SOURCE: Xiaojing, Zhou. “Becoming Americans: Gish Jen's Typical American.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche, edited by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, pp. 151-63. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Xiaojing contrasts representations of the Chinese-American immigrant experience in Jen's Typical American with those of novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Frank Chin. Xiaojing argues that Jen's work breaks from the paradigm of immigrant fiction established by Kingston, Tan, and Chin by focusing on the inner life of her characters as they work through the process of adapting to life in America.

In a 1991 conversation with Martha Satz, the year Typical American was published, Gish Jen said that the novel “is about coming to America and what that means in reality.” She added, “For the characters in my book, it takes a while to become American and...