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Public Affairs Television "Becoming American: Personal Journeys" Interview With Gish Jen

BILL MOYERS: Even though it was an Irishman?

GISH JEN: Even it was an Irishman. At least he had degrees.

BILL MOYERS: And so much irony in that, because then the past, it was the Irish who--

GISH JEN: Oh, I know. No kidding.

BILL MOYERS: --took all the Chinese out in California--

GISH JEN: That's right, that's right.

BILL MOYERS: But that's the American story you're writing here. You're living it here. You're not writing it. You're living it here.

GISH JEN: That's right. But you know what? My parents, because they immigrated so late, had really no awareness of that history, I mean, the dimmest awareness. And they did not identify with those Chinese, either. As far as they're concerned, those are the California Chinese. They were railroad workers; we were educated, so on and so forth. They didn't see themselves as related to them at all.

BILL MOYERS: What did they think when TYPICAL AMERICAN, your first book, was such a success?

GISH JEN: Well, they were happy enough. It was fine. But there was a moment where suddenly it became more than fine.

It actually became great. I had been in THE NEW YORKER and I'd been in TIME MAGAZINE, you name it, I had been there. None of this really meant very much to them. I mean, they would still look at the notices. They would say that's fine. But then I was in the WORLD JOURNAL, which is the Chinese newspaper. And they ran this piece on the front page of the paper.

(LAUGHS) And it was like a wedding announcement. It was, "Gish Jen, daughter of Norman and Agnes Jen,…" And of course, all of their friends called. People called from Canada. And just like that, it was alright.

BILL MOYERS: Like a wedding announcement?

GISH JEN: Yes. (LAUGHS)

BILL MOYERS: One of the reasons I was eager to talk to you is because in your work, you keep wrestling with this question of what it means to become an American, to be an American. And I'm wondering if you come to any conclusions about what it means to be an American today.

GISH JEN: Well, I don't know if you can actually say that there's one definition. But it is striking to me that Americans ask themselves certain kinds of questions.

And it does seem to me that by the time you ask yourself, "Well, what does it mean to be Iranian-American, Chinese-American, Jewish-American, Irish American," you are American 'cause it's not a question that people ask in other parts of the world.

BILL MOYERS: A reviewer said of your work, "If the American immigrant experience is most often construed as a process of merging and gradual assimilation like traffic on the freeway, then Gish Jen's version resembles a busy intersection with everybody laying on the horn." Is that an accurate description?

GISH JEN: Probably. Probably. I've always been interested, in my books, not only just in capturing the Chinese-American experience, but the whole American experience.

And all the many groups kind of jostling and intermingling and banging against each other and coming together both.

BILL MOYERS: Like bumper cars?

GISH JEN: It is like bumper cars. I've always tried to capture that quality, rather than simply write about one group in isolation.

BILL MOYERS: What's interesting about your work is it's not just for Chinese-Americans. I mean, the rest of us learn something about us in it, about what it means to become an American.

GISH JEN: Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I am writing very much with this idea that the American experience includes the Chinese-American experience.

And the Chinese-American experience is very much part of that experience. But that it's a larger phenomenon.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that you can write true to one's ethnic past and true to the American experience too? They are the same, aren't they, in effect? They merge at some point?

GISH JEN: I do think so. I don't think that you need to erase all the particulars of the Chinese-American experience in order to capture the essential American experience.

There's this idea that if you want to make it American, that you have to erase the particularities. But I don't think that's true at all. I think you can write right through them and still come out with something which is recognizably American.

BILL MOYERS: Talk to me about what it's like raising two children when their mother is American of Chinese decent and their father is American of Irish decent. What's it like for them? What's it like for you?

GISH JEN: Well, for us it's perfectly normal. It's just our family. Do you know what I mean? It's not like we have another idea of another family that would be more normal. To us, this is normal. And in quite a wonderful way.

It is true that there's been kind of a tendency, I think, from society, to just make us more Asians, or more Asian-American than we are Irish American, which has been sort of interesting. But we've tried to resist that, as best we have been able.

And we've tried to make something which is not about just kind of two things coming together. Biracial kids are called half/half, but--

BILL MOYERS: Half Chinese, half American?

GISH JEN: Yeah, it always sounds like mismatched socks or something. (LAUGHTER) You know what I mean?

We try to make something which is not half/half, which is something whole and new and integrated.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me about your two children.

Now, do they look like their Irish father or their Chinese mother?

MALE VOICE: Interestingly, they look like each other. They look like both me and my husband. But I don't think they look more like my husband than they look like me, or vice versa. Their facial features are very alike-- so alike that if you looked at their black and white baby photos you could not tell them apart. Interestingly though, their hair color is very different. My son has straight black hair and therefore is often kind of typed as Asian-American, whereas my daughter has very light brown hair and therefore is often typed as Caucasian.

BILL MOYERS: Do you talk to your son about this?

GISH JEN: Yeah, I talked to him a little bit about it. He's not that interested. He's in a school where there are lots of Asian-Americans, lots of biracial kids- multi-racial kids. To him, it's no big deal one way or the other.

He's never experienced a moment of discrimination that he can remember. It's a relatively minor part of his childhood.

What's been very interesting to us is the way my daughter was treated, which is quite differently than the way my son is treated. I mean, there is a sense that maybe she's not quite my daughter.

I noticed this from strangers. I do wonder about the effects of this gaze on her. People will ask me, "Is she yours?" For awhile, we had a German au pair six-foot-two, blond. And everybody assumed that she was the mother and I was the nanny. It's made me think a lot about what we consider natural, how much we depend on things matching in some way, kind of the visual cues are so important to us somehow in our idea of what a natural grouping is. And I do think that as a society, we need to get beyond that.

BILL MOYERS: Who do you think we are now? Where do you think we are in this whole question of becoming American? More immigrants have come here in the last ten years than in the last 100 years. Where do you think we are with inventing this new identity?

GISH JEN: Well, I think sometimes it's going well, and sometimes it's not going so well. Obviously, since 9/11, things have not been going so well.

I think before that, we'd experienced a rate of (UNINTEL) change which is really very remarkable. From the time of Civil Rights until 1990, it was unbelievable, truly. Just as a writer, I know that. Like I say, this is such a small window onto what was happening. But I went from a writer where I was writing stories today would be seen as being between worlds but early on, were seen as totally baffling, as maybe not about anything.

I had this story called "In the American Society" which today every college freshman can tell you, "This is about being between worlds." But when that story first came out, editors wrote to me. It was like, "Well, wonderful writing. But what's it about?" They couldn't see.

'Cause there's a laundry list of things that a story might be about, man and nature, coming of age. If it's not any of them, it must not be about anything.

So we went from this old kind of thinking to this new kind of thinking where, "Oh well of course." You just called this book "Typical American." It's about Chinese-Americans. Can we really do that?

I still remember my agent. "Well, what is this story about? It's about coming to America." Today it's, "Oh, it's an immigrant novel?" Yeah well, in 1990, people were all like, "What are you gonna call this?" I've seen a fantastic amount of change, kind of (UNINTEL PHRASE) change that has very much married the social change. It's been incredibly fast.

First blacks said, "I'm black and I'm proud." Then, "I'm Jewish and I'm proud." Now everybody's proud.

Now we have the opposite problem. There are so many groups on campus, they all have their own dorms. That's its own problem. But that all happened in what, 30 years or something? But I have to say that I think now since 9/11, I do wonder--

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