Gish Jen, born Lillian Jen (Chinese: 任璧蓮; pinyin: Rén Bìlián) in 1955, is a contemporary American writer.Contents
Gish Jen is a second generationjnn Chinese American. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s, her mother from Shanghai and her father from Yixing. Born in Long Island, New York, she grew up in Queens, then Yonkers, then Scarsdale. Her birth name is Lillian, but during her high school years she acquired the nickname Gish, named for actress Lillian Gish
She graduated from Harvard University in 1977 with a BA in English,[4] and later attended Stanford Business School (1979-1980), but dropped out in favor of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned her MFA…
in fiction in 1983.
Fiction
Several of her short stories have been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. Her piece "Birthmates", was selected as one of The Best American Short Stories of The Century by John Updike. Her works include four novels: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town. She has also written a collection of short fiction, Who's Irish?.
Her first novel, Typical American, attempts to redefine Americanness as a preoccupation with identity. "As soon as you ask yourself the question, "What does it mean to be Irish-American, Iranian-American, Greek-American, you are American," she has said.
Her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land concerns the invention of ethnicity, and features a Chinese-American adolescent who converts to Judaism. The Love Wife, her third novel, portrays an Asian American family with interracial parents and both biological and adopted children as "the new American family". She asks the question "What is a family?" as a way of asking, "What is a nation?"
The latest novel, World and Town, portrays a fragile America, its small towns challenged by globalization, development, fundamentalism, and immigration, as well as the ripples sent out by 9/11. It explores the changing face and role of immigrants in America, as well as a changing America.
World and Town won the 2011 Massachusetts Book Prize in fiction and was nominated for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Jen's writing confounds categories like the "immigrant novel," probing societal constructions and boundaries of every stripe, and moving in a direction that seeks to enrich and even redefine what it means to be American.
In 2013 Jen published her first non-fiction book, entitled Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Based on the Massey Lectures that Jen delivered at Harvard in 2012, Tiger Writing explores East-West differences in self construction, and how these affect art and especially literature
Jen has also published numerous pieces in the New York Times, The New Republic, and in other venues
Honors and awards
In 2009, Princeton's Elaine Showalter devoted much attention to Jen in her survey of American women writers, "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx." In an article in The Guardian, Showalter elaborated, including Jen in a list of eight top authors, and pointing out that Jen's "vision of a multicultural America goes well beyond the angry rants or despairing projections of Roth, DeLillo, McCarthy or other finalists in the Great American Novel competition." In 2012, Junot Diaz concurred, calling Jen "the Great American Novelist we're always hearing about." And in 2000, in a millennial edition of The Times Magazine in the UK, in which figures preeminent in their fields were asked to named their successors in the 21st century, John Updike picked Jen.
2013 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of 2013
2012 Delivered the Massey Lectures at Harvard University (an annual lecture series sponsored by the American Studies program)
2011 Winner of the Massachusetts Book Prize
2011 Nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
2009 Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2006 Featured in a PBS American Masters Program on the American Novel
2003 Received a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
2003 Received a Fulbright Fellowship to the People's Republic of China
2001 Received a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship
1999 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (John Updike, ed.)
1999 Received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction
1995 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of 1995
1992 Received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
1991 Finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award
1988 Received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
1988 Story included in The Best American Short Stories of 1988
1986 Received a Radcliffe College Bunting Institute Fellowship
