Gish Jen’s latest novel, Bad Bad Girl, originally started as a memoir, a non-fiction attempt to answer people’s observation: “You never wrote about your mother.” The Author’s Note shares the author’s pondered question: “Do you really want to realize one day that you never did write about a relationship—perhaps the relationship—that stood at the center of your life?”
It is from that premise that this fraught novel emerges. The novel is told in the voice of a semi-omniscient “Gish Jen,” who projects herself into her mother’s life, a mother who was “not anxious to be known” or judged but also “tactful as a sledgehammer.” Her mother left too little behind to piece together a memoir.
The mixed-genre work is what Jen calls “forged truth.” The taking of personal life issues to the wider public may be cathartic for the author and may open the door to speaking about the generational misogyny of Chinese Confucianism and the harrowing mistreatment of girls and women in Chinese culture.
The novel begins with Jen’s maternal grandmother, a Suzhou beauty who married a widower in her 20s. Jen writes:
My grandmother’s beauty only throws into relief my plainness, with that uniquely inescapable unkindness of so many family resemblances. It’s a good thing that I have had, here in America, options beside attracting widowed bankers.
This snippet captures the author’s core dynamics: taking things personally, engaging the world in a prickly way, and the astute humor and wit that are survival mechanisms. Her grandmother is an opium smoker of Persian opium. The author’s mother is the first child, a disappointment, born in a time when female babies were drowned without a second thought given the overweening cultural preference for male heirs, especially in the countryside.
Loo Shu-hsin (Agnes Loo) was born in Shanghai, though, the storied “Paris of the East.” She was raised by her “milk mother” or Nai ma (nursemaids), given the practice of mothers bearing children but not directly rearing them in the early years of the child. Theirs is a privileged family, with a home full of house servants and tutors, a refrigerator, and Western foods. Shu-hsin becomes a secret reader of books, and she masters both Chinese and English with fluency.
Hers is a time of social turmoil, with the Japanese invasion of China and the takeover of Manchuria. The International Settlement is a space of contention:
The unoccupied gūdăo—isolated island—that was the International Settlement and French Concession was in fact a ghetto, barricaded off from the rest of the city by barbed wire. But it was at least protected, while the lovely, leafy section of the International Settlement in which my mother’s family lived, managed though it had been by the British for decades, was technically outside the Settlement line. The result was that the not-so-secret Japanese secret police—the notorious Kempeitai—established their headquarters right down the street from my mother’s house.
The Japanese occupiers’ ethos was summarized in “their Three Alls policy: Kill All, Burn All, Loot All.” The privileged Chinese who had exposure to foreigners for many years were forced to lie low, and in some cases, to collaborate with the Japanese occupiers.
The social roiling may have informed Loo Shu-hsin’s ambitions to study abroad. She was educated in a Catholic school.
In one described incident, Mother Greenough teaches her to wink but not at men: “Because a wink is like a little note you are sending…except that you already know the other person’s answer. And if you wink, it’s preapproved.” Female virtue is the sum of her value, and it must be protected. The Catholics brought new thinking and practices to China, in terms of highlighting the human value of people. Jen writes of the attitude of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart:
Poor girls could be drowned, sold, or enslaved, and even rich girls were second-class citizens. The majority were left uneducated, and many were beaten, if not as daughters then as wives—as if that were how children of the Lord ought to be treated!
Jen describes Christianity as something that empowered its adherents to take risks, such as her mother deciding to study at an American university given her English language learning and her ambitions to pursue a doctorate. For all their cultural disparagement of females, Loo Shu-hsin finds an advocate in her grandfather, who recognizes her intellect. To enable her travel to the U.S., he has had to fight the Confucianism that had it that “An educated woman is a worthless woman.”
Shu-hsin takes the USS General M.C. Meigs ship to the U.S. She settles with a family in Chicago, Illinois, initially. She moves to New York. Hers is a struggle to study and learn, to navigate a new and different social landscape, and to make ends meet. She meets a fellow Shanghainese with family also from Yixing, Jen Chao-pe. And so begins the core struggle in Bad Bad Girl.
