Who's Irish?: Stories
Gish Jen
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0375705929
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Sparkling--a gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it."--The New York Times
With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen--author of the highly acclaimed novels Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land--looks at ambition and compromise at century's end and finds that much of the action is as familiar--and as strange--as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.
The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents' efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who'd sooner drop out of life than succeed at it.
place, another place, maybe a condo—he didn’t know how, or where—I found myself still wistful for the time religion seemed all I wanted it to be. Back then, the world was a place that could be set right. One had only to direct the hand of the Almighty and say, Just here, Lord, we hurt here—and here, and here, and here. DUNCAN IN CHINA Duncan Hsu, foreign expert. That was his name in China. In America, it had been Duncan Hsu, dropout. He had dropped out of a military academy, a law school, a
up at the restaurant. It was almost time: The days were still stuffy with summer, but our window shade had started flapping in the evening as if gearing up to go out. That year, the breezes were full of salt, as they sometimes were when they came in from the east, and they blew anchors and docks through my mind like so many tumbleweeds, filling my dreams with wherries and lobsters and grainy-faced men who squinted, day in and day out, at the sky. It was time for a change—you could feel it—and
into the pool, just right into this little pool here.” Jeremy held it over the water. “Go ahead.” “One hundred twelve-fifty,” taunted Jeremy. “One hundred twelve …” My father flung the polo shirt into the water with such force that part of it bounced back up into the air like a fluorescent fountain. Then it settled into a soft heap on top of the water. My mother hurried up. “You’re a sport!” said Jeremy, suddenly breaking into a smile, and slapping my father on the back. “You’re a sport! I
too late. Pammie wore a vintage man’s dinner jacket to the ceremony, as did Sven. She also wore a web of seashells in her hair—an idea she had cribbed from Muriel. He accessorized with a boutonniere made of orange plastic frogs. —What’s with the getup? asked her brother Maynard. —We hear you’ve gotten yourself a motorcycle, observed her brother Andrew. Actually, it was a scooter, but there was no point in trying to explain. Pammie tried to talk to Andrew about the bulimic tap dancer. —Is she
blue, her family exclaimed when they visited. Blue, completely blue. —They will turn brown, her mother said. I have seen mixed babies before, and their eyes all turned brown. —I saw one whose skin was completely white, said Pammie’s sister Celia. —And was there something wrong with that? said Sven. If this baby looks like me, he looks like me. —Of course he looks like you, said Pammie’s brother Wally. He looks exactly, perfectly like you. —Clearly, no one is supposed to say anything, said