SOURCE: Schwartz, Eleanor N. “Where the East Is Read.” Far Eastern Economic Review 154, no. 46 (14 November 1991): 56, 58.

In the following review, Schwartz evaluates Jen's Typical American, along with two other novels by Chinese-American authors writing about the Chinese-American experience. Lee concludes that Jen, Amy Tan, and Gus Lee are all master storytellers.

It has taken a long time for Americans to acknowledge the presence of the Chinese in their midst. Arriving with the California gold-rush in 1849, hired to lay railroad track in the Rocky Mountains, the Chinese were overworked, underpaid and the easy victims of persecution, both legal and illegal. Barred by the 1882 Exclusion Act from further immigration, they fanned out gradually from the West to other parts of the country, clustering within their own tightly structured and largely self-sufficient communities. Despite the growth of a merchant class and a scattering of scholars in the universities, the Chinese came to...