Events
Past ASIA Event:
The Love Wife: Benefit Reading by Literary Award-Winner Gish Jen - October 25, 2004
Local author Gish Jen reads from her new novel, The Love Wife (Knopf, 2004), at
a benefit for the new Boston Chinatown
Neighborhood Center (BCNC). The new center will meet the growing needs of Boston's Asian American
community and residents of Boston's Chinatown,
South End, and South Cove communities by providing bilingual education, child care,
cultural, social, and recreational programs.
Free and open to the public. RSVP to capcamp@bcnc.net or (617) 357-0052
Boston Public Library, Monday, Oct. 25, 6-8 pm.
T-Stops: Copley Square (Green Line) or Back Bay/South End (Orange Line)
Books will be available at a discount and Gish Jen will sign copies.
Book sales benefit the BCNC.
More about The Love Wife:
The Love Wife is a generous, funny, explosive novel about
the new ‘half-half’ American family. A meddlesome Chinese-American mother bequeaths a Chinese nanny to her ambivalent son and his big
blonde wife in this darkly comic fairy tale about cultural assimilation, biological destiny and
domestic warfare. In her earlier novels (Typical American; etc.) and short stories, Jen
established a sort of Asian Richter scale, registering the culture shock of new and not-so-new Chinese
immigrants and their complicated, irrepressible families. Here she focuses on the racially
mixed Wong family: Carnegie; his older wife, Janie (dubbed "Blondie" by Carnegie's hilariously awful
mother); two adopted Asian daughters (the difficult teenager Lizzy and the hypersensitive
Wendy); and a "bio" baby son who looks disturbingly non-Asian.
When Carnegie's mother dies after a
long bout with Alzheimer's, the Wongs are
shocked to learn that she has arranged for an extended visit by a female relative from the Mainland,
the unmarried, mysterious Lan. A year older than Blondie, whose "dewlap"
and resemblance to an "Aeroflot" are beginning to alarm Carnegie, Lan seems quaint, "plainish" and
self-effacing; soon her ambiguous status,
passive-aggressiveness and blooming beauty threaten to destabilize the already rocky Wong marriage.
Not only does she captivate Carnegie,
who is dismayed and fascinated by his own rediscovered Chinese identity, she also preys on the
Wong girls' insecurity as Blondie's nonbiological
daughters. What threatens to turn into a standard evil-nanny plot takes on unexpected depth as
Jen captures the not always likable Wong family
with her trademark compassion, laser-like attention to detail and quirky wit....
this novel has a robust, lived-in quality that makes you miss it when it's over.
More about Gish Jen:
Gish Jen has published works in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic,
The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, among other periodicals. Her accolades include grants
from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the
Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She currently holds a Strauss
Living Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her two other novels include Typical American (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’™ Circle Award and its sequel, Mona in the Promised Land (Knopf, 1996), which was named one of the ten best books of 1996 by The Los Angeles Times. Her story collection, Who's Irish?, was published by Knopf in 1999. All three books were New York Times notable books.
Gish Jen lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.
More info and/or to volunteer, contact ASIA
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