Overview
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .
Gish’s mother—Loo Shu-hsin—is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents’ marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”
Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace.
This book title, Bad Bad Girl (A Novel), ISBN: 9780593803738, by Gish Jen, published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (October 21, 2025) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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