Mona in the Promised Land - Hardcover

Jen, Gish

3.51

1,779 ratings by Goodreads

9780679445890: Mona in the Promised Land

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445897 ISBN 13: 9780679445890

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

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In 1968, the Chang family moves to posh Scarshill, New York, where the rhodendrons are as big as the Chang family's old bathroom, and nobody trims the forsythia into little can shapes. This takes some getting used to--especially since there's also a new social landscape, with a hot line, a mystery caller, and a temple youth group full of radical ideas. From the author of Typical American.

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Review:

Gish Jen's second novel is populated by characters who "switch" ethnicity almost as if they were changing their hairstyles. The main character, Mona Chang, whose parents were featured in Jen's first effort, Typical American, acts Chinese for her American schoolmates and then converts to Judaism and becomes known as Changowitz. Then there's Naomi, a black woman who teaches Mona's Chinese-American sister about being Chinese. Jen's casual style and deftness with different voices make this a rich and compelling novel.

From Kirkus Reviews:

``American means being whatever you want,'' the intensely bright and high-spirited protagonist of Jen's second novel (after Typical American, 1991) declares to her mother early in the narrative, and this droll, moving work presents an unsparing analysis of the allure and tolls of that freedom. Mona Chang offers a first-person record of her life from 1968, when she is in the eighth grade, to adulthood. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen and Ralph, who have worked determinedly to discard the more obvious habits and tastes that might mark them as being too foreign; they have even (grudgingly) accepted that Mona and her sister Callie will inevitably lead lives far removed from most Chinese traditions. Grasping just how far, though, is the problem: Mona, feeling increasingly unmoored when her parents move to wealthy Scarshill, New York, believing that she needs to belong to a minority prouder of its identity and traditions, decides to convert to Judaism. Her decision unnerves not only her parents but the wider community, yet she stubbornly perseveres in the first of several rebellions. Woven through Mona's often witty narrative of her adolescence, of her struggles both to fit in and to stand apart, of her first hesitant experience of passion, is her determination to live outside both the expectations of her parents and the blithe stereotypes of society. Jen, who misses little, renders the status-laden particulars of life in Scarshill with the specificity of an anthropologist, and she catches the enthusiasms and prejudices of the 1960s and '70s with a documentary-like zeal. Mona describes all of this in a voice that is earthy, vivid, and convincing. In tracing the (guardedly triumphant) struggles of one young woman to be herself, borrowing from a variety of traditions without being constrained by any of them, Jen gives us an affecting story- -precise, often very funny--and a wonderfully idiosyncratic heroine. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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