Audio By Carbonatix
Keep Westword Free
We’re $1,500 away from our spring campaign goal!
We’re aiming to raise $20,000. Your support ensures Westword can continue watching out for you and our community. No paywall. Always accessible. Daily online and weekly in print.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, fiction writer Gish Jen has mined the bi-cultural experience over the past several years — with solid results. From Mona in the Promised Land, a comic novel about a first-generation Chinese-American teen who decides to be Jewish, to World and Town, in which assimilated New Englander Hattie Kong finds herself at odds with a family of fresh-off-the-boat Cambodian immigrants, her stories and novels benefit from the rich autobiographical material that haunts her fiction. But for her latest book, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self ($18.95, Harvard University Press), Jen turned to nonfiction to create a treatise on the constant conflict that inspires her: the independent American versus the interdependent Asian. Dry and scholarly? Perhaps, though David Damrosch (What Is World Literature?) calls it “a rare case of a book on writing that itself is a joy to read.”
After all, the study of writing shouldn’t just be for other writers. Jen will read from Tiger Writing at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th Street. For more information, go to www.tatteredcover.com or call 303-436-1070.
Tue., March 19, 7:30 p.m., 2013
