

"In this book, Mona turns Jewish and, in a way, that's my story," Jen said. "Everyone comes to be a writer in a different way, but, as someone who grew up in the '60s before all this Asian-American-writer stuff came up, I grew to value fiction writing not as a result of anything I ever heard in my family, but as a result of the values of the community I was in.

"I was in this predominantly Jewish community and [it was] in love with the novel," Jen said. "My parents valued scholarship, but novel writing was not considered scholarship. They saw that as in opposition to them. I saw the writer part of myself develop as a result of assimilation. When I started to write this book, it occurred to me that that was my right-to have learned something from assimilation."

Mona does, in fact, become Jewish via a covert conversion. However, while she is the only character who undergoes a formal, ritualistic changeover, each of the characters becomes less fixed in his or her own cultural identity as the novel progresses. Jen portrays blatant, cross-cultural transformations such as Seth Mandel, Mona's Jewish suitor, who takes to sporting a dashiki and proclaiming, "black power." Meanwhile, Callie, Mona's older sister, goes to college and becomes more Chinese as she studies textbook Mandarin and begins her day with a rice porridge breakfast-a diet which boggles her parents, who now prefer raisin bran.

With her mischievously rendered characterizations, Jen tweaks the standard notion of Americanness and Jewishness and Chineseness. "Especially on the East Coast," Jen said, "you find that you are constantly fighting a tide of what defines Americanness as something opposed to your heritage, [and] then, by definition, anyone who holds onto a part of their heritage is less American. That is something that I categorically reject.

"I have my own definition of American," says Jen. "It is not something that you come into [and] particularly does not involve abandoning where you came from. I think of Americanness as a preoccupation with identity. It is the hallmark of the New World because we live in a society where you are not only who your parents were, and you don't already know what your children will be. That is not to say that I am blond and eat apple pie, but any definition that finds me less American-well, all I can say is that something is wrong with the definition."

Jen relates a recent instance. "I was talking to a Canadian Brit and she asked me on the air why there are no Americans in my book! All I could say was, 'You have to think again what an American is [because] there is no way that these characters can be found to be somehow less American than [a Caucasian] who's in the Midwest."

Jen credits her Chinese heritage with her take on Americanness. "There's a very Western view in which somehow you need to resolve the tension between any two things, to want things to come to a kind of conclusion ... whereas I've been wondering where this whole idea of fluidity comes from, and I think it's because I grew up with an [Eastern] idea of yin/yang, sweet/sour. Opposites don't fight each other, but belong together and can intensify each other, and are simply in the nature of the world."

In her novel, Mona and Callie experience life-changing epiphanies through their respective best friends, Jewish Barbara and black Naomi. Even fearful Ralph profits when he gives in and decides to learn a little from his black and Mexican employees.

"This has been the story from the beginning," Jen said. "[America] did start with a bunch of English people who decided they weren't English anymore. From the beginning, it has been about fluidity of identity.

"It occurred to me," Jen reflected, "that one of the reasons assimilation is [regarded as] such a horrible thing today is because it is so caught up in ideas of the melting pot, the product of which was going to be Barbie and Ken. But, today, no one is using that model-and I can't speak for other Asian cultures-but the Chinese culture is very strong. Frankly, I don't think you could get rid of it even if you wanted to."

It's time to think again about ethnic lit," Jen offered. "What is it about? What does it presume to speak on? It doesn't need to be representative to be of value. Mona Chang is not representative, and we're finally at that point where people don't need to be representative anymore ... enough of that.

"This book is not a denial of my heritage, but [America] is the place where I grew up. This is my country; this is what I know. And, in this book, I lay claim to that."