In the American Society Study Guide

The daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to America in the 1940s, Gish Jen (born Lillian Jen) grew up with her four siblings in the New York area. Her father was a civil engineer, and her mother was an elementary school teacher. After living in what Jen once described as the “working class” neighborhood of Yonkers, where she experienced bullying, her family moved to Scarsdale, an upscale suburb in Westchester Country. There, she was delighted to find an extensive school library and enjoyed the range of books available to her. In 1977, Jen received a B.A. in English from Harvard; she was on a pre-med track, but she ended up taking a publishing job at Doubleday in New York after her graduation. When she attended and then dropped out of Stanford Business School, her parents cut her off financially and her mother stopped speaking to her (though they reconciled after one year). After completing her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 1983, Jen wrote her breakout story, “In the American Society.” Compelled by the character of Ralph Chang, she parlayed this short story into her first novel, Typical American (1991), followed by a sequel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996). Altogether, Jen has published eight books of fiction and nonfiction. 

In 1943, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law limiting the number of Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the country. As a result, immigration from China increased over the next several years. When these immigrants arrived, especially after World War II and in the 1950s, they were met by an American society that valued conformity and prioritized economic prosperity. After 1965, when Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to allow more immigration from Asia, the number of Chinese immigrants again rose. Concurrently, residents of Chinatowns who could afford to move were decamping for the American suburbs, where there was more pressure to assimilate to a white, middle-class way of life. Ralph Chang’s struggle to balance these values against his own Chinese heritage throughout “In the American Society” can be understood against this social context.

Gish Jen’s writing is frequently viewed in the context of Chinese-American cultural heritage, and her first two novels—Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land—show Chinese-American characters contending with their American surroundings. Critics often cite Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, Chang-Rae Lee (Native Speaker), and Mae Ng (Eating Chinese Food Naked) as Asian-American writers interested in similar subject matter as Gish Jen. Another writer exploring the immigrant experience in the United States is Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Pulitzer-Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies helped popularize the idea of immigrant stories and multiculturalism in fiction. According to Gish Jen herself, however, Jewish American authors have been most influential in her own development; she was exposed to authors like Grace Paley and Saul Bellow during her teenage years in Scarsdale, which has a significant Jewish population. Jen’s first novel Typical American shows structural similarities to Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, and the concept of criminals teaching moral lessons to protagonists—as Booker and Cedric do to Ralph Chang in “In the American Society”—is also found in Bellow’s Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift.