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Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0679445897
ISBN-13: 9780679445890
May 1996
Publisher: Random House Inc
303 pages
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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 View all Good Items |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
In 1968, the Chang family has moved to Scarshill, New York. In addition to the lavish surroundings, there is further culture shock in the form of radical ideas and ethnic consciousness. Mona Chang, a teenager, joins a temple group bent on reforming race relations, and with them builds a mansion hideout, an underground railroad and a utopian camp called Gugelstein. Her infatuation with her newfound friends turns troublesome, and by the end of the novel certain truths about contemporary America have surfaced which even Mona cannot deny.
| Size | | Length: | 303 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 21.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "There they are, nice Chinese family--father, mother, two born-here girls. Where should they live next? The parents slide the question back and forth like a cup of ginseng neither one wants to drink. Until finally it comes to them: what they really want is a milk shake (chocolate), and to go with it a house in Scarshill."
Industry Reviews
"Hemingway invented his rhythms to create his particular American world. Jen invents a percussive tempo, a series of brusquely energetic leaps and breaks that, without being anything but idiomatic, create an extended particular world where dim sum is as American as apple pie."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (05/26/1996)
"Gish Jen's funny, headlong, and completely delightful novel of high-achieving Chinese and Jewish suburbanites is indelibly American, and could unfold nowhere else. Nothing escapes Jen's affectionate spoofing--and at the same time, every issue is genuine and truth-bringing. A light-hearted novel of radiant charm and human warmth."
Advertisement - Cynthia Ozick
"Gish Jen bravely skewers what we THINK we mean by assimilation, cultural diversity and the uniquely American right to forge a new identity and then patent it. Not only that, now I finally know why Chinese mothers are like Jewish mothers."
Advertisement - Amy Tan
"It's as if [Jen] were capturing the growth of emotional ties in stop-action photographs--as she might capture plants radiating into bloom--and were showing marriage, friendship, and family to be in need of all the patient inventiveness that goes into a work of art. Her fine attention to this kind of cultivation becomes unexpectedly moving as Mona progresses beyond the limits of her family toward a new one of her own making, within the fiendish complexity that is the world."
New Yorker - Anna Shapiro (07/08/1996)
"In tracing the (guardedly triumphant) struggles of one young woman to be herself, borrowing from a variety of traditions without being constrained by any of them, Jen gives us an affecting story--precise, often very funny--and a wonderfully idiosyncratic heroine."
Johnson
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