Bad Bad Girl is a compelling exploration of a mother's life in exile from one of America's finest stylists.

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice...

Growing up in an affluent neighbourhood in 1930s Shanghai, Loo Shu-hsin is told that it is 'no good for a girl to be smart' - and yet when rumours of the revolution reach their enclave, she is the one sent abroad for an education. In New York, she meets Chao-Pei, a Chinese engineering student, and they set out to make a life together. By the time their daughter - Gish Jen - is born, her parents have only sporadic contact with their families, who are locked in repressive Maoist China. And in her struggle to discipline her American daughter, Loo Shu-hsin finds herself repeating the punishing refrains - 'Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!' - that punctured her own childhood.

Details

ISBN13: 9781803513249
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 352
Edition:
Publication Date: 03 Feb 2026
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.6(H)x13.8(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Gish Jen has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and taught at Harvard, Brandeis and NYU Shanghai. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories five times.

Reviews

An unsentimental, insightful, and brutally honest account of Chinese family relationships, in China and in the West -- Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans
What an amazing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything - except the voices of our parents -- Junot Díaz
A tender, poignant family history, laced with sharp insight and quiet humour. Bad Bad Girl is not just the story of women who journeyed from the old world to the new, but also of the luminous, deeply personal world they carried within -- Yan Ge, author of Strange Beasts of China
Reading Bad Bad Girl, I felt a deep ache for mothers and daughters divided by culture and silence. Gish Jen writes tenderly about a woman carrying old China in her bones while raising a child in America. This story shows how quiet courage can be, and how a "bad girl" is often just a woman who refuses to vanish. Many will find comfort and recognition in these pages -- Xinran Xue, author of The Good Women of China
Shocking, illuminating and in places truly heartbreaking. When a book contains all of that, does it really matter which category it falls into? * Sunday Times *
[A] fiercely honest slice of autobiographical fiction... negotiates [ideas] of shared legacy with unsentimental frankness * Mail on Sunday *
The difference between the mother we had and the mother we may have wanted is at the heart of Gish Jen's novel-cum-memoir Bad Bad Girl... It dissects the bruises that bleed through families over generations and how they can be exacerbated by oceans crossed, by unimagined exiles and forsaken homeland... This book is not a forgiveness, but an acknowledgment that it was hard * FT *
Bad Bad Girl is a daughter's attempt to comprehend her fraught relationship with an emotionally closed mother... Playful, witty... strikingly poignant... The writer's grief - not only for her dead mother, but for the relationship they never had - erupts on the page * Times Literary Supplement *
Heart-breaking, difficult-to-read but incredibly honest and compelling * Shortlist *
Blending the fluidity of fiction with the emotional truth of memoir, Jen crafts a book that is genre-defying... Courageous and brimming with emotional intelligence, Bad Bad Girl is a reflection on identity, diaspora, and the complicated love between parent and child * Voice Magazine *
An intriguing blend of fiction and nonfiction... Bad Bad Girl is also a case study of the way the sweeping events of world history can warp individual lives; at times, it functions as a kind of capsule summary of 20th-century Chinese history * Guardian *
Glorious... comic, gut-wrenching... In this redemptive book, Jen has found a means to mourn the mother she could have had - and to honour the matriarch she survived * Big Issue *