SOURCE: Lee, Don. “About Gish Jen.” Ploughshares 26, nos. 2-3 (fall 2000): 217-22.

In the following essay, Lee provides an overview of Jen's life and career.

Gish Jen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, eight-year-old son, and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the hectic pace of her life is reflected in her rapid-fire speech. The celebrated author of two novels and a collection, Jen is known for her humor and brimming intelligence, her ready opinions and easy laugh, her charm, and, not least of all, her volubility. Even though she remembers herself as being shy and withdrawn as a kid, she admits she was constantly kicked out of class for talking.

Born in 1955 in New York, Jen grew up Chinese and Catholic in Queens and Yonkers, where the “library” at her school consisted of a single shelf of books. When her father, a professor of civil engineering, and her mother, an...