Writing About the Things That Are Dangerous: A Conversation with Gish Jen

Author(s): Gish Jen and MARTHA SATZ

Source: Southwest Review , WINTER 1993, Vol. 78, No. 1 (WINTER 1993), pp. 132-140
Published by: Southern Methodist University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43471475

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MARTHA SATZ

£<1$ Writing About the Things

That Are Dangerous
A Conversation with Gish fen

Interviewer's note: In November 1991, 1 interviewed

on the occasion of the publication of her first novel, Ty
can. The novel deals with a young Chinese man, Ralph
comes to do graduate work in engineering and pursue t
Dream as he understands it in China. In this country, h
with his sister Theresa and marries her friend Helen. Much of their
lives is a series of misadventures and disasters. Their idea of America
and the American Dream is continually changed and ultimately
transformed.

satz: I wanted to ask you about the choice of a male protagonist

for your first novel, Typical American. Can you say why you chose
to write about a male?
jen: It was partly a technical choice. When I started out to write
this book, I thought that in order to fill 350 pages or whatever (which
seemed to me quite intimidating at the time) you would be better off
with somebody active, somebody who does things. You and I might
appreciate people who simply think, but they don't always make
good fiction. And it occurred to me that in this generation and cul-
ture men had a greater latitude than women and that therefore a male
protagonist might make for a broader book. Also, Ralph as a character
came very easily to me, and I was interested in him.
satz: How did he come to you?
jen: He first arose in a story titled "In American Society/' which
was the original title of this book. That story was from the point of
view of Callie, the daughter.
satz: You created the second generation first?
jen: Yes and no. That story was about Callie, but the father figured
very heavily too. Especially young novelists like myself (relatively

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 Satz / 133

young - I'm not as young as perhaps I look) often write books about
their parents' generation. I think that's one of the big basic tasks a
person is confronted with, to figure out what reality was like for her
parents.
satz: You have said you found yourself writing often with a self-
consciously explicating voice. I think you do very well with this. You
explain for me, or as I envision for my students, what it's like to try
to find one's home in a new and different culture. That is, it seems to
me that one of the issues in your novel is the nature of home. There
are buildings that are torn down and transported. Is this an example
of what you had in mind as issues you consciously explicate?
jen: Well, those are the kinds of themes that are less conscious.
Those are the kinds of things I notice myself when I get to the end of
a draft. I say to myself, "God, there are a lot of roof problems." And
then I go back and heighten those motifs by having Ralph comment,
for example, "Why do we have so many problems with roofs?" I do
not start with ideas about the nature of home or whatever and then
try to shoehorn them into the work.
satz: There's a little story Theresa tells about the family that
transports a house, tears it down, and builds it again.
jen: Yes, that's right. In a different place.
satz: It had a leak and the question was, why would they move
the house if it were flawed. And the answer was - well, maybe they
were used to it. Wasn't that a conscious explication of a cultural
theme?
jen: The concept was not initially conscious. In later drafts, I saw
how Ralph and Theresa had attempted to reconstruct their family
via a marriage - something many people do, by the way, not just
immigrants - and then I used the story of the housemoving to rein-
force it.
satz: Well, how would you characterize your own novel? What is
your conscious perception of it?
jen: What I came to understand after I'd worked on it awhile is
that this novel is about coming to America and what that means in
reality. People think you set foot in America and you become Ameri-
can instantly. For the characters in my book, it takes a while to be-
come American and it's not so much becoming a citizen that makes
them feel American, it's something like buying a house.

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134 / Southwest Review

Satz: And seeing the grass grow.

jen: I think that's much more the truth. Also, I think the truth is
also that America holds out this promise that a person can do any-
thing. Right? "Be all that you can be." And Ralph believes that for a
time, but he comes to realize the limits here. I hope Typical Ameri-
can will be viewed not only as an immigrant story but as a story for
all Americans, to make us think about what our myths and realities
are. We are not a country that likes to think in terms of limits.
satz: Absolutely.
jen: I can remember how much trouble there was during the gas
shortages. We believe in endless expansion and endless expression of
our will. The grandiose self.
satz: Absolutely.
jen: By the end of the book Ralph comes to a point of reflection
where he starts to ask himself questions.
satz: Instead of do, do, do -
jen: Exactly. It's do, do, do, do, but finally he has to stop and
say - My God, what have I done? - and before I do more, don't I need
to know something about who I am. Ralph is at a point much like
the one we are at as a country. Our adolescence is over - I hope. We're
sobered. People are starting to think about the environment, about
war, about our place in the world.
satz: And maybe this is one of the advantages of getting the per-
spective of the immigrant because those of us who have been here a
long time can't see ourselves. That's the way your title works, doesn't
it? It's an inversion. Typical American is a kind of put-down of
America by those who are themselves being put down. The immi-
grant family in your book says disparagingly that something is "typi-
cal American."

jen: Right. But then in the end, of course, the irony is that they
themselves become typically American.
satz: So they have become American -
jen: Despite themselves.
satz: Despite themselves and so fall under the negative judgment
of their own original critique.
jen: That's right.
satz: I admire your book.
jen: Thank you.
satz: Can you talk about the role of the injection of Chinese Ian-

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 Satz /135

guage? You use Chinese phrases that employ concepts that can't be
stated in English - listening but not hearing, for example. Do you
think this is a means to induce readers to enter the Chinese culture
just a little bit?
jen: Yes, to begin to understand how fundamentally different other
points of view can be. You have talked about what students have to
be taught. They have to be taught for one thing that there are differ-
ent realities. If you have grown up in a place where you have one
reality and everyone else has the same reality, you begin to believe
that is reality. You are unaware of the degree to which it is artifice.
Whereas if you can see the terms in which other people think you
begin to realize that your reality is not so absolute.
satz: As a writer do you feel privileged to have these two perspec-
tives that are in some ways consonant and in some ways dissonant?
jen: Absolutely. I think all writers have to get to the point where
they can stand outside of experience and behold it, and if you are an
outsider by virtue of who you are or where you were born, half the
work is done.
satz: I've talked to Sandra Cisneros - do you know her work?
jen: Yes. She's an exciting writer.
satz: She told me a little bit about her experience at Iowa, which
for her was quite a negative experience because she felt so much the
outsider. Everyone was writing about suburban neighborhoods that
looked the same, and everyone had the same voice. For a while, it
silenced her because her voice and her experience were so different.
What was it like for you?
jen: The student population varies widely from year to year and
in my year there were a lot of cowboys. So I did feel like an out-
sider, but interestingly it wasn't so much because I was an Asian-
American. I felt like an outsider because I was from the east, and
I had gone to Harvard and that was not cool the year I was there.
satz: Was it sexist?

jen: Yes, it was, and there I was East Coast, intellectual, female.
That was really my problem much more than being an Asian-
American.

satz: I want to ask you about yourself. Your situation in terms

of identity and culture is very different from that of your parents'
generation. How do you perceive yourself in regard to these two
cultures?

