This book caught my eye at the bookstore but I bought Ha Jin's Waiting instead. Soon after I regretted not buying World and Town and I was compelled to go back to the bookstore and buy it. I am glad I did. I usually find it difficult to give five stars to modern literature because I often find the classics so much better. Will this be a classic? I don't think so, but it might just be one of those long-lost gems in years to come. This novel covers so much ground yet brings it together so well. It is a book of contrasts. Old age, youth. Children, death. Multiculturalism but from so many angles. Chinese history. Cambodian history. Vietnam veterans, the disintegration of the family farm, the end of long-term marriages, foster homes. Religion - Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, burial, suicide, ethnic gangs, multilingualism, academia, science versus religion, religion versus science, pets, old love, new love. Kids who say "like" in the middle of every sentence, small town life, emails from home to the diaspora (like letters that form part of the dialogue in earlier novels), music, farming, hippies. In many ways it presents a version of the United States as it is rather than as it is imagined by some (I can only guess, but it resonates with the realities of Australia's cultural diversity). And it all concentrates on a small town in the north. I wondered if Hattie, the protagonist, would start to bore me. She just seemed so old. I think of Scott Fitzgerald who said nobody wants to read about poor people. But Hattie is so complex, so interesting. She is nosy, an artist, a scientist, a teacher, lonely. Yet she has a drive and a sense of self-discovery that makes you forget she is an old retired Chinese-American widow living in a small town. The connections with the rest of the world, the different ideas of filial responsibility, of God's work versus the manipulation of churches that prey (not pray!) on the vulnerable. The book even mentions the idea of "third culture kids" (something I have only ever read about in academia). It taught me a few things about adaptability and change, too (p. 232):

Even pigeons try to connect what they do with what happens to them. Really, they have no control. But they're wired to try anyway. They have a connection bias, just like people - a tendency to look for cause and effect, whether it's there or not.

Did you know that "Houdini had a tool pocket in the lining of his mouth"? I didn't. Now I have to find out if it's true. Do you know (p. 246):

...what it meant to have had our structures adapted and readapted, but never fundamentally redesigned[?]

I didn't. I don't know whether to call this a lovely story or an inspiring yet realistic tale. But I did love the book and I look forward to reading some more of Gish Jen's work. In an era of xenophobic nonsense, this novel sheds some light on what the world is like beneath the veneer of how things used to be. ( )

The main character of World and Town is Hattie - a widow in her 70s who was born in China of a Chinese father and a missionary white mother and sent to the US to be raised by relatives when the communists took over China. Besides her husband, Hattie has lost her best friend to cancer and when a Cambodian family takes up residence in a neighboring trailer, she spends much of her time helping them. In addition, an old colleague (and lover) returns to the small town which further complicates Hattie's life and brings up old memories she'd just as soon forget. Most of the book is from Hattie's perspective but there are two other sections - one told by the teenage Cambodian daughter Sophee and one by Hattie's neighbor Everett who has been kicked out of his house by his born-again wife. Where Hattie's voice rings true, the parts by Sophee and Everett are really self-conscious attempts at capturing a teenage and a rural man's voice and I found them awkward.

So...not great, but good parts and Hattie is a wonderful main character, very complex. I'd have been happy if the whole book had been about her. I get where Jen was going and I admire what she was setting out to do - exploring the loneliness of aging, reason vs superstition, the tensions between old and new, the lure of the evangelical church to the new immigrant - but don't feel like she ultimately got there.

Still, a flawed book by a good writer grappling with contemporary America is preferable to mindlss fluff about nothing.
( )

and back to the library it goes. Oh well.

This is a deeply and uniquely American novel: World and Town raises contemporary issues and themes that are timeless and does so in a very readable and fast-paced story. There's insight and intelligence, humor, and compassion in Jen’s portrayal of a group of everyday people who see their world dramatically changing when a Cambodian family settles in their midst in a small New England town. We identify with these normal, average people who feel “just like us” as they seek to hold onto what is familiar and comforting while responding to the intrusion of “The World” with all its different values and confront twenty-first century problems large and small in sometimes clumsy, sometimes graceful, and always deeply humane and recognizable ways. Gish Jen is a wonderful author whose care for the people she creates is clear and loving, and whose insights into the human heart reveal her compassion and brilliance. ( )

World and Town is about a woman (age 67, how unusual is that for a main character?) who was born in China of a Chinese father and an American mother who was the daughter of missionaries but went native. When the cultural revolution threatened they managed to sneak her to America where eventually she becomes a neurobiologist and teacher with a large number of people who depend on her and love her but she continues to feel like an outsider. The book is about principles of all types: scientific, economic, academic, religious- Confucian, christian, fundamentalist christian - and what to do when they conflict with personal relationships. There's a welcome and liberal use of the term hogwash. A major portion of the book revolves around the attempt of the main character, Hattie, to help some Cambodian immigrants who have moved in next door. Everything is very complicated and Hattie ends up being far more forgiving than I could ever imagine myself being. I don't know if that's because of her age and sense of mortality or the fact that she lives in a small town where one is forced to get along with one's neighbors out of necessity, or because of her Chinese - Confucian background. However she manages it, Hattie is fascinating character. ( )