SOURCE: Jen, Gish, and Scarlet Cheng. “Gish Jen Talks with Scarlet Cheng.” Belles Lettres 7, no. 2 (winter 1991-92): 20-1.

In the following interview, Jen discusses her use of humor in Typical American, and the frustrations of being pigeonholed as an Asian-American writer.

Gish Jen is fuming. She is in Washington, D.C., on a book tour for her first novel, Typical American, and reporters keep asking her the same tiresome questions about being an Asian American writer. Her work keeps getting lumped together with the other Asian American books that came out last year—particularly, Frank Chin's Donald Duk and Gus Lee's China Boy—she simply does not feel they are comparable in intention or level of writing.

But last February, Publishers Weekly ran a feature piece entitled “Spring's Five Fictional Encounters of the Chinese American Kind,” and several other publications took their lead and reviewed the books as...