Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self

by Gish Jen

Overview

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders’ Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674072831
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2013
Series:	The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies , #17
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Gish Jen is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of four novels, including Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land. Her most recent novel is World and Town.

Hometown:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

August 12, 1955

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A. Harvard University, M.F.A., Iowa Writers¿ Workshop

Read an Excerpt

Lecture 1: My Father Writes His Story

In 2005, when he was 85, my father sat down to write a personal narrative. This begins simply: “It is few days before my 86th birthday. I am writing my personal history for my family.” As for what follows, it is not elaborate. And written over the period of a month, and totaling 32 pages, it does not begin à la David Copperfield with “I was born”; in what we will come to recognize as true interdependent style, my father does not, in fact, mention his birth at all. We do not hear how much he weighed or whether he peed on the nurse or anything of the “the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously” sort. In fact, he does not even give his birth date until page 8, when he includes “Norman Chao-Pe Jen, June 26, 1919” in parentheses.

Instead he begins: “(1) Ancient History,” drawing his information from his family genealogy book. This is an item those of you who have read my novel, The Love Wife, may recognize as the bait with which Carnegie Wong’s mother, Mama Wong, gets Carnegie to take in a woman who appears to be a second wife. It is the sort of genealogical record that was traditionally kept by any family who could afford to do so, and was of course always prized – but never more so than now, what with every book that survived the Cultural Revolution having done so by a miracle. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s family genealogy book, for example, long hidden inside a wall, was found during a home renovation; and my mother’s was found when Shanghai families whose things had been confiscated during the Cultural Revolution were allowed inside a warehouse with the idea that if you could find what was taken from you, you could reclaim it. I don’t think you have to be a novelist to imagine the piles of stuff, and the crowds and the chaos, and the despair with which people like my aunts pored through the heaps. Finally, though, my youngest aunt simply stopped and, closing her eyes, prayed to our ancestors to help; and when she opened her eyes and turned around, there, right at eye level, was the family genealogy book.

My father’s family was less lucky; the physical book itself did not survive. A copy of it, though, did, thanks to the Japanese, who for reasons perhaps related to their use of the Jen family compound as their regional headquarters during their occupation of China, preserved one in a Japanese library.

Editorial Reviews

Gish Jen is the Great American Novelist we’re always hearing about, and in Tiger Writing she delivers a profound meditation on the divergent roles that storytelling, artmaking, and selfhood take on across the East–West divide. Penetrating, inspired, and, yes, indispensable.

Junot Díaz

In a magnificent feat of integration, Tiger Writing honors the becoming of the Chinese American writer. I am proud, proud, proud to share ancestors—and the novel and the world—with Gish Jen. Oh, and the wonderful faith—that the novel can be learned!

Maxine Hong Kingston

Probing, precise, and extremely thought-provoking, this is a small volume about big ideas.

Boston Globe - Kate Tuttle

How to balance the competing claims of social order and self-determination? It’s a question that all novelists must grapple with, and Jen, drawing on extensive research in the social sciences as well as her own vividly-rendered biography, gives us an entirely new answer. The result is a strikingly original—and compellingly personal—account of the novel as a genre.

Amanda Claybaugh

Jen weaves together examples of the interdependent views that influenced her and how she came to be a novelist—an independent thing. She addresses the notion of culture with a small c and a capital C. In addition, she discusses the blurring of inter/independence in negotiating narrative and life. The notes following the lectures are well worth reading for their nuggets of information.

Choice - M. L. Jackson

Tiger Writing is a remarkable achievement on account of its sobriety and unique perception of difference between what Gish Jen considers as the West and Asian narratives… Her sensitivity to her own roots and the transparency with which she focuses on these textures is what makes Tiger Writing remarkably interesting… Gish Jen’s translucency as a novelist with an astute critical sense is that which leads us through the pages of this extremely interesting narrative. Tiger Writing is thus at once a text of critical exploration and a manifesto.

The Hindu - Murali Sivaramakrishnan

Gish Jen’s elegant and wide-ranging Tiger Writing…explores the differences between Eastern and Western ideas of the self in fiction and culture, and why they matter… Tiger Writing is physically beautiful—printed on ivory paper with photos throughout, intimate in the hand and a pleasure to touch and hold. It seems fitting that a book about writing, connection and culture provides such a full sensory experience. It is a perfect metaphor for its contents.

Shelf Awareness (starred review) - Jeanette Zwart

Tiger Writing is both precise and intimate, a terrific contribution to our understanding of the artist’s lot in the East and in the West.

Gary Shteyngart

Blending family memoir, cultural criticism, and reflections on her own life as a writer, Gish Jen makes a compelling case for the novel as a meeting-ground of typically American themes of independence with classically Asian ideals of interdependence. Tiger Writing is a rare case of a book on writing that itself is a joy to read.

David Damrosch

Gish Jen is the Great American Novelist we're always hearing about, and in Tiger Writing she delivers a profound meditation on the divergent roles that storytelling, artmaking, and selfhood take on across the East-West divide. Penetrating, inspired, and, yes, indispensable.

Junot Díaz