World and Town
Gish Jen, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307272195
Summary
From the much-loved author of Who’s Irish? and The Love Wife, a world-sized novel set in a small New England town.
Hattie Kong—the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China—has, in her fiftieth year of living in the United States, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. It is an utterly devastating loss, of course, and also heartbreakingly absurd: a little, she thinks, “like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium.”
But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run from their inner-city troubles, as well as—quite unexpectedly—by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians.
What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what “worlds” we make of the world.
Moving, humorous, compassionate, and expansive, World and Town is as rich in character as it is brilliantly evocative of its time and place. This is a truly masterful novel—enthralling, essential, and satisfying. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1955
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers'
Workshop
• Awards—American Academy of Arts & Letters-Strauss Living
Award; Lannan Award for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
As a child, Chinese-American author Gish Jen read constantly, though she did not dream of becoming a writer. From pre-med at Harvard to finally finding an academic "home" in an MFA program, the author of The Love Wife, Typical American, Who's Irish?, and Mona in the Promised Land, is known for her tragi-comic sensibility and transcending stereotypes in her characters' search for identity.
Typical American, Jen's first novel, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and launched Jen into the literary limelight. The story follows three Chinese immigrants, Ralph Chang, his wife, Helen, and his sister, Theresa, as they pursue the American Dream and do battle with the pressures of greed, assimilation, and self-interest. Brilliantly funny and sad, the story takes some surprising turns in the quest to become American.
Gish Jen, whose characters undergo profound changes in the quest for identity, is herself no stranger to identity issues. After publishing two short stories with her given name, Lillian Jen, in the early eighties, she began using the name she acquired in high school, Gish Jen, after the silent film star, Lillian Gish.
Born in 1955 in New York, Jen grew up Chinese and Catholic in Queens, Yonkers and in the large Jewish community of Scarsdale. She never dreamed of being a writer. Instead she dutifully pleased her parents by first going to Harvard with plans to become a lawyer or doctor. That changed when a poetry professor suggested she at least work in publishing if she wasn't going to be a full-time writer. She took a job at Doubleday Books, but was not quite satisfied. From here, she enrolled in an M.B.A. at Stanford University, only to drop out and follow the urge to write. Finally, in the M.F.A. program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she found her academic and creative home.
After Jen graduated from Iowa in 1983, she married David O'Connor and lived in California until 1985, when they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they now live with their two children. During this period, she was so discouraged about a literary career that she took a typing test at Harvard. Although she passed it with flying colors, she was able to triumphantly turn down the clerical job offered because she had been accepted as a fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute. It was here that Jen began writing her first novel, Typical American, which was eventually published in 1991.
Typical American was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and gave Jen literary clout and exposure. The book follows the lives of three foreign students—Ralph Chang, older sister Teresa, and Ralph's future wife Helen. When the Communists assume control of China in 1948, the three become trapped in the United States and band together, planning to achieve the American dream while keeping their Chinese values intact. However, as they encounter their own foibles and the challenges of America, the ride in this tragi-comic story is by no means smooth.
Rave reviews followed the publication of Typical American. The New York Times Book Review said, "No paraphrase could capture the intelligence of Gish Jen's prose, its epigrammatic sweep and swiftness. The author just keeps coming at you, line after stunning line. Even her incidental description seems new-minted—purely functional, bone clean yet lustrous."
Although Typical American was successful, Jen resented being labeled as just an Asian-American writer. As a reaction, she decided to complicate what that meant with her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996).
The story centers on the middle-class owners of a pancake house, Helen and Ralph Chang, who have moved on up to a house in wealthy, suburban Scarshill, NY. In 1968, with Vietnam and the civil rights movement in full swing, their younger daughter Mona enters high school, joins a youth group at a synagogue, converts to Judaism, fights against other "isms" and becomes known as Mona "Changowitz." Eventually, her mother turns her back on Mona, and Mona learns that her rabbi is right in telling her, "The more Jewish you become, the more Chinese you'll be."
Jen told the journal, Ploughshares, in 2000 that Mona in the Promised Land grew out of a short story, What Means Switch?, that she had written while trying to finish Typical American. She had lost her first pregnancy, and didn't know if she'd be able to finish the novel. After running into an old high-school acquaintance, she was inspired to revisit her teen years in Scarsdale in a short story.
