RH: This is a continuation of the story from
Typical American, but with a number of
differences.
GJ: It's very different in tone and feeling. The
characters from my first book do appear, but the emphasis is
on the younger generation. The first book is more tragic-
comic, while Mona in the Promised Land is more purely
comic.
RH: Was it something that you had in mind as you
were writing your first novel, or shortly after
that?
GJ: I think there was a time when I was writing the
first book that I realized the potential for two books, and
that the second book would be about the second generation of
this family, but I can't say that I knew this is what it was
going to be. Then, about 3/4 of the way through Typical
American, I was kind of stuck, and I went down to a
reading in Soho, and it happened that the person taking
tickets at the door was from my high school. Something about
seeing that person jogged my memories, and I went home and
wrote the short story that became the first chapter of this
book in about three days (which is very quick for me). I
knew then that this would be my next novel, and so in some
ways it was difficult for me to go back and finish
Typical American, because I had a new voice and new
concerns, and I knew that I was going to be writing a very
fun, very loose, very fast book.
RH: It chronicles what was not only an exciting
time for you personally, but for American culture
as a whole.
GJ: I wanted it to be about than the Asian-American
experience and intergenerational conflict, though those
things are there in the book. From the beginning, I wanted
it to address broader concerns about the nature of
ethnicity, so I did set it quite pruposefully in the late
1960s, when ethnicity was being invented, because it
occurred to me when I looked back on my high school years
that I had been a witness to that process of invention, on
the heels of the civil rights movement, when blacks were
turning blacker, and young Jews were becoming more Jewish,
partly because of the Six-Day War, but also following the
model of black people, reëmbracing their Judaism in a
way that was quite astonishing to the older generation:
returning to temple, learning Hebrew, things that their
parents had gone to great lengths to avoid.
It encouraged me that that's the model that's being used by
Asian-Americans and other groups today. From our latter-day
perspective, the invention of ethnicity is an interesting
thing to look at, because in our time it seems so obvious
that one is essentially (fill-in-the-blank)-American, when
twenty years ago there was no such label. It's a very recent
and very American construction.
RH: Did these experiences influence you earlier
on to become a writer in the first place?
GJ: That's very hard to say. Probably I became a
writer by the process of elimination -- I was a literary
type, interested in writing in a casual way in elementary
school and high school, but it wasn't until college that I
really tried to write. I fell into it by accident; I was a
junior, an English major, and I felt that I still didn't
understand why poetry had to be written in these little
lines. So I took a course in prosody with Robert
Fitzgerald(*). He said that we'd have a weekly assignment,
which I took to mean a paper, but he meant a weekly
assignment in verse. I immediately fell in love with it, and
told my roommate that if I could do this for the rest of my
life, I would. But I'm the daughter of immigrants, and I'd
completely internalized all their practical ideas, so I
didn't even consider for a moment becoming a poet. It was
just not something anybody I knew did. But I had the feeling
in me, and as I went from one career plan to another -- I
was pre-med, pre-law, in business school, thought about
being an architect, a contractor, an antiques dealer -- it
become clear that there was one thing that I loved, and that
none of these were it. But I had to try them all before I
realized that I was going to have to write.
RH: Getting back to the earlier point about the
construction of ethnic identity, I want to explore
the connections between your identity as a writer
and your identity as an Asian-American.
GJ: The funny thing about it is that I was one of the
earliest of this wave of Asian-American writers, but I can't
say that being a writer is an extension of my being an
Asian-American. Quite the contrary. My life as a fiction
writer is directly related to my assimilation, particularly
to the Jewish community in Scarsdale where I grew up, which
is very much like the Scarshill in the book. That was a
community that greatly esteemed fiction writing, which is
how I first got interested in finding my voice and
expressing myself. In my Chinese heritage, scholarship is
greatly esteemed, but fiction writing is not considered
scholarship. So as an "Asian-American" writer, the "Asian"
is linked to the "writer" part by being an "American".
RH: Yet there's a shorthand in literary
criticism, particularly at more mainstream levels,
where a writer can get identified early on as
"(fill-in-the-blank) American".
