Gish jen biography of barack

Gish Jen has a soft voice. In Thursday's reading to promote her highly acclaimed book of short stories, Who's Irish?, Jen's light voice gave life to the title story with warm and inviting tones. This made for a surprising juxtaposition, as the themes in "Who's Irish?" do not generally parallel the writer's warm and tender speaking voice. Dressed in a padded black shirt, black linen pants and clogs, Jen's comfortable appearance and mellow voice belied any of the tough questions that her story was to pose.

Jen has had stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and most recently in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. As Creative Writing Chair Martha Collins pointed out in her introduction of Jen, "Gish Jen's work is multi-faceted in literary ways. To say Gish's writing is multi-cultural is an understatement. Her work is written with such care; every word counts."

The prota

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Gish Jen's Tales of Home and Away

The characters of Thank You, Mr. Nixon (Knopf, Jan. ), Gish Jen’s expansive new collection of superconnected short stories, are restless. They leave China for amerika and return, leave amerika for China and return, traveling between the two countries and cultures as if through a revolving door. Jen, like the second-generation Americans in her book, understands what it is to be “hybrid,” and the inherent tension that requires her characters to engage in frequent acts of translation—linguistic, cultural, and generational—whether they wish to or not.

Born on Long Island in , Jen says she came of age “at the height of multiculturalism, when I was supposed to be writing about my Chinese roots.” But growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., she learned more Yiddish than Chinese—an experience she mined for her very funny second novel, ’s Mona in the Promised Land, about a C

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Novelist Gish Jen Finds Literary Voice Outside Harvard Identity

As Gish Jen ’77 sits at her cedar kitchen table, cradling a mug of green tea and reflecting on her career, it is difficult to imagine her as anything other than a novelist, educator and mother.

Framed black and white photos of her children, ten-year-old Luke and three-year-old Paloma, line a white pillar behind her wicker chair. As Jen sits, her husband of nearly 20 years organizes their photo collection of recent family trips to Egypt and Vietnam.

But Jen writes about identity and, like the protagonist in her novel Mona in the Promised Land, much of her life has been a struggle to define herself.

Though Jen does not like to be labeled an Asian-American author, her stories and articles predominantly focus on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America. They have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Republic, as well as in numerous textbooks a