In this conversation, the acclaimed novelist discusses Bad Bad Girl, the Shanghai-born mother who shaped her, and the blend of fact and fiction she used to understand a life left largely unrecorded.
By most measures, Gish Jen has been a very good girl. She went to Harvard, backed into a respectable job in publishing, left business school when it became clear it was not for her, taught coal-mining engineers in China, earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has now written ten books over four decades. She has been married for forty-five years, raised two children, pays her taxes. Yet throughout her life, her mother greeted her with the same clipped admonition: “Bad, bad girl. You don’t know how to talk.”
That dissonance sits at the center of Bad Bad Girl, Jen’s new hybrid of memoir and fiction, released in October 2025.
Born Lillian Jen to Chinese parents who left China the 1940s, she grew up in the New York suburbs absorbing the dualities that would define her work: silence versus expression, expectation versus agency, an interdependent Eastern sensibility brushing against America’s fierce individualism. Across Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, Who’s Irish?, and her cultural-psychology nonfiction in Tiger Writing and The Girl at the Baggage Claim, Jen has written toward the truth that families are messy, cultures overlap imperfectly, and identity is always being rewritten.
Bad Bad Girl circles the mother who shaped her and baffled her in equal measure. Agnes grew up privileged in 1930s Shanghai, crossed the world after the war, and eventually taught in an American inner-city classroom. When she died during Covid, Jen began writing to her and realised how little she truly knew. “My mother, being my mother, answered back,” she says.
What began as a private exercise for her children slowly expanded into something larger.
Agnes left almost no record of her early life. There were no diaries or letters. Jen had only fragments: anecdotes offered late in life, a teacher’s discipline log, a handful of day planners, and a single traumatic memory of a beloved nursemaid abruptly dismissed. Everything else she had to imagine, blending fact and invention to reach for a truth her mother never articulated.
The book is not an indictment. It begins with a daughter’s sense of having been treated unjustly, but widens into something more generous. Writing into the gaps, Jen encounters not only the harsh mother of her childhood but a woman who was effectively motherless herself, pushed into work unimaginable for someone of her background, and who never once asked her children to recognise the cost. What emerges is not forgiveness but something harder and clearer: respect.
At seventy, with ten books behind her, Jen is still finding new angles on identity, culture and family. In conversation, she is reflective, slyly funny, and attuned to the emotional architecture of family stories. In this Q&A, she unpacks the making of Bad Bad Girl, the challenge of writing into silence, the evolving meaning of cultural identity, and what it has taken to return—decades into her career—to the mother-daughter relationship that shaped her earliest sense of self….
You grew up in a Chinese immigrant household in suburban New York. How did that childhood shape the writer you became?
Jen: I was always aware that whatever reality you are in, there is another one. When you grow up between cultures, you learn that things can look completely different depending on where you stand. It becomes second nature to step outside a situation and observe it from another angle. That kind of double vision, that sense of a parallel way of seeing, has been with me all my life.
Was there a moment when you knew you would become a writer, or did it slip in gradually?
Jen: Very gradually. At Harvard, I took a verse-form class simply because I did not understand why poetry came in all those little lines. Robert Fitzgerald taught it. When he announced we would have weekly exercises, I assumed papers. He meant poems.
I had never written one, but I tried it and loved it instantly. My first poem was in catalectic iambic pentameter. I even told my roommate, “I could do this for the rest of my life,” though it never occurred to me that I could actually be a poet.
Fitzgerald encouraged me. When he discovered I was pre-med, he said I should be doing something with words and helped me get a job at Doubleday. They paid for classes, so I took one at the New School. That teacher also asked if I had ever considered writing. Two friends were interested in fiction, so I tried that too. Bit by bit, I realized it was something I both liked and could do.
Across your work, you return to immigration, family and belonging. How has your approach changed?
Jen: I have written about immigration and family, yes, but really I have been writing about culture and the American project. What does it mean to be American, and what can outsiders reveal about that?
I am interested in cultural difference on a broad scale, not just Asian versus American, but American culture compared with everyone else’s.
When you say “the American project,” what do you mean?
Jen: I’ve written about how natural individualism seems to Americans, and how unnatural it can seem to much of the rest of the world. We like to imagine it comes straight from the Greeks and democracy, but even for the Greeks, the basic unit was not the individual — it was the polis.
In America, the base unit seems to be the individual, and we tend to think that’s universal. It’s not. Levels of individualism in this country have grown far beyond what they’ve been anywhere else — not only in the world, but in the history of humankind.
What sparked Bad Bad Girl? Was there a moment when you knew this was the book you were writing?
Jen: My mother died during Covid, and I was overwhelmed by grief. What I found myself doing was writing to her. And my mother being my mother — opinionated, sharp, present even in absence — she “wrote back.”
