Bad Bad Girl: A Novel - Softcover

Jen, Gish

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593689658 ISBN 13: 9780593689653

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

L.A. TIMES 15 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • TIME "100 BEST" • RUPAUL'S BOOK CLUB PICK • An engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.

“A transcendent work of art.” —Boston Globe

“Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century.” —Junot Díaz

“Heart-piercingly personal. . . . Suffused with love.” —Los Angeles Times

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .

Gish’s mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid—far closer to her than her real mother—is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But proud as he is, he can only sigh, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Agnes finds solace in books and in 1947 announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail—never to return.

Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain—“Bad bad girl!”—as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.

Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as incisive as it is compassionate.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GISH JEN is the author of five novels, two books of stories, and two works of nonfiction. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University. She and  her husband split their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

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Chapter I

A Daughter

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice.

Your grandmother was a Suzhou beauty, she says. Do you know where is Suzhou?

Of course, I say. West of Shanghai.

For I do know: Suzhou is where the classic Chinese gardens are—the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The Lingering Garden. The Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets. West of Shanghai is the correct answer. But my mother does not say so. She is the same now as she was when she was alive—a master of the art of withholding.

Your grandmother was a Suzhou beauty, my mother says again. She spoke Suzhou dialect, Chinese people say it is like singing. And she was tall and thin. By the standards of 1920s Shanghai, that is.

Meaning thin but maybe not so tall, I think. As was my mother in her youth, too, although I mostly picture her in her late-life, big-bellied stage, when she had the bulbous shape of a snake that has swallowed a large animal. Her stomach was so perfectly spherical that had she not been in her nineties, you might have thought her pregnant, and indeed it was likely the result of her five children, the second of whom was me.

But whatever.

Go on, I say.

All my life, after all, I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong—how I became her nemesis, her bête noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat.

You look like her, she says. Only not so tall, not so thin, not so beautiful.

Oh, I laugh. Now, this is the mother I remember, tactful as a sledgehammer. You are too kind.

When I see you, I see her, she says.

Oh no. Your mother? I say. Because of all the possible misfortunes of birth, to remind your mother of a mother who had rejected her is surely one of the worst—as well as, it seems, a great unmentionable. For what does she immediately say but: Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!

Well, she wasn’t exactly the mother of your heart, was she? I say. That was your nursemaid, the one you called “Nǎi‑mā”—milk mother—right? The one who was sent away.

She neither agrees nor disagrees. But then she repeats, Nai‑ma. And as dead as she is, she begins to cry.

My grandmother was twenty-two and my grandfather forty-eight when they married, and for all I know, he was a ringer then for James Bond. But in the only picture I have of him, he is short and rotund. He is wearing a padded Chinese gown; his arms splay in a way that might put one in mind of a penguin. And then there are his porthole glasses, thick and black as Mr. Magoo’s. Actually, he was a crack Chinese banker up to whose porte cochere chauffeured cars would roll, their shiny doors opening to reveal the gigantic shoes of foreigners. At one point, he saved China’s rural banks from collapse by convincing the Shanghai bankers to back them—or so the family story goes, at least—holding the meeting at his house because his was the only driveway big enough to handle so many cars. My aunt remembers coming downstairs and asking what was going on. To which my grandmother answered, Baba has just saved banking in China. But in the photograph, he mostly looks earthquake-proof—as if, were there to be a big one, he would be the last to topple.

His first wife having died—“of natural causes,” my mother always hastened to say, as if we might suspect foul play—my grandfather needed to replace her. He had had two children by that first wife, after all; someone had to take charge of them. And so: enter a matchmaker with a photo of my grandmother the Suzhou beauty. Would I more truly resemble her if I painted my cheeks and coiffed my hair and could squeeze into that dauntingly columnar qípáo? Could I, had I been born in China, with enough powdering and pampering and corseting, have exuded her just-possibly-attainable unattainability? One wants to say it’s hard to know, but in truth it’s easy enough. My grandmother’s beauty only throws into relief my plainness, with that uniquely inescapable unkindness of so many family resemblances. It’s a good thing that I have had, here in America, options besides attracting widowed bankers.

My father would boom, “Hello, hello!” to the foreigners as they filled up the garden, my mother says now. It was the only English he knew. And so it was always “Hello, hello!”

What about your mother? What did she say? I ask.

My mother was always sort of like in the background, she says. You do not see her too much; she does not have too much to say.

People said she never even laughed out loud. Is that true?

She was a real lady. Very proper.

She had self-control.

Not like you.

Always talking, you mean.

You have no self-control! she says. Too much to say.

Proper though she might have been, my grandmother did smoke opium. She was not an addict. She was a social smoker, as most society women were—a smoker of expensive Persian opium, beautifully prepared for her and her friends by an opium sous-chef. Never mind the price, opium was so good for cramps, they agreed, and oh! How bright the opium-smoker’s world, how bright and sharp and glorious! It was all the world should be, a world in which a woman might make demands—demands! can you imagine?—and even laugh out loud, keeping a hand over her mouth as a giggle bubbled up through her fingers.

Another world, indeed.

My grandmother could not read, but she was hardly alone. Never mind most women, most people in China couldn’t, not even in modern Shanghai. What with its neon lights and dance clubs and exciting crossroads style—its hǎipài, as people called it—Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East.” But alongside its cars and trams and double-decker buses rolled ox-drawn carts and rickshaws and wheelbarrows. The British racecourse boasted the largest grandstand in the world; its clubhouse featured so much teak and marble, it could have been a land-bound Titanic. But cheek by jowl with its splendors sprawled the sort of shantytowns for which words like “destitute” and “squalor” were coined. Many of the shanties did not even boast bamboo-pole walls; many were straw-mat lean-tos. This “Paris” was no Paris.

Even rickshaw pullers mobbed the schools and libraries that had been opened for them, though. Everyone hungered for an education, and my grandmother was no exception. Having taught herself a few characters, she had a newspaper delivered, so that she could practice. Then it was two papers; and then three. She went to the storytelling theaters as well, listening raptly as scenes from Dream of the Red Chamber were read and performed—how she loved them. The poetry! The romance! No middle-aged widowers in that story. Instead, there was true love, enduring love, in a garden outside society. Was this what novels were? They were like opium fantasies.

In real life, meanwhile, she dutifully produced five children, one every two and a half years, as if meeting the terms of a contract. My mother was the first and a disappointment.

I should have been a boy, she explains now. I should have been a number one son.

Because? I say.

Because that’s how Chinese people think, she says. The number one son carries on the family line.

And people might not live forever but the family line does?

That’s right.

And only boys carry it on, so what use is a girl? Except to bear sons?

If my mother did not have a son, there would be a new wife soon, my mother says.

As for the good news: at least my mother lived to feel everyone’s disappointment. In the China of her childhood, after all, families...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593689658
• ISBN 13: 9780593689653
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 353
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar