02776cam a2200349 i 4500 2570304327 TxAuBib 20251117120000.0 241021s2025||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2024047385 9780593803738 HRD 30.00 0593803736 HRD 30.00 (OCoLC)1463260937 TxAuBib rda Jen, Gish, author. Bad bad girl [BOOK] : a novel / Gish Jen. First hardcover edition. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2025. xiii, 323 pages ; 25 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier "Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" She gets sent to Catholic school,where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally-minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves--never to return. Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish isborn, her parents' marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with one another across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated life-long embrace". 20251117. Chinese American families Fiction. Chinese Americans Fiction. Emigration and immigration Fiction. Chinese diaspora Fiction. Mothers and daughters Fiction. Autobiographical fiction. Historical fiction.