Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen: A novel with some truth in it

Despite her extensive back catalogue which includes five works of fiction, I’d never read anything by Gish Jen. Her new, difficult-to-categorise book, Bad Bad Girl, is the story of her mother’s life in which Jen imagines conversations, seeking answers to questions her mother would never give. It’s a novelisation, leaning very much towards memoir but, as Jen herself says towards the end of the book: A novel? An autofiction? A memoir? Do I care? It’s what I need to do.

Chicagoans did not think theirs a rich city. But to my mother it was a fairy-tale city where bombs had never fallen and tanks had never rolled, and where even poor people had coats and shirts and shoes.

Born in 1924 into a wealthy Shanghai household, Loo Shu-hsin was the first child of a progressive father and his beautiful second wife. Her first misdemeanour was not to be a boy, something her mother never forgave, alternating between ignoring her and berating her, telling her she would never marry. Spotting her curious, incisive intelligence, her father sent her to a convent school where she was a star pupil. Even the Japanese invasion doesn’t deter her determination to pursue her studies in America, urged on by her prescient father. By the time she meets her Chinese husband, she’s Agnes and he’s Norman but while he eventually turns his back on China, she continues to insist she’s Chinese. She becomes pregnant quickly, then again, giving birth first to a son, then to Lillian, who will eventually choose to go by her nickname Gish, followed by three more children in quick succession. Money is tight: Agnes turns her back on the veiled requests from her family, ignoring the increasingly distressing reports of their plight in Communist China, never forgetting the coldness of her own mother while replicating their relationship with Lillian, bright, curious and strongminded, just as she was in her youth. Lillian forges ahead with little support, her friends shocked by her treatment at home not least the violence dished out by Agnes, but only to Lillian. Throughout her life, Lillian longs for the relationship with her mother enjoyed by her siblings, never giving up even towards the end in 2020.

It’s as if there were some lock to her, to which, if I only knew where to look, there is a key.   

Written in the first person, punctuated by the conversations she wishes she’d had with her mother, Jen’s book reads much more like fiction in its first half, rich in the historical detail of early twentieth-century Shanghai. Once Lillian is an adult, it becomes more of a memoir but as Jen says herself – who cares about genre, particularly when the author is open about her thinking when writing it. It’s a moving depiction of a dysfunctional relationship which has grown out of an equally difficult one. Lillian and the young Agnes are almost mirror images of each other in their fierce intelligence and determination – both refusing to fulfil the ‘first daughter’ domestic role. There are no answers, although the short notes about Lillian in Agnes’s planner suggest a love never demonstrated, giving Jen’s account an aching poignancy. The triumph is the understanding of her own children and the love of the husband her mother told her she would never have.

Granta Books: London 9781803513249 352 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)