Award-winning author Gish Jen’s latest book of short stories, Thank You, Mr. Nixon, opens in 1972 with President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China and ends in the current COVID-19 pandemic. This collection not only tells the story of an immigrant expiernce, family dynamics and what it means to be caught up in history, it tells the broader story of China and America.
In a conversation with Open Studio’s Jared Bowen, Bowen asked Jen what compelled her to look at that 50-year span of history (1971-2022) which she tracks in her book.
"I started writing right after the opening of China," said Jen, reflecting on the 1970s when diplomatic relations between America and China started to thaw.
The first time she went to China was in 1979 with her family. She went back in 1981 to teach English to coal-mining engineers in Shandong province, and then she returned to the United States, earning a master of fine arts degree in 1983 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“I had all these impressions of China," she said, "and I was grappling with what it all meant.”
Jen said she did not set out with this collection of stories in mind, but the pieces came together during the pandemic.
“I sat down during COVID and I'm thinking that I should really do a collection that tells these stories," she said. "All of a sudden, I realize we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of Nixon's first visit to China. I realized I had a record of this. That's my job, to record how people are feeling, what families are like, and what's going on.”
Jen, who wrote Thank You, Mr. Nixon as anti-Asian hate crimes ticked up across the United States, said she didn’t deliberately write this book to take on this issue.
“When I sit down, I don't sit down to address any social problem. But when I stand up, I'm aware that my work has a place in this whole picture," she said. "I do feel like we’ll be better served if we have a better understanding of other cultures and other people. I think in my book you are confronted with human people who have different cultural values than you might. I feel like in this book, this is my contribution."
The humanity Jen brings to her characters is accentuated by her humor. Thank You, Mr. Nixon opens with Tricia Sang who, as a young girl, met Nixon when he visited China in 1972. Years later, from her perch in heaven, she writes to him and addresses the letter to “Mr. Richard Nixon, Ninth Ring Road, Pit 1A."
“I think I have my father's sense of humor," she said. “My father was always very amused by incongruity — one person in one reality interacting with someone else in theirs. That particular kind of humor is extremely helpful for an immigrant who is operating among many realities.”
Jen went on to say that she doesn’t use humor as a defense mechanism to get through dark or difficult times. Rather, she finds humor in everything.
“The potential for something to be funny is always there. It's always there because we take ourselves way too seriously.”
