Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
Family Values
By Jennifer Schuessler
The Love Wife
by Gish Jen
Knopf, 379 pp., $24.95
With her first two novels, Gish Jen established herself as one of the leading literary chroniclers of the Chinese-American experience—a phrase that neatly sums up her subject matter but fails to convey the subtlety, irony, and fleet-footed wit of her approach to the old story of immigrants making it in America, one generation at a time. Typical American (1991) began at the beginning, with the story of a thwarted Shanghaiese student's journey from restaurant kitchens to postwar suburbia, with considerable illusions lost along the way. In the delightfully satirical Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Jen followed the same family up the real estate food chain to suburban Westchester (Jen herself grew up in Scarsdale), where they find themselves plunged into the riotous varieties of American ethnic experience, circa 1968. The Chinese are 'the New Jews,' a sociological observation that teenage Mona takes as a commandment—converting under the guidance of a bearded, guitar-strumming rabbi, starting a civil rights crusade in her parents' restaurant, and wreaking intergenerational havoc by signing up with the louder side in the great American war between the 'oppressive and the expressive.' 'The whole key to Judaism is to ask, ask, instead of obey, obey,' declares Mona Changowitz (as she jokingly renames herself). 'You've got to...[stop] trying to be a WASP and act like you don't have anything to complain about. You've got to realize you're a minority.'
Review, 1738 words
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