Such marvels the dead are: They never fail to surprise the living. This is particularly true of deceased parents and all the conversations they insist on having with their adult children. Now that ...

The American author uses fiction to explore the life of her Chinese mother as she seeks to understand the violence that marked their relationship ...

First, you get stuck with a crappy mom. Then she lives to be 95. That’s nearly a century of terribleness. In “Bad Bad Girl” author Gish Jen’s case, “terrible” doesn’t quite cover it. Her Chinese ...

You never wrote about your mother. Call it a challenge, an observation, or a dare, that was what Gish Jen was thinking as she set out to write her tenth book—did she want to wake up one day and ...

In "Bad Bad Girl," Gish Jen attempts to reconstruct her mother's life from wealthy childhood in China to scrappy immigrant existence in the United States. (Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket ...

Even the most communicative, seemingly open-book parents can still seem unknowable to their children. And when a mother is as tight-lipped and disapproving as author Gish Jen's mom, Agnes, those ...

Gish Jen has been publishing novels and short stories since 1991, when her debut, “Typical American,” was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. But as Jen points out in the “Author’s ...

”Bad Bad Girl” By Gish Jen Knopf, 328 pages, $29.63 First, you get stuck with a crappy mom. Then she lives to be 95. That’s nearly a century of terribleness. The #MeToo movement may have faded from ...