Description

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice…

Growing up in an affluent neighbourhood in 1930s Shanghai, Loo Shu-hsin is told that it is ‘no good for a girl to be smart’ – and yet when rumours of the revolution reach their enclave, she is the one sent abroad for an education. In New York, she meets Chao-Pei, a Chinese engineering student, and they set out to make a life together. By the time their daughter – Gish Jen – is born, her parents have only sporadic contact with their families, who are locked in repressive Maoist China. And in her struggle to discipline her American daughter, Loo Shu-hsin finds herself repeating the punishing refrains – ‘Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!’ – that punctured her own childhood.

Bad Bad Girl is a compelling exploration of a mother’s life in exile from one of America’s finest stylists.

Publisher Review

An unsentimental, insightful, and brutally honest account of Chinese family relationships, in China and in the West — Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans What an amazing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything – except the voices of our parents — Junot Diaz A tender, poignant family history, laced with sharp insight and quiet humour. Bad Bad Girl is not just the story of women who journeyed from the old world to the new, but also of the luminous, deeply personal world they carried within — Yan Ge, author of Strange Beasts of China Reading Bad Bad Girl, I felt a deep ache for mothers and daughters divided by culture and silence. Gish Jen writes tenderly about a woman carrying old China in her bones while raising a child in America. This story shows how quiet courage can be, and how a “bad girl” is often just a woman who refuses to vanish. Many will find comfort and recognition in these pages — Xinran Xue, author of The Good Women of China Shocking, illuminating and in places truly heartbreaking. When a book contains all of that, does it really matter which category it falls into? * Sunday Times *