From the beginning, Gish Jen (the second of five children) and her mother fail to connect. Her mother has a constant mantra for Gish (born “Bìlián” or “Lillian,” based on lilies). She was a colicky baby, and her mother was at wit’s end in a new marriage and a young mother without family nearby to help but a few good friends. There does not seem to be a church family to provide support. She is depicted as a spoiled rich girl who had much done for her and who did not acquire the basic skills for life, which she has to learn painstakingly.
The narrative is interspersed with bold-faced sections in which the narrator shares a snippet of dialogue with her late mother. There are snatches of shared memories in some cases. There are acknowledgments that the conversations are acts of imagination more than remembrances in others.
Gish Jen evokes the Chinese civil war, the takeover by Communists in 1949, and their various political movements (Great Leap Forward, with the resulting mass starvation of Chinese to the tune of 30 – 35 million dead; the anti-rightists movement, the Cultural Revolution, and others) over the years. The extended Chinese family keep in touch, but their relationships are tense, with requests for financial remittances from Chinese relatives from the American relatives, who are seen as more wealthy (and are).
The telling is smooth. Jen does not fall into the trap of assuming that the future is a given and must fall out in the way that it did historically. She writes of Loo Shu-hsin’s thinking:
How alive she felt at International House, how full-throated and Shanghainese—and just as engaged as the men. For example, she was as worried as they about World War III, which was coming—everyone could see it—though like many people, she believed, too, that should the Communists threaten Shanghai, it would finally spark the international intervention that the Japanese invasion hadn’t. Meanwhile, could the Nationalists’ fallback plan really be to raze Shanghai to the ground if they lost, to be sure the Communists gained nothing?
The writing evokes the immediacy of particular lived events, which brings the narrative alive. The text does not get bogged down in excessive historical facts but touch on events lightly and fleetingly.
The mother Loo Shu-hsin and her husband Jen Chao-pe are torn between returning “home” to Taiwan or staying stateside even as they face racist supervisors and knuckle-busting local boys who beat up on their children. Theirs is a committed marriage but certainly not without strife.
Gish Jen as a child insists on her fair treatment and rankles when her mother picks favorites…and Jen is not included. Her mother takes exception to Jen’s mouthiness and her willingness to challenge the status quo. The mother is emotionally and physically abusive. The mother blames Chinese culture for her decisions, and Jen blames her. The two go through cycles of mutual hurt, without truly resolving their differences. Her mother communicates the risks of female intellect combined with too much candor that goes against societal expectations, that challenge power structures. There is not a break until the author is in her 60s and her mother in her 90s or so.
Bad Bad Girl embodies an act of creative empathy for Gish Jen to connect to her late mother. The “novel-memoir” is a difficult read given the shimmer between fiction and nonfiction, the emic and the etic, and the literary liberties. After all, how far can a reader trust an author’s telling of floating placentas and a college moved to caves inland and her mother’s first confession? How much does it matter that the author’s father went off track from his engineering career into real estate and stock purchases and financial problems? What is personal and private for her siblings and those around her, and what is public for history and broad public consumption? Is it fair to stand in for her late mother and speak for her (not in her voice) in the fiction? Oris this over-reach by the voiced, the survivors? [In one scene, the mother tells a writer by vocation: “You should write nothing.” It is as if both the mother and daughter fight tooth and nail to cancel out the other, in their worst moments.]
In some ways, the descriptions of Gish Jen’s mother’s aging and decline capture some of the most eloquent writing in the text, with rich descriptiveness and also some release of a tight-held tension between them that might be something like forgiveness. These sections read as more inspired and present than the historical parts, the projected ones. In the mother’s dotage, the author seems to finally feel like she can get past the lifelong hurts. In this time, the COVID-19 pandemic has arrived…and perhaps the sense of the world’s challenges has overwhelmed the personal.
The ultimate victory in Bad Bad Girl is not recreating the negative mother-daughter dynamics with her own daughter, Paloma, and her son, Luke. There is power in appreciating and enjoying relationships with one’s children and not letting negative emotional habits and cycles take over. The human condition is not one without inherent strife between people, in the microcosm and in the macrocosm.
Gish Jen is the author of a number of books: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, Who’s Irish?, The Love Wife, World and Town, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Independent Self, The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, The Resisters, and Thank You, Mr. Nixon.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