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136 / Southwest Review

jen: There is a certain amount of cultural conflict. For instance,

when my son was born a lot of my friends said you really want to
have two weeks to yourself, just you and your husband and baby. It's
a very intense time and really you should get your parents to come
after that. So I tried to explain this to my mother, but it was just out
of the question. The problem has to do with different ideas about
what constitutes the fundamental social unit. I mean to my friends
I'm starting this new group, and I'm entitled to that. To my mother
I am part of the family that already exists, and the new baby is too.
Take the issue of Christmas. Dave and I are trying to lobby for having
Christmas Day at our own house now, especially when our son Luke
gets older. We want Santa Claus to come down our chimney. But my
mom wants all the grandchildren to come to her house.
satz: May I ask you about your Boston Globe piece? The grounds
on which you criticize multi-culturalism as an artist?
jen: What I said in effect was that multi-culturalism has made
more boxes for people. It has added questions to the lists with which
we approach literature and that has been an enormous contribution
to our understanding. Unfortunately, the result has been that readers
reading a minority writer now assume that these new concerns are
the ones you must be addressing. So they say to me things like, "Oh,
you must be trying to preserve their heritage in this book." Mean-
while, there's a lot about business in my book. No one asks, "Oh,
there seems to be a connection between religion and business."
satz: I wanted to ask you about your wonderful comic voice.
Where do you think it comes from?
jen: It's because I'm half-Jewish. Oy.
satz: Oy.
jen: It's interesting - someone interviewed me from the Yale stu-
dent paper who turned out to be a Chinese-American who had grown
up in Scarsdale, and she commented on how articulate all the Jewish-
American students seemed to be, and how she was forced to start
talking just to survive.
satz: So it was living in Scarsdale, basically, you think -
jen: Basically. Don't get me wrong, my whole family also had a
great sense of humor. But the humor is not so verbal. I think a lot of
the verbal humor comes from growing up in Scarsdale. You know, a
nice Catholic town.

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 Satz /137

Satz: My children are adopted and they're bi-racial, so they're

black and white and Jewish.
jen: Which is very American.
satz: Yes, it's very American. I also think they are in a privileged
position because they can't succumb to easy answers and easy stereo-
types. It's on many levels an outsider's position, which I think is
advantageous.
jen: Well, it is. From the beginning, you are forced to confront the
complexity of life with all its difficulties. Other people have an easier
time but they never see anything.
satz: I wanted to ask you about something else. You seem to
know so much about so many things. There is the terrible realism of
your portrayal of university politics. And I don't know anything
about animal slaughterhouses, but your description sounded terribly
authentic to me.
jen: I only saw one chicken get killed, but it left a big impression
on me.

satz: So what would you say about yourself? That yo

cially acute and curious observer?
jen: I'm curious about everything and it really is true
was trying to decide whether to become a writer, I th
enjoy it partly because I would get to do everything an
satz: It's my research. It's my job.
jen: No corner of the world is too obscure for you to
sniffing around. But you also have to understand that I
much as it seems I may know. I don't really know abou
world, for example. I'm just guessing.
satz: May I say it's a very astute guess!
jen: Oh dear, I'm so sorry.
satz: About your earlier comment on the link betwe
and religion, Ralph, your protagonist, hears all these s
lieves them, and they basically alter his life. Do you
American, I mean typical American?
jen: I do think so. Norman Vincent Peale pretty mu
the connection. Historically we've always felt that we
cial connection with God, right?
satz: Right.
jen: And through Norman Vincent Peale, we have a

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138 / Southwest Review

nection with God through which we can get rich. You know what I
mean? This has always been part of American culture. Religion and
self-aggrandizement go hand-in-hand.
satz: Were you also consciously working out relations between
males and females? You have Ralph and his sister and his wife in very
painful relations. Is that something that concerns you about Ameri-
can and Asian households?

jen: I didn't consciously address that. As soon as you have men

and women of that generation, though, that's what you get. I couldn't
help but bring it out. What I was thinking more about when I was
writing was sibling rivalry. I thought a lot about how what happens
to Ralph is shaped by his experience with Theresa and his father. I
was thinking too about how much what becomes of you in America
is shaped at least as much by family dynamics as by America. Helen
and Ralph and Theresa all find some version of the American Dream
and yet it's very different for each of them. There is no one story.
There are many stories.
satz: And that's another thing that we do. We say there is a Chi-
nese view and basically Chinese people come -
jen: Exactly. Meanwhile, birth order was as important as anything
else in this book.
satz: This was not an issue for you as an Asian woman, that is
you weren't in any way discouraged from writing, from achieving,
from going -
jen: I have to say that I was. This is not a story of all Asian-
American females because many are pushed in a big way. And prob-
ably if I had started to fail I would have been pushed too but as it was
for most of my life I did well in school without too much effort and I
was not encouraged to work any harder. My mother did say to me as
the mother in "What Means Switch?" says to Mona, "It's no good for
a girl to be too smart anyway."
satz: Pricing yourself out of the market, so to speak.
jen: She thought I would have trouble getting married and that I
should not work at being any smarter. So that while growing up a lot
more attention was paid to my brother's education than to that of me
and my sister. And speaking of the next generation, here he is -
[Luke, Jen's infant son, arrives in a stroller with his father and is
admired by all.]

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 Satz /139

Satz: Does Luke bring up new questions about identity for you?
jen: I realize he is very different from me. And that as much
trouble as Tve had with categorization, he is going to have more.
Already it's starting. People will say things like, "Oh and he's half
Chinese and half American." I say, no, no, no, no, he's one hun-
dred percent American. What do they mean he's half Chinese, half
American - give me a break. Or they'll say, well he looks like you. I
think what they mean is that he looks more Asian than he does Cau-
casian but actually he doesn't look like me at all.
satz: I wouldn't think so. They are struggling to say something.
jen: Exactly. But they're very stuck on this race thing. He presents
a challenge to them, even at this age. People will say his eyes are
blue. They're trying to make some new category for him - they're
working on it even though -
satz: They're working on it, and they're trying to be nice.
jen: It's a matter of education, there's no ill will. People need edu-
cating, and he will be the educator.
satz: How much Chinese do you know?
jen: I actually don't know that much. I don't speak very well and I
don't understand that well anymore these days. I've never been very
good at it. I put in the book what I know.
satz: Is it important for you that Luke know some Chinese?
jen: I would like him to know some. In fact I would like him to
know more than I know. My mom talks to him in Chinese, and I'll
send him to Chinese school, but who knows what he'll learn. And in
a general kind of way I think that it's more important for him to
understand what it means to be Asian-American than it is for him to
speak Chinese, that being Asian-American often means not speak-
ing Chinese or Japanese or whatever, the same way being German-
American often means not speaking German. I think it's a very
American thing not to speak the language of your ancestors.
satz: But a negative thing, don't you think? Or not?
jen: I don't think it's necessarily negative. I think it would be nice
if all Chinese-Americans spoke Chinese, and at the same time I also
think that all change involves loss. I don't mean to minimize the
loss. But if you stand against change, you stand against life.
satz: You have said that you wanted to be wicked.
jen: Wicked. Yes.

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iąo / Southwest Review

Satz: What does that mean for you?

jen: It means writing about the things we're not supposed to write
about. For example in "What Means Switch? " I'm pretty close to the
edge. People are uncomfortable when one starts writing about the
Jews and the Japanese. Everyone's a little bit -
satz: Everyone's poised, right? Where's this going to go?
jen: It's dangerous but as a writer you have to get up the nerve
to write about the things that are dangerous. And it is a minefield.
I don't know. I don't think anything actually explodes in my story
but -

satz: It's poised, it's poised. That was the feeling that I had.
jen: It makes people nervous.
satz: Which is a good thing, it seems to me. The tension of being
on the edge. Are there particular topics you think are bad?
jen: Sex in general is of course a bad topic, for a nice girl. Racism.
Power. Things you wouldn't talk about in company you're not sup-
posed to write about either. But a writer is dedicated to truth - a writ-
er's job is to write about these things. So the naughtier you are the
better. The not-nicer you are the better a writer you are.
satz: Do you have a new novel in the works now?
jen: I sure hope so. But you know how it is - you really can't tell
what's going on for a couple hundred pages. I hope I'm not going to
have to throw it all out, but -
satz: Do you feel courageous? You have spoken about writing in
the dark, just going ahead without plot, without structure. Are you
doing that now?
jen: Yes. I'm doing it again. You would think I'd have learned bet-
ter by now.

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