Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen review why was my mother so cruel to me?

"Loo Shu-hsin is born into privilege in 1924 her father is a banker in the largely British-run International Settlement of Shanghai but her life is marked by her mother's constant belittlement. Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk, she's told, after speaking out of turn. With a tongue like yours, no one will ever marry you. Her only solace in the household is a nursemaid, Nai-ma, who vanishes"

"In one striking way, however, Loo Shu-hsin is different from Jen's previous protagonists: she happens to be Jen's own mother. Bad Bad Girl is in part a fictionalised reconstruction of Jen's mother's life, in service of a searching attempt to excavate their troubled relationship. All my life, after all, Jen writes, I have wanted to know how our relationship went wrong how I became her nemesis, her bete noire, her lightning rod, a scapegoat."

Loo Shu-hsin is born into privilege in 1924 Shanghai, yet her childhood is dominated by a mother's constant belittlement and the sudden disappearance of her nursemaid, Nai-ma. She grows up, emigrates to the US and enrolls in a PhD programme while carrying a psychic wound from Nai-ma's vanishing and ongoing maternal criticism. The narrative blends memoir and fiction to reconstruct Loo's life, imagining her perspective and rendering her a deeply flawed but human figure rather than a villain. The reconstruction exposes emotional withholding, physical violence, berating, and intergenerational patterns that shape both mother and daughter.

Read at www.theguardian.com