GJ: Of course you hope that the identification
doesn't end up becoming a pigeonhole. I have to say that
that hasn't been my experience, though I did bristle early
on at being labelled an "Asian-American writer," because I
think every writer likes to be seen as a universal writer.
But today, I look at how many of my writer friends are
greatly talented and hugely unknown, it occurs to me that we
live in a culture where if you're not labelled you
disappear. So as much as I hope I'm not limited by that
moniker, and that people will use it as a starting point to
think about my work rather than an ending point, I now see
that I'm lucky to have the label, ironic as it may seem. I'm
probably pigeonholed with respect to the press, but among
general readers and universities I seem to have gotten out
of that small cubicle.
RH: Are you working on a third project?
GJ: I don't plan until I sit down. I'm a really
intuitive writer -- no plan, no end point -- so I can have
all the ideas in the world, but until I sit down at the
keyboard, I have no idea whether I've got a live fish on the
line or not. I wait for my books to write themselves; the
conscious mind doesn't really know much about getting that
to happen on a schedule.
RH: Who are some of the fiction writers that
were held in high esteem when you were growing
up?
GJ: It depends on what age you're talking about. In
high school...Bellow, Mailer, Philip Roth, Singer, Cynthia
Ozick, Grace Paley: these writers were like gods to me. I
continue to greatly esteem these writers, and to admire what
Roth has called "red-face literature", a literature that is
out there emotionally, not quite so restrained...So, aren't
you going to ask if I'm Jewish?
RH: I don't know. I thought I might try to avoid
asking some of the things you've probably been
asked a dozen times already.
GJ: Oh, well, nobody's asked me yet if I'm writing a
new book.
RH: I just hate reading interviews full of
questions like "So how autobiographical is this
novel? Did this really happen to you?"...Fine. Are
you Jewish?
GJ: I'm not Jewish, but I thought about it a lot as a
teenager, and reëxamined a lot of those thoughts while
writing the book... who I am is a person who assimilated a
great deal of the Jewish culture I grew up in, as I think
everybody who lives in the New York area has. The fact is
that you can't grow up in New York without learning some
Yiddish, without the culture leaving its mark on you. In the
parts of this book that were consciously controlled, I did
want to honor that. One of my friends from childhood
described the novel as "a love letter to Scarsdale."
In this time of huge, public embracing of ethnic roots, I
wanted to show how our lives are more complex than what
we're born with. While our ethnic roots are very important
to us, I think that anybody who is interested in their
identity would do well to learn about the place they grew up
in, and learn about its culture. We make ourselves in this
country; even people who are racial and ethnic minorities
transform themselves. The different groups have spent a lot
of time rubbing elbows, rubbing off of each other, and while
the melting pot model of assimilation was unhealthy, with
its one way melting of people into generic Barbies and Kens,
the idea of assimilation is still with us in ways that we
don't necessarily have to be afraid of. We rub elbows with
each other, and learn from each other, and this is a
wonderful thing. It's not like we abandon our own roots, we
just know more things and allow them to change our lives.
One of the reasons that I steered the interview around to
the "Are you Jewish?" question is that I want to question
why it's funnier for an Asian-American woman to consider
switching identities like that than it would be for,
example, an Irish-American. There's some racist component to
that formulation. Nobody asks an Irish-American if he knows
Gaelic, or if she celebrates Saint Patrick's Day, and if you
don't, you're not seen as a fallen Irish. But for Chinese,
it's different -- how is it that people who don't even know
us very well feel free to tell us about our identity and how
we're living up to it?
RH: Why are Chinese being held up to a higher
standard of cultural integrity?
GJ: And why do people consider it appropriate to even
raise the issue? Asian-Americans are held up to a different
standard in that regard than Caucasian Americans, and
there's an assumed power differential there that I want to
question.
RH: At the same time, white people can
experiment with Asian culture in any number of
different ways and don't get asked about how
unwhite they're being.
GJ: Exactly. It's not as much of a joke for a white
person to try Buddhism as it is for a Chinese person to try
Judaism. People have found the book hilarious, from what
they've been saying to me during the tour, but there are
also serious issues there that I hope they'll consider as
well.
