Regardless of culture, mother-daughter relationships can be fraught and tensions incomprehensibly continue to be passed down generation after generation. Gish Jen addresses her own contentious relationship with her mother in her new novel, Bad Bad Girl, her tenth book and the first she’s devoted to her mother.

In her author’s note, Jen writes that she originally set out to pen a memoir about her mother, but since her mother didn’t leave behind much in the way of papers after she died in 2020, Jen instead wrote this story as a novel. The timeline of the book spans her mother’s childhood from 1920s Shanghai to Jen’s own middle age a century later.

Born into a Shanghai banking family, Jen’s mother grows up in an opulent house just outside the International Settlement.

Surrounded by a high wall, the house was European-style—a three-story stucco villa with a portico, a dark red tile roof, and large dark red-trimmed windows, including floor-to-ceiling windows on the ground floor. Besides the well-furnished living room and wood-paneled dining room with their graceful arched entryways, there were eight bedrooms, a solarium, a library, two studies, several balconies, and several fireplaces. There was also a wisteria-draped veranda, an expansive lawn lined with trees and shrubs, a two-bay garage, and a large dorm for the family’s two twenty-servant teams.

Jen’s mother goes by the name Agnes and is a curious child, to the joy of her father but to the detriment of her mother. Agnes’s mother often calls her a “bad bad girl” for asking questions and wanting to get an education. In 1947, Agnes leaves Shanghai to study in the United States. Even though China is in the throes of civil war at the time, no one in her family predicts the conditions and isolation that would follow after 1949.

Even though Agnes is safe in the United States, her life there is not easy. Agnes enters a PhD program and is ABD by the time she marries George Jen, a recent immigrant from Yixing, famous for clay teapots. George finds a job in academia and Agnes leaves her graduate program when their first child, a boy named Reuben, is born. Jen is their second child and is given the name Lillian. Agnes calls Jen “bad bad girl” when she exhibits the same curiosity she possessed as a child back in Shanghai. Later in the book, Jen explains why she formally starts using the name Gish Jen around the time she publishes her first story.

In my high school creative writing club I had been dubbed “Gish” after the silent screen actress Lillian Gish (another girl whose last name was Hausman had been dubbed “A.E.” after the poet A.E. Housman). And never mind that I had never seen any of Lillian Gish’s movies. I had first accepted “Gish” as a nickname, then started using it myself, especially in contexts farther and farther removed from my home. Probably my mother would not have wanted to hear how I came to realize now that this “Gish” Jen had written the story, much less how “Gish Jen” would go on to publish everything else I wrote—becoming a person who was, above all, not her daughter.

Another daughter and two more sons follow. George leaves his academic job to open an International House of Pancakes and invest in real estate, all to pay his children’s university  tuition. George is both a supportive father and one who inflicts corporal punishment when he thinks his children misbehave. Agnes and George also argue often, so the Jen household is anything but peaceful.

Throughout the story, Jen writes conversations with her mother in bold typeface that  range from a few sentences to a few paragraphs and give the story extra depth. By the conclusion of the book, Jen wonders if she’s done the right thing by finally writing a book about her mother even though Agnes has already passed away.

This is my tenth book, and every book has been hard. But this is the hardest. My sibs are going to be upset. And I can already hear the disappointment of some readers: It’s not funny. They always want you to do what you’ve done before. Plus, I’m going to have to fill in a lot. Invent a lot. And what is it then? A novel? An autofiction? A memoir? Do I care? It’s what I need to do—as if I am finally burying you, or trying to. All that matters is, Can I do it, can I do it, can I do it? Can I do it?

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.