Why We Write (11 page)

“J
en knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes,”
Washington Post
reviewer Ron Charles wrote about
World and Town
. In her review of
The Love Wife
,
New York Times
critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Ms. Jen takes big social issues like ethnic identity and racial prejudice and filters them through the prism of…individuals so in thrall to their own quirky emotional histories that they never for a moment seem like generic or representative figures.”

A second-generation Chinese American whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 1940s, novelist Gish Jen has built a career on craft and contradiction. The pure
power of her prose has earned her a devoted following of die-hard fans and a slew of rave reviews and awards, including a Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And, while challenging some of America’s most entrenched melting-pot myths as only an insider/outsider could, she has somehow managed to defy categorization as an “immigrant novelist.”

Gish Jen

Why I write

Writing is part and parcel of how I am in the world. Eating, sleeping, writing: they all go together. I don’t think about why
I’m writing any more than I think about why I’m breathing. Its absence is bad, just as not breathing would be bad.

When I’m writing I’m unaware of myself. I’m in my characters, in the story. I know the writing is going well when I look at my watch and see that it’s ten p.m., and the last time I looked it was noon.

My writing has always been very intuitive. When I start a piece I don’t have a plan; I’m not looking ahead. I’m looking only at what I’m doing, and then I look up and realize, Here I am at the other shore of the lake, so I guess I must have been swimming.

Why I’m not supposed to write

Even a lot of second-generation Asian Americans are uncomfortable talking about ourselves and taking up a lot of room. From birth we’ve been encouraged to think about ourselves in terms of our social roles, so when we talk about our childhoods, some of us talk about our own childhoods, but some of us talk more about others than we do about ourselves.

The whole question of narration for me has been caught up in issues of identity. That’s one of the reasons I was so slow coming to the idea of writing.

Books were precious to me as a child because we didn’t have a lot of them. My parents didn’t read to me, and I went to a Catholic school that only had a donated library. My godmother would send me books for Christmas, though:
Heidi
,
Little Women.
I read them each thousands of times.

Versification

When I was a junior in college, I took a writing class by accident. It was a class on prosody, taught by Robert Fitzgerald, the translator. I signed up for it because I felt I didn’t understand poetry. Why did poems have those little lines? Why didn’t poets just say what they meant? I didn’t understand from the course description that I was actually myself going to have to write poetry in this class, but when the light went on, I thought, well, let me try it; I can always drop the class if it doesn’t work out. So I wrote my first poem, and right away I loved it. I told my roommate, “If I could do this every day for the rest of my life I would.”

But people like me didn’t become writers, and probably I would not be a writer today had not Fitzgerald said to me, “Why are you premed? You should do something with words. If you’re not going to be a writer, you should at least be in publishing.” He then called up his editor at Doubleday and said, “I’ve got this student. You should give her a job.”

Today I realize that this didn’t happen to everyone, but in 1977 I didn’t know enough about the world to be amazed. It was as if someone had said, “I know this apartment you can rent”—something helpful, that’s all.

Doubleday back then had a program where they’d pay for any outside courses you wanted to take. So I took a class in nonfiction writing at the New School, and when I turned in my assignment the teacher said, “This is the best writing I’ve seen in years. You should think about being a writer,” about which, I thought, How strange. Here is another person who thinks I should be a writer. I started buying literary journals and hanging
around with people interested in writing. One of them was Jonathan Weiner, who went on to write
The Beak of the Finch
; back then he was just moving out of poetry and into science writing, which he was very excited about.

After a while it became clear that by working in publishing, I was neither doing what I really wanted to do—which by then, finally, was clearly writing—nor making a reasonable income, and my parents, of course, wanted me to do something practical. My father kept saying, “You have to have a meal ticket”—something, as an immigrant, he understood very well. So I applied to business school, mostly because I’d already been premed and prelaw, and B-school was the one sort of grad school I had never considered.

To my amazement, I got into both Harvard and Stanford, and decided to go to Stanford because they had a good writing program there. It was a pretty confusing time, but I took my first fiction classes while I was in business school, and they were wonderful. I took an advanced class first, with Michael Cook. Then I realized that I didn’t know the basics, so I backed up and took a beginning class with Stephanie Vaughn. The whole thing was a bit cockamamie, but Michael and Stephanie were truly gifted teachers and taught me a great deal.

I never went to any business classes after the first semester. Instead, I read and read—I think I read a hundred novels that year.

Finally I took a leave of absence and applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Iowa

This was Iowa in the early 1980s, a much more innocent time. Today there are agents all over the MFA writing programs, but back then, agents were in some far distant future for us. I don’t remember anyone discussing agents or how to get one—publishers, either. It was really just about the work.

