Bad bad girl : a novel / Gish Jen.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

BEST OF FALL: Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, People, Oprah Daily, Writer's Digest, W Magazine * RUPAUL'S BOOK CLUB PICK * An engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.

"A transcendent work of art." --Boston Globe

"Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century." --Junot Díaz

"Heart-piercingly personal. . . . Suffused with love." --Los Angeles Times

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .

Gish's mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid--far more loving to than her real mother--is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name--Agnes--but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But even then he can only sigh, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail--never to return.

Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-Pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain--"Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!"--as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.

Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as immensely incisive as it is compassionate.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The astute and revelatory latest from Jen (The Resisters) recounts the author's tumultuous relationship with her Shanghai-born mother, Loo Shu-Hsin, and offers a fictionalized version of Loo's early life. Loo, born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family, was met with disappointment by her mother, who wished for a son. Intellectually gifted, Loo convinces her parents to let her immigrate to a graduate program in Chicago in 1947 amid the Chinese civil war. She flounders in Chicago before moving to New York City, where she enrolls in Columbia University and meets future husband Jen Chao-Pei, a fluid mechanics engineer. The two forge a life together, settling first in Queens and finally Scarsdale, where Loo abandons her PhD studies in psychology for motherhood, planting the seeds of her anger, resentment, and depression. Second-born Lillian (the author's given name) lives in the shadow of her older brother, Reuben, whom Loo adores, while Loo incessantly berates Lillian as a "bad, bad girl" for asking too many questions. Jen cannily portrays the struggles facing Chinese immigrants (a neighbor points out that Loo's "soul is still in China"), as well as the family's repeated patterns, showing how Loo consistently invalidates her daughter's wit, curiosity, and intellect in the same way that she was invalidated as a young woman. Throughout, the author blends sharp-witted autofiction with powerful images, such as Loo's mother throwing her placenta in the Huangpu River where it floats away, prefiguring the sense of drifting that Loo would later experience. This is striking. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Oct.)

Kirkus Book Review

A great novelist distills the truth of her mother's life, and her own. Jen's 10th book, she writes in an author's note, began as a memoir of her mother, who died in her mid-90s during Covid-19. But because Agnes Jen resisted sharing her stories and left few artifacts, some invention was necessary. All the same, Jen has "stayed as true as [she] could to the facts" of her mother's life as well as their troubled relationship: Both were bad girls. A confirmation from beyond the grave: "I knew what this book was going to say even before you wrote it, my mother says now. I knew it was going to say I was a terrible mother, blah blah blah blah. The first part explains how I became so terrible. The second part says how terrible I was." Well, we won't argue. Her terribleness consisted in both physical abuse and in brutally intense favoritism, making the second-born author a distant fifth to her four siblings. The withholding, abusive Chinese mother who believes she is simply doing things the Chinese way is not an unfamiliar character in either memoir or fiction, but Jen has created a fully three-dimensional portrait of her. Known for humor, Jen worries her readers will be upset this book isn't funny, but her eye and her style of description (a couple at her first publishing job "smoked as if it was in their marital vows to keep the tobacco industry alive"; her mother's puffy eyes are "part goldfish, part James Baldwin," though she is "too sad to quip") as well as the back and forth between the postmortem conversations and the main storyline keeps the mood lively. "No, I cannot forget you. You are right. You've won," she concedes to her mother at one point. But actually, and for the same reason, she wins too. Who cares what genre this is; as portraits of tough mother-daughter relationships go, it's as moving as they come. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.