Book Description
In eight wonderfully alive stories, the acclaimed author
of Mona in the Promised Land and Typical American
chronicles Chinese and other Americans as they exuberantly
win, lose, love, hate, overachieve, underachieve, and
generally take on America--with sometimes comic, sometimes
heartbreaking results.
Life now is not what it was a generation ago, but is it any
easier? A Chinese-American woman attempts to discipline her
Chinese-Irish-American grandchild, only to come up against
her daughter's state-of-the-art parenting. A grown man flees
to China to escape his disapproving mother, "who called
every day, lest he forget she was not speaking to him."
A computer expert accidentally books himself into a welfare
hotel. A bohemian art student turned young mother finds
herself entrenched in PTA meetings and soccer games when her
WASP husband opts out and takes off for the woods. A family
takes its first comically disastrous steps toward joining a
country club. The stories in Who's Irish? prove once again
that Gish Jen is an essential writer for our time--a writer
who moves and entertains us as she updates the American
Dream.