Gish Jen

The daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to America in the 1940s, Gish Jen (born Lillian Jen) grew up with her four siblings in the New York area. Her father was a civil engineer, and her mother was an elementary school teacher. After living in what Jen once described as the “working class” neighborhood of Yonkers, where she experienced bullying, her family moved to Scarsdale, an upscale suburb in Westchester Country. There, she was delighted to find an extensive school library and enjoyed the range of books available to her. In 1977, Jen received a B.A. in English from Harvard; she was on a pre-med track, but she ended up taking a publishing job at Doubleday in New York after her graduation. When she attended and then dropped out of Stanford Business School, her parents cut her off financially and her mother stopped speaking to her (though they reconciled after one year). After completing her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 1983, Jen wrote her breakout story, “In the American Society.” Compelled by the character of Ralph Chang, she parlayed this short story into her first novel, Typical American (1991), followed by a sequel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996). Altogether, Jen has published eight books of fiction and nonfiction.