Gish Jen’s ‘Bad Bad Girl’ recasts a fraught relationship
Such marvels the dead are: They never fail to surprise the living. This is particularly true of deceased parents and all the conversations they insist on having with their adult children. Now that both my father and mother have gone, I hear them more clearly than ever before, speaking to me in their Georgia accents: my father’s Piedmont twang, offered in monosyllables and curt phrases, and my mother’s coastal drawl, melodious and judgmental.
Gish Jen knows from judgmental mothers. Her new novel, “Bad Bad Girl,” is two books in one: the first half an imagined account of her mother’s early years in Shanghai and the United States, and the second Jen’s own fictionalized memoir, framed by her signature intellect and hilarity. Throughout the text she splices her mother’s constant interruptions — you were a pain in the neck, bad bad girl! — as if Agnes Jen (née Loo Shu-hsin) is glancing over her daughter’s shoulder while Gish types, propelled by anger, seeking the satisfaction of a candid dialogue she had always craved. (In an “Author’s Note,” Gish Jen claims never to have written about her mother, who died in 2020, but I would bet good money that Agnes was at least a partial inspiration for the narrator of “Who’s Irish?,” the title story in Jen’s superb collection.)
As a child, Shu-hsin is portrayed as a “terror,” frustrated by her own mother, an aloof patrician beauty, preferring her wet nurse, Nai-ma. The Loos live in a sprawling compound: a villa with portico and veranda, a solarium and garden, and a separate dorm for their many servants. (The residence is on the edge of the International Settlement, a protected enclave during Japan’s brutal 1937 invasion.) Women are expected to be decorative hostesses for their affluent husbands, yet Shu-hsin’s father encourages her to borrow books from his library and then blesses her education at a Catholic school, where she is baptized and takes the name Agnes. A British nun also recognizes the girl’s potential and nurtures her: “Mother Greenough did not have green anything. She had blond eyebrows you could hardly see, they were so pale; her eyelashes were almost white. And her eyes were not just blue, they were a blue my mother had never seen besides on a temple devil — a blazing blue, like the sky on a day so hot not even the clouds would come out.”
Jen maps Agnes’ trek to Chicago and then on to a New York university, where she meets Jen Chao-pe, known as Norman, an aspiring academic with a passion for math formulas and chalkboards. After their marriage, “Bad Bad Girl” rips off its mask: It’s about a pair of bad bad girls who unerringly press each other’s buttons. The second of five children, Jen contrasts herself with her siblings. She’s a thorn in her mother’s side: inquisitive, rebellious, argumentative. Throughout her childhood and adolescence in suburban New York — first in Yonkers and later in Scarsdale — Agnes is quick to hit her. Her older brother Reuben, the “number one son,” is a magnetic athlete; her younger sister Lisa is Agnes’ favorite. Gish finds role models: the kindly Mrs. Cunningham, a neighbor who teaches her to knit, and Carmen, a bohemian ballet instructor. “Carmen swore and smoked — because she was a Commie from Cuba, where everyone smoked cigars, people said. But she was also magic,” Jen writes. “She could make her arms ripple like water and her hands fall like petals, and when she tilted her head to the side and looked up, you would swear she was seeing a spaceship.”
Agnes and Norman neglect Gish’s ambitions. She drives herself to college tours and chooses Harvard, where she gravitates toward the eminent classicist Robert Fitzgerald, who assigns her to create a poem in the manner of Catullus: “I sat myself down in a library and tried to write something with eleven syllables per line. I counted; I changed some words; I counted again. Poetry was about what Carmen, my ballet teacher, used to call a method. It had principles. ‘A mentality.’”
This is more the stuff of memoir than a novel. Jen grapples with structure, presenting “Bad Bad Girl” as a collaboration cobbled from decades of psychological checkmates and physical abuse. The book’s power derives from a deeper tension: Jen is interrogating not her mother so much as the gulf between Chinese immigrants and their Americanized children, questioning whether an uneasy truce is even possible amid the long shadows of communism and diaspora. A few affecting passages come late in “Bad Bad Girl,” as Agnes seeks to support her daughter and son-in-law when they struggle to start a family. After Norman leaves his professor’s job to speculate in real estate, straining his marriage, Jen mediates, proving to Agnes she is the “most Chinese,” the one who had absorbed the ideals of filial duty.
As China modernizes under Deng Xiaoping, Agnes swaps letters with her siblings, including a sister liberated from a labor camp, but refuses to communicate with her ailing mother, instead sending her money. After becoming a published author, Jen visits Shanghai, a brief episode that teases out themes familiar from her previous works: the old world vs. the new, the challenges and compromises of Chinese Americans. The story of what it means to be American in an era of sweeping demographic change enlarges “Bad Bad Girl,” sweetened by comic touches and a final note of grace. If memory is the mother of the muses, as the Greek poet Hesiod observed, then perhaps a difficult mother is just the right muse for a memorable tale.