Gish Jen is a confirmed talent

Gish Jen has a soft voice. In Thursday's reading to promote her highly acclaimed book of short stories, Who's Irish?, Jen's light voice gave life to the title story with warm and inviting tones. This made for a surprising juxtaposition, as the themes in "Who's Irish?" do not generally parallel the writer's warm and tender speaking voice. Dressed in a padded black shirt, black linen pants and clogs, Jen's comfortable appearance and mellow voice belied any of the tough questions that her story was to pose.

Jen has had stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and most recently in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. As Creative Writing Chair Martha Collins pointed out in her introduction of Jen, "Gish Jen's work is multi-faceted in literary ways. To say Gish's writing is multi-cultural is an understatement. Her work is written with such care; every word counts."

The protagonist of the title story "Who's Irish?" is a Chinese grandmother who resides in the United States and lives with her assimilated daughter. The story, the only work in the collection to be written in first person, is sculpted with an ear for the voice of a first-generation Chinese immigrant. The grandmother speaks in the halting, ungrammatical language characteristic of non-native English speakers.

This carefully created voice floats between two worlds. It is a fragile, almost brittle voice of a woman who is caught - pinned between the world of "plain boiled food, plain boiled thinking" and that of growing up with "black bean sauce and hoisin and garlic sauce." As the grandmother states, "I always feel something is missing when my son-in-law talk."

The central action of the story concerns the grandmother's three-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, and the at times not-so-gentle struggle between Sophie's two ethnic identities, Irish and Chinese. Jen sets up the constructs of the story immediately. It is a story about differences, intergenerational and intercultural:

"My daughter is fierce too, she is vice-president in the bank now. Her new house is big enough for everybody to have their own room, including me. But Sophie take after Natalie's husband's family, their name is Shea. Irish. I always thought Irish people are like Chinese people, work so hard on the railroad, but now I know why the Chinese beat the Irish. Of course, not all Irish are like the Shea family, of course not."

One of the most memorable passages of the story is the grandmother's description of her granddaughter:

"Sophie is three years old American age, but already I see her nice Chinese side swallowed up by her wild Shea side. She looks like most Chinese. Beautiful black hair, beautiful black eyes. Nose perfect size, not so flat looks like some big deal got stuck in wrong face. Everything just right, only her skin is a brown surprise to John's family."

The voice of the grandmother is particularly touching when heard in relief to the secondary characters. As Jen mentioned during the question-and-answer period after her reading, "a lot of the sympathy the reader has for the protagonist is based on how [the author] weights the secondary characters. They are portrayed ever-so flatly [in "Who's Irish?"], to accentuate the grandmother. It's like a mobile - this string is a bit short, make that one a bit longer."

"Who's Irish?" is an oddly touching story, with the tender moments interspersed with the thorny. "It was a story I couldn't have written 10 or 15 years ago," Jen explained. "Even now that I have established myself, there were some questions my editor and I had about whether or not to open the collection with this story." The voice of an immigrant takes great sensitivity to create gave Jen pause.

"I was intimidated by the voice. Dialogue is artifice and a construction. Trying to capture a flavor of the grandmother's voice, yet not have it sound so ungrammatical the reader can't sympathize is a challenge. But to engage the reader, I was almost forced to write in the first-person."

The limbo region between Irish-American and Chinese-American is the world that Jen explores in this story. It is a world in stasis, yet ever so often the attitudes of the hyphenated labels collide to create situations imbued with an awkward intimacy we can all relate to. This is the power inherent in Jen's writing.

"As a writer you always endeavor to be Chekov," Jen said to the audience. "You are always looking for that moral judgement. You're shooting for sympathy that's a genuine response from one human to another. You adjust and readjust. It's not an easy thing to hit."

Gish Jen is hitting many of those "genuine responses" with her writing; she navigates the delicate path between laughter and tears. Anton would be proud.

The next Updike? Gish Jen poignantly read from her latest short story collection, Who's Irish?, on Thursday. (photo courtesy of Knopf Pub.)