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In Gish Jen's hands, '70s suburbia is a place of buoyant hope and change. While Mona's parents worry about what she'll do next--her mother suggesting at one point that she might even want to be black, Mona ripostes that that's not a religion. She does, however admit to knowing "some kids studying to be Bobby Seale. They call each other brother, and eat soul food instead of subs, and wear their hair in the baddest Afros they can manage." The divide between past conservatism and present bohemia is one of the novel's concerns, but its epigraphs hint at the porous nature of cultural identity, of groups taking what they choose from one another. As for Gish Jen, she turns out to be a descendant of Laurence Sterne. Mona has the buttonholing narrator, the rollicking comedy that modulates into genuine sadness, and the incidental but all-important details that might confuse those intent on the author's ethnicity but will delight everyone else.
"A shining example of a multicultural message delivered with the wit and bite of art...Gish Jen creates a particular world where dim sum is as American as apple pie."--Los Angeles Times
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon comes a hilariously funny and seriously important novel (Amy Tan) about American multiculturalism and a Chinese American teenager doing her best to fit ineven if it means converting to Judaism.In these pages, acclaimed author Gish Jen introduces us to teenaged Mona Chang, who in 1968 moves with her newly prosperous family to Scarshill, New York. Here, the Chinese are seen as "the new Jews." What could be more natural than for Mona to take this literallyeven to the point of converting? As Mona attends temple "rap" sessions and falls in love (with a nice Jewish boy who lives in a tepee), Jen introduces us to one of the most charming and sweet-spirited heroines in recent fiction, a girl who can wisecrack with perfect aplomb even when she's organizing the help in her father's pancake house. On every page, Gish Jen sets our received notions spinning with a wit as dry as a latter-day Jane Austen's. The author of "Typical Americans" sets readers' notions of cultural diversity and ethnic identity spinning in "Mona in the Promised Land". Moving to Scarshill, New York, with her newly prosperous family, Mona Chang discovers that, in 1968, the Chinese have become the "new Jews". Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679776505
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