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Gish Jen Passes Muster - Again Dave Weich, Powells.com
Having published two novels, Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land, Jen came to Powell's to introduce her first collection of shorter, award-winning pieces. It was refreshing to talk about short stories for a change. Any time you have the chance to read an author's work four or five times before meeting her, you can't help but feel better prepared. "There was once a review that Updike wrote of a Philip Roth novel in which he said that the novel had been 'a little too long in the writing' and that, as a result, all these offshoots had sprung up. I think that's true: if it takes too long, your interest begins to wander," Jen admitted. "What I do with those side interests is I channel them into stories."
Dave: When did you find out that "Birthmates" had been chosen for Best American Short Stories of the Century? Gish Jen: It's over a year ago now, but I was completely shocked. Updike is the kind of writer that I would want to be respected by, but I don't think he's the type I write for. This is a terrible thing to say, but I wouldn't have thought that my world and my concerns would resonate with him. I was just completely shocked and thrilled to find out I was entirely wrong. Dave: This is your first collection of stories, but you've been writing and publishing them for a while. Another story in Who's Irish?, "The Water-Faucet Vision," made Best American Short Stories 1988. And another, "In the American Society," is already anthologized in college textbooks. Jen: I'd been thinking for some time of doing a collection, and when I got pregnant with my new child, I knew it wasn't time to start another novel. Also, I had a number of stories that had been hanging around for a while. But there was something about that second trimester of pregnancy - I don't know, my estrogen levels were really high - but for one reason or another I started writing stories. Three of these pieces came quite quickly. I finished "House House Home," I wrote "Duncan in China," and I wrote "Who's Irish?" all within a month and a half, which for me is very, very fast. By the time I had those pieces, I knew I had a collection. I was still hoping to make an aesthetic whole. You want to have the collection cohere. I wasn't sure I had that before. Dave: The stories feel like the work of one author, certainly, but at the same time, there are a lot of different points of view, different structures. . . no two of the stories feel the same, which is rare for a collection. Jen: I wrote almost all these stories while I was supposed to be doing something else, so they're all off the beaten track for me. I don't know if that accounts for the variety or not. Updike once wrote a review of a Philip Roth novel in which he said that the novel had been "a little too long in the writing" and that, as a result, all these offshoots had sprung up. I think that's true: if it takes too long, your interest begins to wander. What I do with those side interests is I channel them into stories. That's good because it enables me to go back to my novel and not be distracted. But also, by their nature, they compel you to write them - without realizing it, you are. So maybe more than a novel could be, they're products of your unconscious. There's a kind of waywardness to them, so maybe it's not surprising that they would be extremely various. Dave: Because you didn't sit down to write a bunch of stories. Jen: Yes, they're all things that came unprompted. Dave: In the notes to Best American 1995, you say you wrote "Birthmates" while you were writing Mona in the Promised Land. Jen: One thing I've noticed is that if I'm writing something very funny, it tends to engender something which is serious. I think every writer struggles to keep that opposite tendency in check so the novel doesn't take a big right turn and become something else. But with "Birthmates," I got it out of my system; I wrote the story and went back to work on Mona. Dave: "Birthmates" has a completely different tone than Mona, but it's pretty funny. It's safe to say that to be considered for Best American of the Century, a story has to be complex enough that you can read it a few times and still be getting more out of it. For me, in the case of "Birthmates," it's two things: point of view and the balance between the serious story and the fact that there are some really funny passages in the middle of it all. A bunch of the lines stand out: "The tie pin was smiling. The man was not." The sign behind the registration desk that reads, "FEWEST CUSTOMER INJURIES, 1972-73". And just the whole idea of a man walking around all day carrying a phone as an instrument of self-defense. Jen: Yeah, he's walking around his hotel with his phone. He's armed with a telephone handset. It's funny. But it's a different kind of humor than Mona. There's not as much vocal humor in the story as there is in Mona, but there's a lot of situational humor. Early on in my career people would say, "Is this supposed to be funny or it supposed to be sad?" And I would hear voices like that and think that somehow I was supposed to resolve my work, be either funny or sad. Then at a certain point I finally decided, for better or worse, I was somebody who simultaneously sees things as happy and sad. I am the kind of person who would make a joke on someone's deathbed, tacky as it may seem. It could be seen an Asian part of my sensibility, in the sense that it's a very Asian thing to imagine that opposites go together. Ying-yang, sweet and sour. There isn't the sense that something should be sweet or sour, one or the other. I don't know if that's completely true, but in any case that ying-yang quality certainly embodies a lot of these stories. Dave: You mention in the notes also that a lot of the emotion came from a terminated pregnancy of your own - and the whole idea of being able to laugh or creating an environment where you could laugh. Jen: It took me years. The pregnancy that I lost came while I was writing Typical American, and in some ways I think it accounts for why the ending of that book is so sad. I lost the pregnancy between the fourth and fifth sections. People will analyze and analyze, but the experience changed me. I was very worried I wouldn't finish that book because I was a different person. It