On November 11, USCET partnered with the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) and The Serica Initiative to host the latest installment of the Asian American Authors series, “Across Generations and Oceans: A Fireside Chat with Gish Jen & Qian Julie Wang”. The evening brought together two generations of acclaimed Asian American writers to explore storytelling, identity, and the interwoven histories that shape immigrant families and, subsequently, the U.S.–China relationship.
Gish Jen is a celebrated novelist and essayist whose works have helped define contemporary Asian American literature. A recipient of countless honors, Jen is known for her wit, humanity, and incisive portraits of immigrant life. Her latest book, Bad Bad Girl, blends fiction with memoir to reconstruct her mother’s life and their complex bond, offering a rich meditation on family, identity, and the legacies that echo across generations.
MOCA Director Michael Lee opened the program by reflecting on the power of Asian American literature in shaping cultural belonging and public understanding of the AAPI minority. Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch, USCET’s founding president, shared her personal connection to Jen’s work and the origin of the Asian American Authors series, which Jen inaugurated in 2012. Bloch emphasized the program’s mission: to amplify Asian American voices, challenge stereotypes, and bridge cultures at a moment when such narratives are urgently needed.
Moderated by NYT bestselling author and civil rights litigator Qian Julie Wang, the conversation focused on Jen’s newest novel Bad Bad Girl, which she described as her most personal project to date — woven from memoir and fiction and written in the months after her mother’s passing. She discussed writing as a dialogue across generations: an attempt to understand her mother’s life in 1930s Shanghai, the traumas of war and migration, and the complicated legacy she carried into motherhood.
“People would love you once and all,” Jen reflected, imagining what she might say to her mother now.
Wang and Jen explored themes resonant across many immigrant families: the burdens carried by first daughters, the cultural distance between parents and children, and the challenge of breaking intergenerational cycles. Jen spoke candidly about being both her father’s favorite and her mother’s “bad girl,” about the emotional difficulty of writing painful memories, and about the profound responsibility she felt in raising her own children differently. At the same time, she described the enduring beauty she sees in interdependence, sacrifice, and the values passed down through family.
Audience questions touched on genre blending, the craft of writing across memoir and myth, and how Chinese and American cultural expectations continue to shape family life. In response, Jen reflected on the historical forces that constrained her mother’s generation and the importance of recognizing those pressures with empathy and nuance.
USCET Executive Director Rosie Levine closed the evening by thanking attendees for braving the cold night and celebrating the return of the Asian American Author Series, which affirms Asian American stories as an essential part of the American narrative and a meaningful bridge between audiences in the United States and China. A book signing and warm conversations among community members rounded out the evening.
Biographies
Speaker
Gish Jen is the author of Bad Bad Girl. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories five times, including in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Gish has received NEA, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, and a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award. Her short work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and many anthologies; she has taught at Harvard University, NYU Shanghai, and other universities. Bad Bad Girl is her tenth book.
Moderator
Qian Julie Wang is the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood, which was a Today Show Read With Jenna pick and named a best book of 2021 by the New York Times, President Obama, NPR, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, and more. A graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College, Qian Julie is managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, a firm dedicated to advancing educational civil rights for marginalized populations. Her writing has been published in major publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more, and she has appeared on the TODAY Show, NBC, PBS, and NPR, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Asian American Author Series
USCET’s Asian American Authors Series brings outstanding Asian American authors to Chinese audiences to introduce their literary works and discuss their experiences with American multiculturalism. This series was launched in November 2012 with award-winning Chinese American Author Gish Jen at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Following the successful launch, USCET brought a number of other acclaimed Asian American authors to China including Shawn Wong (2013), Helen Zia (2017), Cheryl Tan (2018), Karen Yamashita (2018), and Shirley Lim (2018).