Bad bad girl a novel
"Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1924 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. Agne...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Alfred A. Knopf,
2025.
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| Edition: | First Edition. |
| Subjects: | |
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| Summary: | "Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1924 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 is born, 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"-- |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 323 pages ; 25 cm |
| ISBN: | 9780593803738 0593803736 9780593689653 0593689658 |
| Author Notes: |
