In 'Bad Bad Girl,' Gish Jen reimagines the relationship with her mother

Gish Jen’s “Bad Bad Girl” is a stunningly executed genre-bending book that tells the story of Jen’s damaging relationship with her mother Agnes, how Jen became a writer, and her mother’s own story. It is at once a personal history of generational trauma, an origin story and an immigrant story.

Near the end of the book, Jen notes she was unsure how to categorize “Bad Bad Girl” – “A novel? An autofiction? A memoir?” It has elements of all three; we might need a new literary label.

This is Jen’s 10th book. She has received numerous awards, fellowships and honorary degrees for her novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction. After reading what Jen overcame in “Bad Bad Girl,” it may seem a minor miracle that she has written anything at all, never mind created a deep body of literary work.

Given her mother’s reticence in discussing her own history, Gish had to “fill in a lot” herself. One of her goals was to stay true to facts she knows and use her perceptions for what she does not to tell “a forged truth,” as she calls it.

Jen explored the different ways of portraying the self in Eastern and Western literature (fiction and nonfiction) in a series of lectures she gave at Harvard in 2012: The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures. These were collected into her 2013 book “Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self.”

As one example from this work, Jen notes that in memoirs, Western writers place themselves at the center of their story as the “individualistic self.” In contrast, Eastern storytellers fold their life into a larger context as an “interdependent, collectivist” self. This tradition is in part why Jen’s mother was truly baffled as to why Gish wanted to tell her personal story.

Jen’s mother Agnes (her given name was Loo Shu-hsin) was born into an affluent Shanghai family. Her personal story is threaded into a cultural and political history of China in the 1920s and ‘30s, a time when even privileged young girls were not taught to read (a popular saying was “to educate a girl was like washing coal; makes no sense”).

Even so, her father was delighted by her curiosity and intellect (she could recite poetry at 3 years old) and sent her to a Catholic school, where Agnes excelled in all her subjects including English; she thought “all sorts of things seemed possible in English that didn’t in Chinese.”

Agnes’ father and brother’s usual response to her academic achievements was “Really it is too bad you are a girl.” Her mother, a beautiful and remote woman, would just criticize Agnes, saying she was too smart for her own good, a “bad bad girl” who didn’t know how to talk right and whom no one would ever want to marry.

Years later, Agnes would hurl the same invectives at Gish.

In 1947, 18-year-old Agnes embarked for America to further her studies. Her father had urged her to go; he did not mention his fears about ominous political signs in the country; the Communists fighting in the northeast.

Jen interposes the chronicle with imagined conversations between herself and her mother, who died in her 90s during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are bittersweet, sometimes funny exchanges they could never have had while Agnes was alive. Set apart in bold italic type, the conversations provide shrewd commentary on the unfolding tale. At one point, Agnes says of this book: “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, yes. But so much more.

Agnes meets her future husband, Chao-pe Jen, in New York City where she is attending graduate school for education and he has just gotten his Ph.D. in fluid mechanics. Agnes likes that he is bold in his social interactions, not hesitant in the way other Chinese men in America she knows are.

Before long, the girl whose mother said she would never wed is married and pregnant with their first son. She leaves her Ph.D. program after he is born; it will become her life’s major regret that she was unable to complete her degree.

Their family continues to grow until they have five children, of whom Gish is the second. As their family expands, they move from the city to a series of homes in Yonkers and then Scarsdale.

As the 1950s lead into the 1960s and ‘70s, the family letters Agnes receives contain increasingly dire news. During the Cultural Revolution, her younger sister is sent to a labor camp. Her mother grows ill. And every letter that arrives contains a request for money. Agnes dutifully sends money but often does not reply with a letter. At times, she is overcome by the distance and the worry. At times, she just wants to not think of them at all.

She is also overwhelmed by the challenge of raising five children with a husband of unpredictable moods and a short temper. Agnes sleeps more during the day, her only joys are reading the New York Times, watching TV, and especially baseball with their eldest son.

Of all the children, Gish is the most like her mother, talking at a young age and an early reader whose love for books only grew. Instead of this generating joy, the similarity triggered resentment, making Jen, as she describes it, “her nemesis… her scapegoat.”

Like her own mother before her, Agnes would tell Gish she was “Too smart for your own good” and often, “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”

Agnes would shower attention on the four other kids but somehow never make it to Gish’s dance recitals. Their father regularly disciplined the children by hitting them. The only child Agnes hit was Gish.

When Gish applied to college, neither parent accompanied her on college visits, yet Agnes was eager to tell people Gish was accepted at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Gish chose Harvard). Luckily, outside the home Jen had friends and a particularly kind neighbor who offset the toxic household atmosphere.

“Bad Bad Girl” shows the many ways in which trauma is driven down through generations. Jen’s daughter Paloma also notes that it can take generations to fade. Jen’s son Luke tells her that although she wasn’t given the gift of love and caring, she gave it to them and he hopes to pass that on to his own daughter.

Ultimately, this remarkable author does not write about her mother to bestow forgiveness; that would be a generous but one-dimensional response. She does not write to seek revenge; that would be a small-minded and easy response.

In forthright and profound ways, Jen sought the most difficult path: to understand.

Because of her courage, “Bad Bad Girl” is an extraordinary book.