Gish Jen/Multicultural Identity--Humor--Class Divides

Gish Jen

Gish Jen is the author of Mona in the Promised Land.  She is truthful, funny, and serious--about being second generation Chinese American and writing about how a family becomes "American."  Her first novel was called Typical American and started the story of the Chang family that is continued in our novel--enjoy and think about how her humor conveys an important message about how immigrants make a life here and how their children re-imagine that life for themselves.  Her most recent novel is World and Town that continues to look at immigrants and the stories of why they come to America and what they bring.

Transcript of her Interview with Bill Moyers from Becoming American: The Chinese Experience
Here is a book review of our book from the New York Times.
Here is an interview with her from Powells Bookstore in Portland.
Here is the page about Gish Jen from Voices from The Gap: Women Artists from the margins.

Cristina Garcia--Dreaming in Cuban--Migration/Culture/Identity

As we begin the reading/research and seminar process for our 3rd book, Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia, we enter another land, culture, and history.  We will do research on the author and the background of the setting for this novel on Wednesday.  We will have our first seminar so you should have read the first 100 pages.  Your seminar paper #5 will be DUE on NOV. 10th. for the second seminar.  The work on this paper (1-2 pages) could be used also in your Essay #2 if you choose to develop a thesis that will find support and illustrations in the Garcia novel.  Here you can read an academic article about her work; here is a link to a bibliography of her work.  USE THESE RESOURCES TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ACADEMIC WRITING ON A NOVEL.

Cristina Garcia

In a 2003 interview published in Criticas discussing her most recent book Garcia said “For me, each book further embroiders the themes and obsessions that drove me to write in the first place. The characters may be different, the settings and times and particulars may vary wildly but the bigger questions of where do we belong and how do we negotiate our identities between and among cultures is what keeps me going.”

Cristina Garcia continues to write and lives in California.