‘Thank You, Mr. Nixon’ and other tales of the Chinese diaspora

Gish Jen tackles the cultural whiplash experienced by Chinese people living both inside and outside China in “Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories.”   

Award-winning author Gish Jen’s latest collection opens with a Chinese saying: “A long journey begins with a step.” Readers could add, gratefully, “And ends with a story.”

There are 11 here – insightful, wistful, nuanced – sometimes heartbreaking and often funny. Each tale packs in social commentary, political asides, and keen observations that lodge the characters in time and place like thumbtacks on a map. Even more satisfying, these very different women, men, and children get more than a moment in the sun; many appear in an early story only to reappear, more grown up, altered, later in the book. 

Jen, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a short fiction wizard; her stories can be found in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and “The Best American Short Stories” anthologies. “Thank You, Mr. Nixon” is her ninth book.

The title story appears first; it’s a letter from Tricia Sang, lodged upon a cloud in heaven, writing to United States President Richard Nixon at his “Ninth Ring Road, Pit 1A” address in hell. Tricia, one of the young girls Nixon spoke with during his 1972 visit, reflects on the historic event – the cleaned-up streets, the carp-crammed lake, the scrubbed slogans, the prepped populace. “Really the whole China you saw was a tailor-made China,” she declares with a child’s cheerful bluntness. 

It was also a China ready (yet again) for change. Tricia, aloft and all-seeing, makes her case that the first sparks of China’s economic opening and consumer boom can be traced to the vibrant red coat the first lady wore during that visit. “You let a big genie out of a bottle,” Tricia writes to Mr. Nixon. “Still, I am glad that you came.”

Jen’s next story, “It’s the Great Wall!”, follows travelers on a package tour to China shortly after the parting of “the bamboo curtain” in the 1980s. Grace is Chinese American and her husband Gideon is of Caribbean and Sephardic Jewish background. The couple bring Grace’s mother, who ends up serving as an ad hoc translator during the tour, even as she struggles with her own outsider status after slipping away for a family reunion.

“It’s like going to Narnia … [or t]he moon,” Gideon blurts about their trip of a lifetime. Grace disapproves of the statement, but identifies with the sentiment. “China had been no-go for so long,” she muses, that it was hard not to feel whiplash at its new travel destination status. 

Such cultural whiplash – whether characters belong to the Chinese diaspora, live on the mainland, or hail from other backgrounds – threads through Jen’s collection. Jen captures the pull, mystery, and myriad contradictions of China as it marches through the last decades of the 20th century and bursts into the 21st. 

Jen’s stories prove engrossing thanks to her polished prose and multifaceted characters. Equally riveting is the fearless way she dives into fraught, ripped-from-the headlines topics. “A Tea Tale” touches on the complexities of cross-cultural – and cross-racial – adoptions of Chinese children. “Rothko, Rothko” asks readers to consider the gray areas between artistic homage and creative theft. 

“Thank You, Mr. Nixon” concludes with “Detective Dog,” a pandemic story that brings back several familiar faces. Jen loads the brisk tale with comments on anti-Asian hate, protests in Hong Kong, Zoom school realities, and Chinese surveillance. The story asks: How does crisis redefine home and reshape family? The answers are both poignant and pending; the present is very much a work in progress. 

In this collection, Jen stares down history with a discerning eye, cracking wit and well-tuned words.