From a comfortable armchair on a small stage at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, Gish Jen asked: “Do you ever feel like you’re living in one reality and there’s a string pulling you to a different world?” Her audience laughed in recognition, and Jen smiled. “I do, too. So does Hattie Kong.” Jen, whose name appears often on lists of eminent contemporary Asian-American writers, was about to begin a reading to promote her new book, World & Town.
Hattie Kong is the book’s protagonist, a Chinese immigrant who has lived in the United States for decades. She spends her time painting; navigating the complicated social world of Riverlake, the small Vermont town where she lives; and befriending the Cambodian family that has moved in next door. The strings Jen mentioned pull Hattie back to Chinese traditions and family and into the world of memory, where her best friend and husband—both recently deceased—now reside. They also snake through Riverlake as the town debates whether to allow a cell phone company to build a tower there, allowing urbanity to win another battle.
“This is an age of flux,” Jen writes as the book begins. Flux, strings, the feeling of being in between—call it any name you like, but Jen is fascinated by it. She knows the feeling well and has spent much of her formidable writing career examining it. The daughter of immigrants from Shanghai, Jen grew up in Yonkers, NY, a working-class community where the differences between her family and the rest of community were keenly felt, sometimes violently so.
“It really just wasn’t a matter of you ate with chopsticks and they ate with forks…I had this feeling that, ‘My goodness, I know people who think so differently about the world, in the most fundamental ways,’” she said in a PBS interview in 2003.
Much of the tension dissipated once the family moved to Scarsdale (an experience that heavily informed Jen’s book Mona in the Promised Land), where Jen finished high school and was accepted to Radcliffe College at Harvard. After graduation, she spent a year at Stanford Business School before dropping out to pursue writing full time. Her family was dismayed, cutting her off socially and financially.
“I was a nice Chinese girl, and writing was not something nice Chinese girls did,” she said at the reading. “My English name is Lillian. I published my first story under Lillian, but I found that my writing-self was not Lillian; it was more rebellious. Gish was a nickname my school friends gave me, after the movie star Lillian Gish. As a writer, I was free to remake myself, and I started to publish under Gish instead.”
Jen’s parents ultimately changed their minds about her writing, and she has come to view her upbringing as a boon. “I like to quote someone who said, ‘To be second generation is to be tremendously creative and productive,’” she said. “You are American enough to know the ropes, but you’re much more free and without expectations. It’s an unbelievable gift.”
Jen’s novels and short stories find unique and varying ways to portray people existing between and among multiple American worlds. “I write a lot about America and Americanness,” she explained. “Obviously, it’s important to all of us. But it’s a nerve, a sensitive spot, for me—if I hadn’t grown up with my ‘Americanness’ questioned, it wouldn’t be such an important topic.”
During the reading, Jen showed off her nuanced, lyrical, sharply funny prose and the research she did in Lowell’s Cambodian community. The Cambodian characters in World & Town allow Jen to deepen one of the book’s richest themes, exploring layers of meaning in Chinese, English, and Khmer. “I’m interested in language—what we have words for and the many realities we use them in; that people who speak the same language cannot understand each other, and people who speak different languages can understand each other perfectly,” she told the audience.
The event, which drew around 25 people, was part of BCNC’s Sunshine Saturdays, a series that brings filmmakers, authors, and artists to Chinatown. The center works to facilitate immigrant transition into American life through language lessons, childcare, and afterschool programs on weekdays and is now adding more activities on weekends. “Sunshine Saturdays help us bring arts and culture to the community. [Jen] came here several years ago to read from [her previous book] The Love Wife. When I heard she had finished her new book, I let her know we were interested in doing another reading,” said Carmen Chan, who oversees BCNC marketing and development.
Reading attendees were diverse in age and background.
“I wish I had invited my mother. My family is from Taiwan, and my mom had some of the same difficulties,” said Hsiu-Hsien Chiang of Lexington. Chiang had never been to BCNC before and said she was now considering volunteering there.
David Chin of Charlestown, a longtime fan, added, “I like that she writes from a Chinese-American view. Immigrants tend to want to fit in; this is more about self-discovery, more of a feeling you’ve moved on and moved in.”
After the reading, a Chinese woman waited for Jen to sign her three copies of World & Town. “One for me, one for my ‘American sister,’ and one for my real sister ” she explained. “My American sister is a close friend. We give each other books, and we each dedicate them ‘to my sister.’ ”
This is a sentiment Jen would surely appreciate. World & Town is, after all, a great deal about America’s tradition of conviviality. “Doing research for this book, I went to Vermont, and I thought, ‘Do they know what they have here?’” she said, referring to the welcoming atmosphere of many American towns. “My book is infused with that openness and shows how immigrants take that up. That’s their inheritance, American kindness. I want to ask: Who keeps America this way? My answer is Hattie Kong.”
Alissa Greenberg is a Sampan correspondent.
