lished himself as one of the leading voices among
Chinese-American authors of the “baby-boom”
generation.
Born in Rockville Centre, New York, to parents
who were laundry workers, Louie received a B.A.
from Vassar College in 1977 and an M.F.A. from
the University of Iowa in 1981. After working in
New York City in advertising, he accepted in 1988
a visiting professorship in creative writing at the
University of California at Berkeley. From 1988
to 1992, he taught writing and literature at Vas-
sar College. Since 1992, he has taught courses in
Asian-American studies and creative writing at the
University of California at Los Angeles.
Pangs of Love and Other Stories is a collection
of 11 unusual stories mostly treating the experi-
ences of Chinese Americans as they attempt to
adjust to American life and to their own senses
of hyphenated identity. The Barbarians Are Com-
ing chronicles the generational conflicts within a
working-class Chinese-American family living in
Long Island in the 1970s.
Louie’s essays and short fiction have appeared
in such notable periodicals as Chicago Review, Fic-
tion International, Iowa Review, New York Times
Book Review, Ploughshares, and Zyzzyva. In addi-
tion, his work has been included in the following
anthologies: The Best American Short Stories of
1989 (Boston: Houghton, 1989), The Big Aiiieeeee!
An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese
American Literature (New York: Dutton, 1991),
Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contem-
porary Asian American Fiction (New York: Viking,
1993), and Other Sides of Silence: A Ploughshares
Anthology (New York: Faber, 1993).
Martin KichLove Wife, The Gish Jen (2004)
GISH JEN’s inspiration for her third novel came
from her own biracial family. With a husband of
Irish decent, one child who looks Asian and one
child who looks “American,” Jen wonders about
how her children experience the world differently.
Strangers often ask Jen if her daughter, who looks
“white” with brown hair and fair skin, is her child.
When the Washington Post held an online question
and answer forum with Jen, she told the newspa-
per’s readers that she started writing The Love Wife
with these questions in mind: “What is a family?
What is ‘natural?’ ” She tackled these questions with
the creation of the Wong family. Carnegie Wong,
a second-generation Chinese American, marries
a blonde beauty named Janie, who is renamed
“Blondie” by Carnegie’s mother, Mama Wong.
Carnegie and Janie raise a biological son (Bailey)
and two adopted Asian daughters (Lizzie, who was
abandoned at a New York church, and Wendy from
China). After Mama Wong dies, she continues her
controlling hold on her son by willing to him a
nanny named Lan from China so that her grand-
children might be raised according to their Asian
ancestry. Sending for and hiring Lan are conditions
of Carnegie’s substantial inheritance.
Through the novel’s quickly shifting first-per-
son narrative, we hear each character’s version
of the family story. Jen describes the narrative as
“family therapy without the therapy.” The Wongs
are described as “the new American family,” but
Carnegie worries about his multicultural family.
He painfully questions if Lizzie is Chinese, like
him, at all: “Was she part Japanese? Part Korean?
Part Vietnamese? Was she part Chinese at all?” He
also begins to feel attracted to Lan, whom Blondie
believes Mama Wong has sent “from her grave,
the wife [Carnegie] should have married.” While
Carnegie and the children develop close relation-
ships with Lan, who cooks Asian food and tells
them stories about China, Blondie feels increas-
ingly alienated from the family: “Any passerby
would have thought Lan and Carnegie the hus-
band and wife of the family, and that I was visiting
with my son, Bailey.”
The Love Wife is darker and less comical than
Jen’s previous novels, which include more fantas-
tical plot shifts and tragicomical family relation-
ships. The Love Wife, Jen’s longest novel, includes
serious issues of physical abuse, emotional aban-
donment, and life-threatening illnesses.Bibliography
Anshaw, Carol. “The 21st Century Family.” Women’s
Review of Books 22, no. 2 (2004): 8–9.Love Wife, The 17 7