And then by the time he got here he said, “Well, maybe I’ll stay and go to graduate school.” And so he did.
By the time he got there the war was over. He was sent over the hump, as they say, over the Himalayas into India and all the way across Europe, all the way across the Atlantic. And so they needed some harbor engineers to come over and help coordinate that.Īnd so my father was sent, overland of course because the Pacific was too dangerous to cross. And back at the end of the second World War there was talk of opening a second front against the Japanese in Shanghai. But it was sort of a nice thing to do.Īnd my father came as part of the war effort. Not that they were ever gonna have to earn a living or anything.
They sent their girls abroad for a little graduate school. It was something the upper class families did. At that time, it was called “gilding the lily”. GISH JEN: Well, they both came in the 1940s. And my father was from outside the city.īILL MOYERS: Talk about how they got here. My mother was from Shanghai from the city. And I think that that dissonance led me to become a writer.īILL MOYERS: You were born in America of immigrant parents? I don’t think I asked myself that explicitly but I did have this feeling that you could step through a door and step into a completely different reality at any moment. I simply had this feeling that, “My goodness, I know people who think so differently about the world, in the most fundamental ways.” Well, what am I gonna do with that? And of course, I grew up in a time before we had that phrase “between two worlds” ? So I didn’t even have that. Wasn’t that what the world was for? To provide for us?īILL MOYERS: Did you feel between two worlds? That one had to be canny and one had to be smart because the world opposed you.Īnd then I would go out into the mainstream world where it was assumed that you got what you wanted. I came from a world where– in every sentence– in everything they did there was this idea that there were obstacles everywhere that one could not simply go out and do what one wanted. It really just wasn’t a matter of: you ate with chopsticks and they ate with forks but the whole difference in the way that people thought. The immigrant world and the mainstream world and all that that meant.
GISH JEN: Well, early on, of course, it was the whole business of trying to make sense of two very different worlds that I was living in. Sometimes I imagine that someday I’ll be done with my stuff and then I won’t write anymore. But in another way I could have done something very different, if I hadn’t had so much stuff to deal with. I think I am a person who on one hand can find deep satisfaction in holing up with my computer day after day after day. I’m not even sure that I would have been a writer. I know that these irritants help me over come other anti- writing feelings such as, general sloth, embarrassment, whatever, a desire to make a living.īut yeah, for me growing up Asian American, having been a child of immigrant parents– all of that difficulty did serve as a kind of amiable irritant, the grain of sand that hopefully produces the pearl.īILL MOYERS: So, you think your writing would have been different had you not been the daughter of immigrant parents?
I think he developed it under circumstances that are similar to mine in the sense that he had identities assigned to him by society which he found very irritating. GISH JEN: Yeah, well, that’s not my phrase. BILL MOYERS: You once said that writing depends on an amiable irritant.