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	Gish Jen - Voices from the Gaps
		Gish Jen was born in Scarsdale, New York, in 1956.
		Gish is her chosen pen name, a pseudonym she created while on an archaeological dig in Pennsylvania for the National Science Foundation.
		Gish Jen is currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, her son Luke, and her new daughter, Paloma Jen O'Connor.
	www-personal.ksu.edu /~leena/jen.htm (1071 words)

	Harvard Gazette: Gish Jen, American
		Jen, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, read from the yet-unnamed novel she is writing to a packed Cronkhite Graduate Center Living Room last Wednesday (Jan. 16).
		Jen, who lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, credits her writing inspiration and a good measure of her success to Harvard and Radcliffe.
		Jen insisted that her work is not autobiographical, sharing her mother's relief upon reading the galleys to "Typical American" and finding her family absent from the story.
	www.news.harvard.edu /gazette/2002/01.24/11-gishjen.html (954 words)

	Strangeness and failure: Gish Jen's Who's Irish?
		Gish Jen has published two well-received novels, Typical American (1992) and Mona in the Promised Land (1997), both of which deal with the entry of Chinese immigrants or their families into American life.
		Jen is talented, but most of these short stories, with the two exceptions I have mentioned, seem too focused on minutiae: sociologically focused on the ethnic, aesthetically on minor feelings and images that seem relatively conventional.
		At her best, Jen is capable of addressing with grace various kinds of failure and a sense of the new or the odd to which they can lead us.
	www.wsws.org /articles/2000/jan2000/book-j19.shtml (1508 words)

	The Oberlin Review \\ Arts Article
		Dressed in a padded fl shirt, fl linen pants and clogs, Jen's comfortable appearance and mellow voice belied any of the tough questions that her story was to pose.
		As Jen mentioned during the question-and-answer period after her reading, "a lot of the sympathy the reader has for the protagonist is based on how [the author] weights the secondary characters.
		Gish Jen is hitting many of those "genuine responses" with her writing; she navigates the delicate path between laughter and tears.
	www.oberlin.edu /stupub/ocreview/archives/1999.12.03/arts/gish.html (783 words)

	Longman Anthology of Short Fiction Online Chapter 3 -- Gish Jen (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		The experience and lives of first and second generation immigrant families in contemporary America provides Gish Jen with a wealth of stories, conflicts, and themes for her fiction.
		One major theme that Jen’s reviewers have discussed is the interplay between ethnicity and identity, both of which are shown to be slippery and unstable in Jen’s fiction.
		Jen has expressed her own interest in capturing and conveying to her readers some of the complexities of the American Dream.
	occawlonline.pearsoned.com /bookbind/pubbooks/gioialasf_abl/chapter3/custom31/deluxe-content.html (151 words)

	Becoming American: The Chinese Experience . Gish Jen Transcript, Page 2 \| PBS
		GISH JEN: Yeah, well, for my parents, it took them a while to realize that they were really, truly stuck here.
		GISH JEN: Well, I think I do because I am 47-- I'm gonna be 48 later this year -- I'm at that age where you suddenly realize that your parents are not gonna live forever and all your heritage [is going to die].
		GISH JEN: \Well, yes and no. Whatever their expectations were they were mostly worried that I would not get married.
	www.pbs.org /becomingamerican/ap_pjourneys_transcript1b.html (1368 words)

	Salon Books \| "Who's Irish?" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		In the gang warfare of contemporary American fiction, no turf has been claimed more genially than that of the Chinese-Americans in the work of Gish Jen, who is quite as ready to expose the foibles of her own people as to catalog their complaints.
		They look at some small apartments, but in the end the narrator stays with her son-in-law's mother, an Irish woman of her own age, who is just as befuddled as she is by the young people's modern ways: The generational wars have overwhelmed the ethnic skirmishing.
		Gish Jen's "Mona in the Promised Land" A comic novel, related in minor chords, about a Chinese-American teenager's search for cultural -- and personal -- identity during the 1960s.
	www.salon.com /books/review/1999/06/04/jen (665 words)

	berniE-zine Book Reviews: The Love Wife, by Gish Jen
		, by Gish Jen, is a novel of frustrations; no one in the story is pleased with his or her life, always looking for the proverbial grass that they assume is greener on the other side of the fence.
		Jen writes her story as if all the characters are standing around you telling it from their perspective.
		Even the teenage daughters are indistinguishable in voice from their parents, except when Jen remembers to throw a few "like" and "you know" verbalized pauses into the daughters' quotes.
	www.homestead.com /rantsravesreviews/LoveWife.html (421 words)

	New York State Writers Institute - Gish Jen
		Jen's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, as well as in numerous textbooks and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.
		Gish Jen visited the NYS Writers Institute on October 12, 1999.
		Theirs is the story of a family coming together and coming apart, and of miracles real and imagined, as Gish Jen puts her unique stamp on the American dream in this astonishingly accomplished debut.
	www.albany.edu /writers-inst/gishjen.html (504 words)

	foundersday
		Gish Jen, whose work has been widely acclaimed for its humor and insight, will kick off both the Founder's Day weekend festival and the Mary Lyon Lecture Series for the 1999 - 2000 academic year when she reads from her writings Friday, November 5, at 4 pm in Mary Woolley Hall's New York Room.
		One critic writes, "one of the greatest charms of Gish Jen's fiction is her position as a bemused chronicler--of the way things are in this crazy mishmash of an America, of the power and the limitations of family roots, and of the hugely comic potential in human nature."
		Gish Jen has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation.
	www.mtholyoke.edu /offices/comm/csj/991029/foundersday.html (862 words)

	Heath Anthology of American LiteratureGish Jen - Author Page
		Born in Long Island, New York, Gish Jen comes from a family of five children with parents who were educated in Shanghai, China (her mother in educational psychology and her father in engineering) and who separately immigrated to the United States around World War II.
		In an interview, Jen said that the scene in “In the American Society” where Ralph throws the polo shirt into the swimming pool convinced her to use Ralph as the protagonist for her first novel.
		Jen’s style contrasts markedly with the styles of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, two other contemporary Chinese American writers with whom she is inevitably compared.
	college.hmco.com /english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/contemporary/jen_gi.html (557 words)

	Ploughshares, the literary journal (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Gish Jen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, eight-year-old son, and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the hectic pace of her life is reflected in her rapid-fire speech.
		The celebrated author of two novels and a collection, Jen is known for her humor and brimming intelligence, her ready opinions and easy laugh, her charm, and, not least of all, her volubility.
		Jen says, “I could not have written this story early on in my career in dialect, using that voice, because if I had sent it out, the assumption would have been that I didn’t speak English.
	www.pshares.org /issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=4925 (1902 words)

	Gish Jen To Read From Latest Hit Novel On WSUI Oct. 26
		Fiction writer Gish Jen, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, will return to Iowa to read from "The Love Wife," her latest bestseller, at 8 p.m.
		Gish Jen wrote 'Mona in the Promised Land,' 'Who's Irish?' and 'Typical American,' all rich and telling contributions to immigrant literature.
		The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Jen grew up in the predominantly Jewish community of Scarsdale, NY, and she attended Harvard University before coming to the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
	www.uiowa.edu /~ournews/2004/october/101304jen.html (393 words)

	The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Novelist Gish Jen Finds Literary Voice Outside Harvard Identity
		As Gish Jen ’77 sits at her cedar kitchen table, cradling a mug of green tea and reflecting on her career, it is difficult to imagine her as anything other than a novelist, educator and mother.
		Jen wrote her first story in fifth grade, and in junior high, developed a strong interest in poetry.
		Jen says she got by with the help of her classmate and husband-to-be, David O’Connor, who “would sit me down before my exams and tell me, ‘these are the three things you need to know.
	www.thecrimson.com /printerfriendly.aspx?ref=214834 (1593 words)

	MELUS: MELUS interview: Gish Jen - Asian Perspectives - Interview
		It was during high school that she acquired the nickname "Gish" (after the actress with whom she happened to share a first name, Lillian Gish), which she later adopted as her pen name.
		Jen: If you had asked me at any point along the way, the answer would have been "no." But looking back, I can see that one of the biggest experiences of my young life was when I was in fifth grade and we had a literary magazine.
		Jen: What I mean by moral is that they are concerned with values and the human condition.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2278/is_n4_v18/ai_14878616 (1323 words)

	The complexity of being American: Q&A with Gish Jen -- July 29, 1999
		Gish Jen, the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, asks that question in her latest book, titled "Who's Irish?"
		Jen, the author of the acclaimed "Typical American" and "Mona and the Promised Land," says "a desire to wrestle with the question 'Who am I?' defines what being American is."
		Jen recently spoke with Riz Khan of CNN International about hyphenated Americans, whether the nation is a melting pot or a buffet, and how T-shirts reveal the wearer's Americanization.
	www.cnn.com /books/news/9907/29/gish.jen (280 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		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.
		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, fl, WASP) cast of characters who are continually and hilariously undergoing cultural consciousness-raising.
		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.
	www.asianweek.com /092796/cover.html (1976 words)

	Gish Jen -- Facts, Info, and Encyclopedia article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Her works include two (A extended fictional work in prose; usually in the form of a story) novels, Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land, and a collection of short fiction, Who's Irish?
		She is the daughter of Norman and Agnes Jen, who are from (The largest city of China; located in the east on the Pacific; one of the largest ports in the world) Shanghai, (A communist nation that covers a vast territory in eastern Asia; the most populous country in the world) China.
		She is married to an (additional info and facts about Irish-American) Irish-American named David O'Connor and has an elder son and a younger daughter.
	www.absoluteastronomy.com /encyclopedia/g/gi/gish_jen.htm (157 words)