At Iowa I studied with Barry Hannah, who at one point held a Raymond Carver write-alike contest. It was anonymous; we all signed our entries “Raymond Carver.” So the next day, when Barry announced the winner, he had to hold the story up and ask who’d written it. I was mortified to have to raise my hand, and still remember the moment as both happy and awful. Recently someone told me, “You’re a very good speaker, but all your stories are about being embarrassed,” and I realized that’s kind of true. But in any case, there it is.

I published my first story while I was in the program, and under my given name, Lillian Jen. As soon as I saw that “Lillian” I thought, the self who had written the story was not Lillian; and after that, I always published under the name “Gish”—Gish being a nickname I’d picked up in high school.

I don’t know which was the chicken and which was the egg, but becoming a writer was very much tied up with taking on this other identity, making up this person who wrote. Lillian was a nice Chinese girl. Gish was not such a nice girl. Gish was the one propping the doors open so I could get back into the dorm at night, the one who got into all kinds of trouble. All these things that were not open to Lillian were open to Gish.

I still think of Lillian as quite a dutiful person. I am a responsible human being. I’m the mother of two, and a more or
less upstanding member of society, but there’s a kind of freedom that goes with being Gish that didn’t go with being Lillian, and that freedom went with writing.

Ninety words per minute

After I got out of Iowa in 1983 I got married and moved east because both my family and my husband’s were there. As I needed a job, I thought maybe I should try and get back into publishing. So with the idea I might try for a job at a university press I took a typing test, at the end of which the woman said, “You typed ninety words per minute with no mistakes. I’m sure we can get you a job.” I was elated. But in fact she couldn’t get me a job at the press or anywhere else. The months went by; and while I was waiting, I got it into my head to apply for a fellowship at the Bunting Institute, though, honestly, I did not think I had any chance of getting one. I was so convinced of this that when they contacted me to say that they were missing a recommendation, I did nothing.

I happened to have lunch around that time with the poet Martha Collins. While we were talking, the subject of my application and my missing recommendation somehow came up, to which she responded, “I’ll be your recommender.” I said, “I’m not going to get a Bunting,” but she marched right over to the Bunting office and said she was my second recommender. And that fall I was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe.

My first day was a Monday. I remember everyone sitting in a circle introducing themselves, and when they got to me, I introduced myself as “a would-be writer,” to which the other women objected until I finally called myself, for the first time, a
writer; and such was the climate of expectation there that by the Friday of that week, I had decided to write a novel. I can still remember writing the first line of the novel that was going to be
Typical American
; I can still see my fingers typing,
It’s an American story.

A number of agents wrote to me as I worked, mostly in response to stories I published here and there; I wrote to them all saying that I’d be in touch once I had a novel, and put their names in a file. And when I was done with my book I got the names back out and sent my book to them, and to my amazement they all liked it. I picked an agent who then found a number of editors who were interested, and we sold it to Seymour Lawrence at Houghton Mifflin. It was all so improbable. In a way, I still can’t believe it.

I had a child by then, and knew I needed a place outside the house to work—something I still recommend to young mothers trying to write. In my case, I got a big enough advance to buy myself a small office, a great joy. When I walked into my office for the first time I thought, I am now a permanent resident in the world of literature.

A little enchanted space

My career has been very unusual. I feel incredibly thankful that I am where I am, and extremely dismayed for other writers.

I feel as though I stepped onto a boat that left the dock almost as soon as I stepped onto it. Multiculturalism had a lot of problems, but it did mean that many people wrote who never would have written before. It changed what they wrote about, too.

I’ve continued in a little enchanted space. I’m at a wonderful publishing house, Knopf, with a wonderful editor, Ann Close. Though I have taken a lot of risks with my work, my house has been with me every step of the way.

Publishing has gotten so much more difficult overall, though. I had a long period of innocence before I quite knew that publishing was a business and books had to be sold. I didn’t know what my sales numbers were; that wasn’t part of my life. And in truth, I’m still not very clear about them, though I’m not in as much of a fog as I was. But can the young people afford that innocence? I’m aware that this whole project we’ve embarked upon is fragile and very much at odds with mainstream trends. Anyone who cares about writing has to be more realistic than in the past.

The fact that you can’t get an advance you can live on is inevitably going to weed out a lot of good writers. Not that there won’t be any; but we will tend, I think, to have writers with both talent and resources. Talent is not going to be enough. Or talent will be enough for the writer to produce one or two books, but not a body of work. And we may well see something like what we see in many elite institutions, too, a kind of barbell, with people with resources doing all right, and people who come from very unrepresented groups also doing unexpectedly well, but with the middle hit hard. As somebody who could so easily have not been a writer myself, I feel terrible to see this happening.