That’s when I realized how little I actually understood about her life. I knew fragments, stories told late, a few sharp-edged memories, but not the larger arc of who she was or how she became that way. I wanted to understand her, not as the mother who raised me but as the young girl she once was.
So I began with the story she told me at ninety-two about losing her nursemaid when she was seven. It was a profound rupture for her as she was far closer to the nursemaid than to her own mother. I wrote it first as a memoir and showed it to my children. They shrugged sympathetically, but it didn’t land. They didn’t feel the magnitude of it.
So I rewrote it as fiction. I invented the nursemaid because we know almost nothing about the real one. I added an earthquake. I wrote my mother as the rambunctious, spirited child I understood her to have been. When my kids read that version, their reaction was immediate: “Oh my God.” They finally felt the devastation.
That was the moment I understood this book needed both memoir and fiction, that the truth of my mother’s life wasn’t only in the facts, but also in the imaginative space between them.
When did you realize the book was meant for a wider audience?
Jen: Gradually. I saw that my story was also part of a larger story. Many daughters have difficult relationships with their mothers, for reasons that are personal but also historical, cultural and sexist. I began to think, “This is not just my story.”
Often books about mothers are written to get back at them. This is not that book. It began with a sense of having been treated unjustly, which I had been, but it grew into an examination of one woman’s life and the forces that shaped her and, through her, me.
Your mother left very few records of her early life in Shanghai. How did you write into those silences?
Jen: We have no records from Shanghai at all, which is hard. What I had were family stories and fragments. When I had documents, I used them.
My mother’s teaching log from her inner-city classroom is used verbatim. Later in life she kept day planners, but they were more like almanacs, little notes about the day rather than reflections about the self. In other traditions, that is what writing is for. So I used what existed and invented what did not.
“Bad, bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” becomes a refrain across continents and generations. How did you think about carrying that phrase through the book?
Jen: It was simply what my mother said to me almost every day. From her point of view, I was not the daughter she had in mind. Yet by most measures I was a very good girl. I went to Harvard. I have been married forty-five years. I raised two children. I pay my taxes. She thought I had too much to say.
But I was growing up outside New York in the 1960s, in the middle of civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the rise of protest culture. At school, we were taught that having an opinion mattered and acting on that opinion mattered even more. In sixth grade, we made posters about what was wrong in society. A friend and I protested a proposal to straighten the Bronx River Parkway.
Later, we marched around the cafeteria because girls weren’t allowed to take shop.
Meanwhile, my mother came from a world where women were expected to be silent, dutiful and unquestioning. No protesting. No challenging elders. Certainly no challenging parents. She didn’t want news of the outside world, she found it destabilizing.
So that phrase — bad, bad girl, you don’t know how to talk — captures the entire cultural collision we were living inside. It is about language, obedience, girlhood, and two very different worlds trying to occupy the same house. It became a title because it distilled the whole mother-daughter story into five words.
What did writing the book uncover that surprised you?
Jen: I realized how much my mother had done for our family. Establishing a family in a new country is not simple. Her inner-city teaching job was extremely hard, especially for someone of her background, and she never complained. She simply did what needed to be done.
I also saw how motherless she had been. She had a very difficult relationship with her own mother. I gained a great deal of compassion for her. She did an imperfect job with me, but she was a human being dealing with a great deal.
By the end of the book, I felt enormous respect and compassion for her. Forgiveness is the least of it.
As a novelist writing about your mother, did the writer and daughter in you ever diverge?
Jen: Not exactly, but some scenes were very painful. Writers have to be inside the experience and outside it at the same time. If you are only inside, that is therapy. On the page you are shaping and crafting.
I was not sure I could maintain both roles, but I could. It helps that this is my tenth book. I could not have done this as my first.
If your mother could read Bad Bad Girl, how do you think she would respond?
Jen: I do not think she would like it. In a dream scenario she would say, “I see who I was and why you felt mistreated,” and she would apologize. But that was not who she was. She would assume people would judge her harshly.
Readers have responded with empathy, admiration and love for her. I only wish she could absorb that, but I do not think she could have.
Agnes is, in many ways, unknowable, and the book honors that distance. You don’t solve her or redeem her; you let her remain complex. Were you consciously resisting the urge to explain her, or did that approach emerge naturally as you wrote?
Jen: Exactly. She was who she was. It’s okay. She was human, like all of us.
I wasn’t interested in sanding down her edges or turning her into a different kind of mother than the one I had. The point was not to tidy her up or redeem her, but to illuminate the forces that shaped her: history, culture, circumstance; and, through her, me. Literature isn’t about solving people; it’s about trying to understand.