In the eight short stories of Who's Irish? (2000), Jen chronicles Chinese and other Americans as they take on America with sometimes comic and heart-breaking outcomes. The stories originally appeared in such publications as The New Yorker and Ploughshares. Two stories were selected for the anthology Best American Short Stories, and one that was originally published in Ploughshares, "Birthmates," was chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
The title story of Who's Irish? is one of the best. The story's narrator is a Chinese-born grandmother, who clashes with her liberal-minded, Westernized daughter in matters of childrearing. When she tries to discipline her misbehaving granddaughter in her firm Chinese way, the child's mother, who has married an Irish-American, decides her own mother should move out. Ultimately she moves in with her Irish-American son-in-law's mother, who is just as confused as she is about their offspring's modern ways. It seems the generational clash has superceded ethnic differences.
Throughout her writing career, Jen, has chosen to take advantage of what freedom she could find rather than play such roles as expert on China, or of professional victim. In the Ploughshares interview, she said, "I have hoped to define myself as an American writer."
In her third novel, The Love Wife (2004), readers are introduced to another of Jen's "typical American families." The family is made up of a second-generation Chinese American husband named Carnegie, a blue-eyed wife named Blondie, adopted Asian daughters Wendy and Lizzie and a blond biological son, Bailey. Then from mainland China, along comes Lan, a nanny and relative who is "bequeathed" by Carnegie's mother.
The mother of two biracial children, Jen told Dale Raben in a 2004 interview for the Library Journal that their appearances helped shape one of her themes in The Love Wife.
"My children look exactly alike except that my son has straight black hair and my daughter has fine, light hair. And for whatever reason, that has caused them to be seen very, very differently by the world.
In the novel, Blondie is already worried that their family looks strange, as if she and Bailey don't belong. Lan's arrival only intensifies this pre-existing tension.
Writing from a Chinese American standpoint, Jen argues that grouping people by ethnicity is almost meaningless. Continuing her interview in the Library Journal, she said, "You have to ask, Are they immigrants or are they non-immigrants?' For the people in this book, to be first- and second-generation immigrants from a non-Western culture is very germane. How germane it will be to their children, who can say?"
In her novels and short stories, Jen liberates her characters from stereotypes by making them profoundly human and complex. In an interview published in 1993 in the journal MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature) Jen said she views her work as indeterminate in its final message: "I think it has to do with the fact that I come from a culture where things can have opposite attributes at the same time, like in food, sweet and sour. The world is at once yin and yang." (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
One of Jen's greatest strengths is her fluid point of view, which she employs beautifully here, alternating perspectives among Hattie, Sophy and a local man named Everett, whose wife is Sophy's sponsor at the Heritage Bible Church. Nothing is fixed for these unsettled characters, who keep trying to build new lives in a bewildering world, and whose victories, when they come, bring not rapture but "a defining grace, bittersweet and hard-won.
Donna Rifkind - New York Times
What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen…If you've already enjoyed Anne Tyler's Digging to America and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, you have some idea of the tenor of World and Town. Jen's fourth novel manages, in its amiable, unhurried way, to consider the challenges of immigration, the limits of scientific rationalism and the sins of fundamentalism. Yes, it's a heavy load for such a buoyant story to carry, but, like Allegra Goodman, Jen knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Gish Jen’s triumph of a novel World and Town starts with all the energy of a runaway train—or actually, a runaway trailer. Jump on. You’ll enjoy the ride.... What interests the author is how we interpret family, culture and home.... From family plots to subplots, Jen orchestrates everything. In fact, there's something symphonic about the novel itself...her richest, warmest work yet.
Ellen Kanner - Miami Herald
Jen knows the rhythm of life in a small town, where swirls of gossip can set events in motion, and personal history exerts a stronger force than anything that happens in the wider world.... She’s generous to her characters, even the violent or larcenous ones. Her bighearted, rumpled novel gives them room to change directions and find new ways to live together.
Margaret Quamme - Columbus Dispatch
In this thick, satisfactory sprawl of a read...Jen gracefully introduces some of the great issues of or time: how the shock of 9/11 reverberated from city to town; how lost souls can cling meanly to fundamentalism; how it feels when a chain store bulldozes into a mom-and-pop community, or a family farm finally collapses.... When she slides into the voice of a 15-year-old Cambodian girl or the bitter old-timer angry over the loss of his farm and wife, World and Town practically sings.
Karen Valby - Entertainment Weekly
Jen (The Love Wife) unwinds another expansive story of identity and acceptance, deploying voices that are as haunting and revealing as they are original. Hattie Kong, 68 and full of unresolved longing for her dead husband, her best friend, and an old lover, finds a sort of purpose in the new neighbors, an immigrant Cambodian family. As she nurtures a friendship with the family’s teenage daughter, Sophy, Hattie learns the family’s secrets. Sophy’s father, Chhung, has survived the horrors of Pol Pot, marrying Sophy’s mother in a refugee camp and adopting her brother, Sarun. Sarun and Sophy founder in America; Sarun has gang ties, and Sophy becomes involved with manipulative evangelicals. Chhung, isolated and unable to cope with his children, spends his days digging a pit behind their cramped trailer until one day he implodes in an act of horrifying violence. While pondering how to help the family, Hattie discovers much about her own motivations and her place in the world as the daughter of an American missionary and a descendant of Confucius. Jen’s prose is unique, dense, and enthralling, and her characters are marvels of authenticity.
Publishers Weekly
Hattie Kong, a 68-year-old high school teacher, seeks solace both from 9/11 and her own personal tragedies in Riverlake, a small New England town. It's been two years since she buried her husband and best friend within a wrenchingly short time, leaving Hattie with her dogs and a crushing loneliness. The daughter of an American missionary and a Chinese father, Hattie befriends the Chhungs, her Cambodian-refugee neighbors, offering tutoring and advice as they struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, teens in trouble (one is in a gang, two are in foster care, and 15-year-old Sophy is drawn into a Christian fundamentalist church with cascading devastating consequences). Carter, Hattie's long-ago lover, has also settled in Riverlake. A former neuroscientist, he is now teaching yoga and trying to resolve old business with Hattie. The ripple effects of 9/11 on Hattie and company are compounded by the insularity of their community. Verdict: Riverlake serves as a road map through the minefields of prejudice and fear planted in post-9/11 America. Jen's (The Love Wife) sensitivity and charming humor should vault this to the top of book groups' must-reads. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
Sharply funny and wisely compassionate, Jen’s richly stippled novel slyly questions every assumption about existence and meaning even as it celebrates generosity, friendship, and love. A new novel by exuberant and insightful, much-loved and much-talked-about Gish Jen is big book news. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. The prologue is set in a beautiful and ancient Chinese graveyard in which Hattie Kong’s relatives—descendants of Confucius—are buried, a provocative opening for a book about small-town America. What does this suggest about America today? The section ends with Hattie Kong—Chinese and American, Christian and Confucian—lamenting the passing of an older, simpler order and wondering what she has to replace it. To what degree are her questions uniquely her own?
2. Hattie is the center of this novel, the person through whom all the others connect, but she has her own story as well. Why does she move to Riverlake? What do Lee and Joe represent to her? Why does Sophy mean so much to her? When Neddy Needham, in the first Town Hall scene, asks “Whose town is this?” she wonders, on the side, if it is hers. It is by the end, but how has this change come about?
3. There is a lot of doubling in this book. Chhung feels himself to have been reborn into his brother’s life; Carter Hatch seems scripted to become his father; Hattie is able to leave China thanks to her serendipitous resemblance to a girl who died. Do you see other doublings of characters or situations? What does this suggest about the nature of the self and reality?
4. Vision is a major theme in the book. Hattie’s mother has always told her, “We must see that we don’t see,” and Carter spent most of his career working on the process by which information from the outside world is filtered and made coherent. Vision, as Carter’s father says, goes with blindness, even depends on it. Do you find in the book other forms of seeing that involve blindness? And if what we see might be thought of as a “world,” does this shed light on the title of the book?
5. Hattie, by the end of the book, has embraced a new life, but she has also rejected several modes of being. Though displaced, like her fellow teacher Ginny, and betrayed, she has chosen a different road for herself. Do other characters offer reflections of what Hattie might have become, had she chosen differently? In her youth, Hattie rejects superstition and embraces science; by the end, she has modified her view somewhat. Why?
6. One of the ways in which people in this book try on new selves is by changing their hair. What are some of the things people do to their hair?
7. This book has a main narrative in three parts, with two related narratives inserted into it. What does this suggest about the nature of the main narrative and storytelling generally? Is it definitive? How might it be related to the themes of “world”-making and blindness?
(Questions issued by publisher.)