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At first glance, the protagonist of Gish Jen’s latest novel seems like many of the other Chinese American immigrants Jen has portrayed so astutely in her decades-long career. Loo Shu-hsin is born into privilege in 1924 – her father is a banker in the largely British-run International Settlement of Shanghai – but her life is marked by her mother’s constant belittlement. “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk,” she’s told, after speaking out of turn. “With a tongue like yours, no one will ever marry you.” Her only solace in the household is a nursemaid, Nai-ma, who vanishes one day without warning – a psychic wound that lingers even as she grows up, emigrates to the US and enrols in a PhD programme.
In one striking way, however, Loo Shu-hsin is different from Jen’s previous protagonists: she happens to be Jen’s own mother. Bad Bad Girl is in part a fictionalised reconstruction of Jen’s mother’s life, in service of a searching attempt to excavate their troubled relationship. “All my life, after all,” Jen writes, “I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong – how I became her nemesis, her bête noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat.”
The result is an intriguing blend of fiction and nonfiction. Jen began writing Bad Bad Girl as a memoir (Loo is referred to as “my mother” throughout), but she found that fiction crept in to fill the gaps of her reticent mother’s life. It’s an empathetic, expansive choice. By attempting to imagine the full story of her mother’s life, to see things from her perspective, Jen allows her to become not a villain but a deeply flawed human being, even as she unflinchingly describes the emotional withholding, criticism and physical violence that marked their own relationship. In Jen’s telling, her mother’s upbringing clearly prefigured Jen’s own. Just as her mother was berated for her curiosity and spirit, so she berated Jen with the same cutting refrains: “Bad bad girl!” and “No one will ever marry you”.
But it’s not just emotional history that shapes a person and a relationship, the book makes clear. Bad Bad Girl is also a case study of the way the sweeping events of world history can warp individual lives; at times, it functions as a kind of capsule summary of 20th-century Chinese history. In 1937, Loo witnesses Japanese forces invade and conquer Shanghai – a terrifying period of firebombing and panicked mobs – and lives through Japanese occupation until the end of the second world war. After she leaves for America, we catch glimpses of the Communist party’s rise through Loo’s discussions with other Shanghainese students and the letters she eventually receives from her family: the Nationalist party’s flight to Taiwan; the passage of an agrarian reform law; food shortages that ultimately culminate in the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. A sister is sent to a labour camp, and she never sees her parents again.
The weight of this history colours the second half of the book, where the focus shifts to Jen’s own childhood memories in suburban Yonkers and Scarsdale and her mother’s selective cruelty. Jen was given the smallest bedroom among her siblings and the burnt ends of their meatloaf dinners, and was hit by her mother over and over again. Here, it’s clear, is the root of the obsessive ache that fuels the entire book. Even months before her mother dies in 2020, Jen is still trying, as an adult with children of her own, to win her approval. “I want to have had a real mother, Mom,” she thinks in an imagined conversation. “Just like you wanted. A mother who loved me. I want to have had a mother like Nai-ma. I want not to have a mother-shaped hole in my heart.”
These imagined exchanges crop up throughout Bad Bad Girl – moments outside the narrative, when Jen and her mother talk about what Jen is writing, commenting on and complicating the text. Bad Bad Girl is thus half story, half never-ending, imagined conversation, the freewheeling, frank discussion she and her mother never had when her mother was alive. It’s a kind of wish fulfilment, as Jen is perfectly aware. But the novel is all the more piercing for this unsatisfied, unsatisfiable yearning for understanding. We never stop talking to – or arguing with – our parents, Jen’s book reminds us. They linger in our heads all our lives, attachments durable enough to withstand even death.
