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    Conversations with Gish Jen
    Conversations with Gish Jen
    Conversations with Gish Jen
    Ebook261 pages4 hours

    Conversations with Gish Jen

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    Conversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen’s authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen’s development as a novelist and cultural critic.

    Jen’s insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen’s sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Press of Mississippi
    Release dateOct 24, 2018
    ISBN9781496819345
    Conversations with Gish Jen

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      Conversations with Gish Jen - John Zheng

      The Intimate Outsider: Gish Jen

      Marilyn Berlin Snell / 1991

      From New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 1991, 56–60. Reprinted by permission of Marilyn Berlin Snell.

      Author of the widely acclaimed novel Typical American, Gish Jen has thought a great deal about what it means to be American, what sacrifices assimilation demands, what is lost in the process of migration and mutation and what America has to gain by accommodating the infusion of different cultures. In the following interview with NPQ Senior Editor Marilyn Berlin Snell, Jen—the daughter of Chinese immigrants to the US—discusses the odyssey of the immigrant in the New

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