	Amazon.com: The Love Wife: Books: Gish Jen (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Gish Jen's THE LOVE WIFE aspires to a broader view of personal and societal issues - foreign adoption, career mothers, self-identity and self-fulfillment, capitalism and greed, marital fidelity, job (in)security, racial violence, and controlling mothers.
		Gish Jen gives us the mixed Irish-American/Asian-American marriage of blue-eyed, blond-haired Janie Bailey, nicknamed Blondie by her mother-in-law, and Chinese Carnegie Wong, no doubt superstitiously named by his money-driven mother after the great American industrialist.
		Gish Jen's prose and dialogue are affecting, and her portrayal of Chinese cultural tone is wonderfully on target.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400042135?v=glance (3348 words)

	Powells.com Interviews - Gish Jen
		As far as I know, there is no such thing as Gish Jen Elementary School, anywhere, yet here she is alongside Papa in the century-ending collection.
		Gish Jen: It's over a year ago now, but I was completely shocked.
		Jen: I wrote almost all these stories while I was supposed to be doing something else, so they're all off the beaten track for me. I don't know if that accounts for the variety or not.
	www.powells.com /authors/jen.html (2371 words)

	Gish Jen (b. 1955) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		A key theme found in Jen's work is the Asian immigrant's coming to terms with American society.
		Since the author is fairly new on the literary scene, her audience is comprised of contemporary readers as young as adolescents and older who are interested in multicultural literature.
		Jen's stories are easily anthologized and can be compared to numerous American short stories-- immigrant, classic, and ethnic--that explore issues of Americanization and the tensions which exist among various American cultures.
	www.georgetown.edu /faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/jen.html (570 words)

	Off the Page: Gish Jen (washingtonpost.com)
		Gish Jen, the author of three previous books including the award-winning stories, Who's Irish, will talk about her new novel, The Love Wife.
		Jen is a sharp and witty observer of the immigrant experience--of the Chinese Americans that populate her work, certainly, but of immigrants in general.
		Gish Jen: Among classic writers, certainly Shakespeare, Jane Austen are very important to me. I think you can still see in my new book the impression the Shakespearean soliloquy had on me. There's a lot of soliloquizing in this book.
	www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/articles/A46979-2004Sep24.html (2183 words)

	AsianWeek: Who's Chinese American? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		But despite these limitations, Jen is obviously not concerned with such intra-ethnic categorization -- even though she is constantly reminded by book reviewers of this hyphenated cultural experience.
		Despite her focus on Asian American characters, the issues that Jen confronts are significant to Asian Americans in varying degrees.
		While her characters are not necessarily afforded a singularly Asian American viewpoint, Jen says that her Chinese heritage is inseparable from the way she perceives the creative process itself.
	www.asianweek.com /062499/ae_gishjen.html (792 words)

	Amazon.ca: Books: Mona in the Promised Land (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Gish Jen's second novel is populated by characters who "switch" ethnicity almost as if they were changing their hairstyles.
		In chronicling the coming-of-age of a refreshingly un-neurotic Chinese-American teenager, Jen casts an ironic eye on some of the hypocrisies of contemporary society, and her amusing insights illuminate several minority cultures.
		However, Jen has depicted Mona so sympathetically that we are drawn in and follow her willingly through her romps, and her friends' romps, that we will believe anything as long as it follows with her character.
	www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/0679445897 (1234 words)

	Amazon.com: Who's Irish? : Stories (Vintage Contemporaries): Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Jen comes at the question of identity from another angle in "Duncan in China," in which a second-generation Chinese American man returns to Mainland China to teach English.
		In real life, Gish Jen had great difficulty getting pregnant, and her stories are sprinkled with the hopes and sorrows of women desiring a baby.
		When Jen tries to be naughty she still can't keep from being very proper and lady-like ("'Could it have been the penile suggestion that piqued you?' Then he would have maybe suggested some piquing himself."), but coming from a Philip Roth background, I find this turn from the clinically explicit a refreshing one.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375705929?v=glance (2932 words)

	Julie Leung: Seedlings & Sprouts: The Love Wife by Gish Jen (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		I've read a few Gish Jen stories but never one of her novels.
		Jen's novel wanders the territory of adoption and "natural" children, families that blend identities, work/life balance dilemmas, and the contrast between American and Chinese values, lifestyles, proverbs and behaviors.
		But Jen's story creatively exposed perspectives in a way that made me laugh and cry and cling to the book until I had finished the last pages.
	www.julieleung.com /archives/001627.html (595 words)

	Southwest Review: Writing about the things that are dangerous: a conversation with Gish Jen. (Interview)@ HighBeam ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Gish Jen is a Chinese American woman novelist whose first book, 'Typical American,' came out in 1991.
		Jen can draw upon the cultural conflict with her elders, and she now has her own family with a husband and baby.
		Interviewer's note: In November 1991, I interviewed Gish Jen on the occasion of the publication of her first novel, Typical American.
	www.highbeam.com /library/doc0.asp?DOCID=1G1:13471926&refid=holomed_1 (226 words)

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