Gish Jen's genre-bending novel about her Chinese immigrant mother (and herself), Bad Bad Girl

As she details in the beginning of her fictionalized memoir, the author, Gish Jen, was constantly scapegoated by her mother, Agnes, who was born into a well-to-do banking family in Shanghai in 1925 and died in New York during Covid. Why did a woman treated so dismissively by her own mother, and who endured difficulties throughout her life, act so harshly toward Gish, her American-born daughter?

“Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk.” This refrain echoes from one generation to another, directed toward females too outspoken to be controlled.

Within this book, Jen performs an extraordinarily generous act, seeking to understand the circumstances that shaped Agnes and the origins of their troubled history. She invents storylines and motivations when needed, since her mother remained tight-lipped about much of her background.

Through Jen’s first-person voice, her mother’s story unfolds, interspersed with imagined conversations between them: Gish gently probing for explanations, and Agnes reacting to her writing choices— “tactful as a sledgehammer,” judgmental, and silently vulnerable in turn.

Named Loo Shu-hsin, her mother grows up knowing her sex is a disappointment. She adores books and receives an education at a modern Catholic school, where she’s renamed for St. Agnes. Her childhood nursemaid’s abrupt firing remains a traumatic memory.

She bravely boards a ship for America in her twenties, alone, to pursue a PhD, never returning to China; overwhelmed with childcare soon after her marriage, she also never finishes her doctorate, a constant regret. Abandoning her past isn’t easy, since letters from her family, wanting money and trapped during the Communist takeover, frequently arrive, using discreet language for their self-protection.

Some later sections, breezing through years at a stretch, read rather dry. But this unique account, which is pointed and unguardedly honest, shows how fiction can illuminate truths too complex and deep-rooted to be spoken.

I reviewed this novel originally for the Historical Novels Review.  You may be wondering about the original cover design. Having read the book, I think it perfectly captures the novel's themes: two individuals, intertwined with one another in a difficult relationship they can't escape. Yet both still exult in their own freedom of thought, as shown through the lines of a Tang Dynasty poem spoken by the novel's characters:

Goose, goose, goose!
You lift your neck to the sky and sing--
White down bobbing on the green water,

Red feet pedaling the clear waves.

Gish Jen's Bad Bad Girl was published by Knopf in October 2025. The UK publisher is Granta.