that resists closure and suggests a strategy of con-
tinual transformation as a necessary and histori-
cally contingent ethic of survival” (182). As the
narrator observes, farmers in Idaho can no longer
maintain a profitable enterprise in response to the
shifts of an increasingly global economy, just as
peasant farmers in India, when rents and irriga-
tion become unaffordable, find themselves forced
to sell their land in hopes of finding some form
of employment in the burgeoning and overpop-
ulated cities. In this sense, Mukherjee challenges
the reader to make any final pronouncement on
the morality of Jyoti/Jasmine/Jase/Jane’s decision
at the end of the book to leave the paralyzed Bud
while carrying his child, as no cultural values/
standards appear to be absolute and unchanging;
rather, they must be mitigated and deliberated
within the context of a constantly shifting self and
that self ’s relationship to increasingly destabilized
notions of culture and society.
Bibliography
Carter-Sanborn, Kristin. “ ‘We Murder Who We Were’:
Jasmine and the Violence of Identity.” American
Literature 66, no. 3 (September 1994): 573–593.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Viking Pen-
guin, 1989.
Ruppel, F. Timothy. “ ‘Re-inventing ourselves a mil-
lion times’: Narrative, Desire, Identity, and Bharati
Mukherjee’s Jasmine.” College Literature 22, no. 1
(February 1995): 181–191.
Zach Weir
Jen, Gish (1955– )
Born Lillian Jen in New York to Shanghai im-
migrants, Gish Jen changed her name early in
her writing career to mark the creation of a new
self. The sharp, strong sound of Jen’s new name
matched her mission to write about subjects she
calls “dangerous” and “naughty”: racism, sex,
power, and greed (Satz 132). The combination of
dangerous topics and a tragicomic tone has earned
her praise for breaking away from the established
script of Asian-American experience. In fact, Jen’s
wildly successful writing career has been earned
by pushing against and through conventional
ideas about assimilation and cultural conflict.
Critics point to Jen as a new kind of Asian-Ameri-
can writer, a writer in the post-KINGSTON era who
wants to be known as an “American” writer and
who insists that her books depict much more than
just the so-called Asian-American experience.
During a 1993 PBS interview with Bill Moyers, Jen
described her multicultural writing style: “I’ve al-
ways been interested in my books not only just in
capturing the Chinese-American experience, but
the whole American experience and all the many
groups jostling and intermingling and banging
against each other.”
Jen’s parents came separately to America in the
1940s. They married, started a family, and settled
in New York when the political situation in China
prevented them from returning home. The family
lived at first in Queens and Yonkers before moving
to Scarsdale, a predominantly Jewish suburb. The
second of five children, Jen distinguished herself
with her passionate interest in reading literature
and writing short stories. Her favorite books were
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and
Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Jen went on to receive a
B.A. in English from Harvard in 1977. However,
Jen felt unsure about what her future career should
be. Her parents expected her to be a doctor or a
lawyer, so Jen tried pre-law, pre-med, and business
school. Eventually, however, she returned to writ-
ing. In 1983 she received an M.F.A from the pres-
tigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her short stories
from Iowa and afterward have been published in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Plough-
shares, and The New Republic. She completed
her first novel, TYPICAL AMERICAN (1991), during
a fellowship at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. The
novel depicts the life of Chinese immigrant Ralph
Chang, whose attempts to successfully assimilate
into American culture leave him emotionally and
financially bankrupt.
Jen states that “dissonance” led her to pursue
a writing career. No doubt Jen refers to the dis-
cord between her parents’ expectations of her as
a “good Chinese girl,” her Catholic upbringing in
a Jewish suburb, and her hyphenated existence asJen, Gish 135