Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen

 

Publisher: Knopf

On Sale Date: October 21. 2025

Pages: 352

I reviewed a digital review copy from the publisher

Loo-Shu-Hsin is born in 1925 in Shanghai in a wealthy family. In a time where women and girls where expected to be obedient and quiet, and when they don't, they are told they are bad bad girls. But Loo-Shu-Hsin is one of the girls that is lucky to get a good education, instead of becoming a mother and housewife. She is sent to a Catholic School for girls, where she is renamed in Agnes and also is baptized. Being a booklover, she is reading her Chinese-English dictionary every night with a flashlight, and studies so well that later departs for the United States to get her Ph.D. She leaves in 1947, just when the cultural revolution is about to start in China, her country she will never return to. Later on, when she lives in Manhattan, she starts dating Chao-Pei, who is also from Shanghai. Together, they set up their new life in the USA, while their families back in China update them on what is going on there during that time in history, and it is not good. They get a number one son, which was their wish as Chinese parents and a daughter, Gish. Agnes bitternes of her forced abandonment of her Ph.D program to become a mother resonates in bitterness and anger towards her children.

Gish always had troubled relationship with her mother, who was emotionally absent and verbally abusive to Gish, as she is always dissapointed in her, and disapproves of everything she does. When her mother passes away, Gen only has a few of her notebooks, the memories her mother told her about and a lot of traumatic guilt. 

It is difficult to tell where in this book the fiction stops and the memoir part starts. There are lot of blurred lines between them, and as a reader it is difficult to tell them apart, especially because the book is so fragmentaric and jumps from one point in history to the next point in the present time. it is not a book that stays long in your memory because of this. I like the writing style though, and the historic parts set in Shanghai of the mother, and I liked how the author wove her difficult relationship with her mother into a book that is part fiction, part memoir. Overal, I liked this book!