was my first pregnancy, conceived after a long period of infertility. But I did finish Typical American, and that experience kind of sat there with me all through Mona. Then all of a sudden, almost at the end of Mona... Obviously, their marriage was not my marriage and those facts are not my facts (the way they lose their child is actually not the way I lost my child), but the fact was that I knew what it was to lose a pregnancy. And the fact that I could write about it with anything like levity represented a kind of maturing that had taken me, what, six years to achieve? Dave: And yet essentially you present it from his point of view, the husband's. It's third-person, but it's sitting with him. Jen: It's sitting with him. The story in many ways is about his distance from it and his inability to close that distance. In some ways, too, it's about a subtle fallout from racism. I realize that I was suggesting there's a way in which Art Woo, in order to deal with his work environment, has had to deaden himself in certain ways. And the ways in which he's deadened himself have cost him his marriage. Dave: I found it interesting. One the one hand, I'm reading and I sympathize with Art because he's not in a good situation; he's not in a comfortable environment. Yet at the same time when I look carefully I see past his point of view to Lisa, who sees things completely differently. You show the reader her perspective by Art's trying to reconstruct it - what Lisa must have been thinking. Obviously he's failing to understand certain things; we see through his thoughts to something closer to the truth. But it's written in very casually. That's an interesting, effective, and very subtle way to build numerous viewpoints. Jen: Well, thank you. She is kind of stitched in there lightly, kind of the way the daughter is in "Who's Irish?" is stitched in, with just a couple of lines. In my mind, I'm not on the side of either one of these characters. I think that she has a viewpoint and he has a viewpoint. She hasn't had to grapple with some of the hard realities he's had to deal with. It's not as though I see her as right. I see her as having learned to retain some of the humanity, but also as naive in some ways. Dave: When he gets hit by the phone and collapses... that scene is building, it's building, it's building - though we don't know toward exactly what, then - bam! - all of a sudden he's down on the floor. I think it takes two lines. The whole scene, if you compare, mimics Lisa's recollection of the lightning. The first time I read the story, I didn't really notice. It's not heavy-handed. Jen: I do hope there will be layers and layers of things for people to find. There are references and jokes along the way. Did you get the Oscar Wilde reference? Dave: No. Jen: Maybe next time. Dave: For some reason, at odd moments throughout the day, I've found myself thinking of the passage about croissants. I can almost imagine Updike writing it - though I don't know if the comparison would have occurred to me if he hadn't been the one to choose the story for Best of: In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up with an asymmetrical mouthful of pastry, which he then had to relocate with his tongue to a more central location. This made him look less purposive than he might. Also, croissants were more apt than other breakfast foods to spray little flakes all over one's clean dark suit. Art himself had accordingly never ordered a croissant in any working situation, and he believed that attention to this sort of detail was how it was that he had not lost his job like many of his colleagues.It might just be the word purposive that makes me think of Updike, I don't know why. Jen: That's very flattering to me. I do pay close attention to the texture of life, which I suppose is Updike-like. But Updike is sort of a preternatural... Dave: What do you read? Jen: I just finished a wonderful book called Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West. I loved it. And I've been reading Preston Falls and liking it a lot. Dave: I haven't read that yet, but I keep hearing about it lately. Our graphics guy told me that it was written by the former lead singer of Bread. Jen: What? Dave: They have the same name, the guy who wrote that book and the singer/songwriter: David Gates. Jen: The author isn't the singer, though, right? Dave: No. It's just another rumor, like Mikey died from Pop Rocks. Clyde was just screwing with me, and I fell for it. Jen: Oh. Because I hadn't heard that. Dave: We must be hanging out on different playgrounds. Anyway, more than once you've written about Asian children adopting the religion of their American friends. In "The Water-Faucet Vision," it's Catholicism, and it's Judaism in Mona.
Jen: It's funny because everybody thinks of me as Jewish now. But, yes, I've also written about turning Catholic. Dave: You've covered a lot of holy ground. Jen: After Mona came out, so many people would come up to me and say, "What are you doing for the High Holidays?" And I'd say, "Um, I'm not Jewish." And I'd feel guilty. I'd feel like a lapsed Jew. But "The Water-Faucet Vision" is about turning Catholic. And it's also about superstition, that story. Religion is one more way the girls can define themselves. Of course I'm interested in the Asian-American experience. But I'm also interested in architecture; I'm interested in religion. I'm very interested in the different realities, not just my own ethnic group. In Mona, I wrote extensively about what it means to be Jewish. And I was happy about that. That's one of the greatest challenges, as a writer, that I set for myself. To see that through effort and imagination, you could penetrate another people's experience.
The bar is higher now than it used to be, which I think is a good thing; you can't get away with a so-so job when you're writing about an ethnic group other than your own. And I was very happy when Cynthia Ozick reviewed it and presented, really, a banner take. I was thrilled just to have attracted the notice of a writer whom I admire as much as I admire Cynthia Ozick. But in addition I was thrilled to have passed muster with her. I felt as if I had contributed in a tiny way to peace and understanding. And if I could do that, surely other people could imagine the Asian-American experience.
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